Home automation system Home Assistant
Home automation is a thing that keeps getting talked about and marketed and played with, but which overwhelmingly manages to miss being actually useful for me. “Set the lights in the den to 50% and tinted amber,” is such a common example that I feel like I must be one of the only humans who thinks, “Just stick a dimmer switch on the lights.” Like, is the light switch on the wall really that hard to get to?
Anyway, for Reasons, I have some several Things that either report out their status or receive control commands (or both) via an app that I have to install on my phone. Which is fine, I guess. (Reader, it is not fine, but complaining about it is tantamount to pissing into the wind.) In the near future (less than 1 year timeframe) I will have even more Things with even more and different apps. It occurs to me that it might be nice to have One App to Control Them All. So, home automation, I guess?
It kind of looks like maybe Home Assistant will do the thing I want. Like, the major, *major* plus is that it runs on hardware in my house and it stores data locally and only requires the Internet if it has to talk to devices through their proprietary gateway and not just directly over the home network. So, I guess I can see a path where we start out with these devices we’ve got (water heater, solar panels, home battery, doorbells, chimes, camera, garage door opener, &c.) and integrate them all with the Home Assistant device, then start looking at swapping out the weird cloud-only devices for ones that can be managed over the local network. Which, yeah, that seems reasonable and ultimately, the kind of space I want to be in.
Okay. So that’s me thinking about it all in one place. And, for the record, none of this is about turning on the lights and starting the television when I come home. That is the example that every home automation how-to in the flipping world starts out with, and it is precisely the kind of bullshit that nobody who thinks about this shit for five seconds wants to do! Seriously!
#chindogu #iot #smartthings