@ufarooq @depau

Yeah HA has worked really well for me as well and I have been mostly very pleased with the experience, minus default dashboards.

Fully get the container release frustration with add-ons. I bumped up against that when I first tried it out with a ton of confusion and went to the VM and didnt look back.

Keep us posted on your voice control work. Excited to see where leads!

@depau

I have no experience with openHAB. Looks like a good project.
Few comments... in terms of enshitification, I would say it's the exact opposite. Home Assistant used to be way worse!!! If you think it's bad now, look what people went through 4-5 years go.

As far as running locally goes, I'm not sure I follow you. I don't have their hardware and didn't have a subscription with them for a few years and had no issues with pure local control. Happy to dive in there with you if you want

@j_angliss
BT proxies for me. I don't even have a BT adapter plugged into my HA box. Works great for switchbot blind tilts around the house. 98% of the time they respond as quickly as I expect. Then randomly they will take a few seconds to act, but they still end up getting the request.

Distance to the BT device definitely matters from my experience. Plus you can go down the time suck rabbit hole of room presence if you wish.

@SebinNyshkim

Really easy. Especially with this builder site where you really don't even need to get into the weeds of esphome if you don't want to

https://esphome.io/projects/?type=bluetooth

I'd pickup a normal cheap esp32 wifi board and give it a try to start.

Keep the BT device count to 4 or below and you should be fine with a wifi versions.

@cattail

Lights are one of a thousand ideas. :)

If you're looking for something to try HA on and lights aren't speaking you, think about something you'd like more info about or would like to automate.

While I do have a lot of lighting automation, perhaps one I like the most is monitoring soil moisture to know when to water the yard. It has saved a lot of water and keeps my lawn looking green!

@SebinNyshkim

Really depends on your use case but I picked up a few of these
https://shop.everythingsmart.io/products/est-poe-32-esp32-poe-development-board
To use as BT proxies with esphome. They work great for me. If you want to go a cheaper route you can just use any vanilla ESP32 variant and leverage wifi. That has worked great for me as well!