To offer a bit of background, I’ve been messing about with smart home technology since the early 1990’s when, as a somewhat younger guy I was going out a lot on weekends (as you do) but kept on leaving stuff on in the house when I left. I needed to cure that problem of things being left on while I wasn’t there as it wasn’t unusual to leave on a subwoofer or lights guzzling electricity for days.
It wasn’t practical to use a timer for that as I didn’t watch stuff on a schedule as such and so my solution was to bring things on only when needed.
Back then, the only real option was the old X10 power line transmission stuff, so that is the route I went down. Firstly, I started with a PC (if I recall) running a very small network with a few modules for home cinema stuff and some lights.
I got the bug for it all, though, and it turned into a bit of a hobby, some might argue bordering on an obsession, eventually to try to automate as much as was possible.
That led me to getting an original Homevision (HV) controller, then a Homevision Pro but around the same time a bit of a bomb dropped on the smart home world and that was the introduction of Z-Wave.
While there were bodges to get HV to speak to and control Z-Wave stuff it was a bit of a kludge and I didn’t bother with it, until Craig that produced the HV controllers announced he was giving it up and would no longer produce or support them. It was time to move on.
At the time the only viable option, that I wasn’t over the moon about, was Homeseer (HS) that really was designed for and had to be run on a Windows based PC. I had no option really but to set aside by dislike of Windows and to use this, on the upside, it did allow me to get and easily use Z-Wave stuff.
So around 2009 or so that was the system I installed. And slowly the old X10 stuff was retired.
All went, okay-ish until we rolled around to 2023-24 when cracks began to show in some things and sure, I could have patched it up and bodged some things to work with HS but development on HS is slow, really slow.
I couldn’t access or use many things, such as cheap Zigbee devices from China, and where you could get an integration, it would often be expensive.
I then tried A Fibaro controller and that I really didn’t get on with so I ended up back at HS and putting up with some limitations.
I explored using a Hubitat controller; it’s gathering dust in a cupboard, as I really didn’t like it.
All this because I really didn’t like having my whole home dependent on a Windows-based machine as they’re just janky in my view and prone to falling over. Which is not a good thing when it’s running lighting, heating and so on.
But, in the background there was always Home Assistant (HAss) that many in the smart home world raved about however, to me, it looked to be complicated, used a lot of code and I dismiss it for a long time.
Then they brought out the Home Assistant Green. £89, plug it in and it just works. That’s more my sorta thing.
So I got one.
Within minutes, I knew that HS was doomed.
HAss picked up on almost all my stuff just by plugging it in, I didn’t need to do anything other than to tell it where stuff was, then program the automations.
I upgraded that to a Yellow for more storage, speed, and so on as I run rather a lot of automation and devices. At the time of writing, I have over 360 devices with over 250 automation, which is a lot.
Due to all this I know quite a bit about home automation and how to use it but, I am not a coder. I can dabble a bit in it but I am far from an expert in coding.
Ask me how to automate a “thing” though, and I’ll figure out how and the logic to do it. Much of that experience was applied to Rapport when we built that, it’s designed to automate as much as possible.
In this section of the site I’ve decided to give one info on what I do, the devices I use or have used and to offer an opinion on them. How much use it’ll be I honestly don’t know but hopefully it helps some people with HA stuff.