Home automation with Home Assistant

I’ve been heavily in to home automation for years, starting with my own homebrew projects built with Arduino, Mbed and later Raspberry Pi, the solutions I ended up with were always bespoke and esoteric. 

As time went by I added new products from Hue, Tuya, Smart Life, Ring, Ezviz and others. While these all worked fine, they each had their own app and ecosystem and therefore could not interact with each other. 

A few months ago I found a Raspberry Pi Model 3 that I wasn’t using and started looking at various home automation options that were available.

Enter Home Assistant…

Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform that allows users to control and automate various aspects of their home, including lights, locks, thermostats, cameras, and more. It is built using Python and runs on a variety of platforms, including Raspberry Pi, Docker, and cloud services like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.

Home Assistant provides a unified interface for controlling devices from different manufacturers and platforms, making it easier to manage a smart home setup. It also supports integrations with many popular home automation protocols and services, such as Z-Wave, Zigbee, Philips Hue, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and more.

Users can set up automations and scripts in Home Assistant to perform tasks automatically based on triggers such as time, device status, or sensor readings. For example, you can set up an automation to turn on the lights when you enter a room, or to adjust the temperature when the weather changes.

Home Assistant is highly customizable and extensible, with a large community of developers creating custom integrations and add-ons. It also offers a mobile app for remote control and monitoring of your smart home devices.

So, two months ago I started my journey with Home Assistant. Overall the experience has been great and has allowed for a degree of integration that would not have been possible otherwise.

I’ll be documenting some of my more useful findings in a series of future posts.