Smart home stuff is unfairly maligned. You just need a few basic rules and some hobby time.
Don’t buy wifi stuff.
If it needs its own dedicated app, don’t buy it.
Don’t buy smart appliances. If you want to smart up something expensive, get a cheap smart outlet or a cheap sensor that does the job.
Use an open source platform like Home Assistant, not Google or Alexa or whatever.
When you find something it can’t do that you want it to do, write some Python code and make it open source. You’ll get so much love from the community for the simplest things. Also the occasional person that angrily wants to know why your free thing doesn’t support his hyper specific use case but you can safely ignore that.
Home assistant is the shit. I’ve got lighting automations based on time of day and via motion sensors within specific timeframes.
Many sensors. Motion, climate, humidity, you name it.
Home theater automations. If I want to watch something, I tell voice assistant (Siri in this case) “turn on home theater.” It turns on the TV, receiver, and Apple TV, and uses the receiver’s API to switch the input to the media input. When I hit play on a video it turns off the living room lights, and if I pause or stop the video it turns them back on.
It has monitoring for all my thermostat sensors, solar, batteries, keeps track of my fridge and freezer temperatures, list goes on.
It also fully supports zigbee antennas and Bluetooth devices over Wi-Fi with simple esp32 Bluetooth extender configs. HAOS is just an outstanding piece of software.
Smart home stuff is unfairly maligned. You just need a few basic rules and some hobby time.
Home assistant is the shit. I’ve got lighting automations based on time of day and via motion sensors within specific timeframes.
Many sensors. Motion, climate, humidity, you name it.
Home theater automations. If I want to watch something, I tell voice assistant (Siri in this case) “turn on home theater.” It turns on the TV, receiver, and Apple TV, and uses the receiver’s API to switch the input to the media input. When I hit play on a video it turns off the living room lights, and if I pause or stop the video it turns them back on.
It has monitoring for all my thermostat sensors, solar, batteries, keeps track of my fridge and freezer temperatures, list goes on.
It also fully supports zigbee antennas and Bluetooth devices over Wi-Fi with simple esp32 Bluetooth extender configs. HAOS is just an outstanding piece of software.