Overview

I’ve had a very moderate home automation setup through Alexa for years with some basic routines setup. After moving into a bigger home, I decided it was time to branch out and expand my automation capabilities a little more. After doing a lot of research (ok, fine, watching youtube but, I digress), I decided to use Home Assistant, eventually settling on a Home Assistant Green unit for about $100.

Welcome to the Machine

By default, Home Assistant detects and works with a large amount of devices upon installation, almost everything else can be connected and configured via installable extensions or the HACS ecosystem (Home Assistant Community Store).

For Alexa, the interesting thing is that, once connected, Home Assistant automatically exposes every device that it connects with back to Alexa so, voice automations through Alexa are super easy to configure. The only challenge I have currently is that when the Home Assistant unit restarts, it re-exposes the devices to Alexa and Alexa subsequently forgets which room they are in as Home Assistant rooms and Alexa rooms are separate entities.

If you use Apple’s HomeKit, Home Assistant can act as a hub and, much like Alexa (but with a little more work), expose all devices to HomeKit so you can start to do interesting things like getting notifications on Apple TV.

Getting everything to work with my Ring Alarm devices required the native Ring integration plus a Ring MMQT extension.

Stability

Its been about six weeks since I've set it up and there has only been one issue which caused me to have to restart the Home Assistant hardware. This was caused by a Home Assistant update after which the web interface stopped working and I had no other means of restarting at my disposal at the time. Note to self, setup ssh.

Automations

It seems crazy to be able to create automations based on all of the various sensors exposed from no less than 10 different device ecosystems. Even the state of my Tesla which, through the Tessie app, exposed over 30 sensors, can be part of the decisioning process.

Some of the things I have done so far:

• Alexa notification in specific rooms when my girlfriend’s phone battery gets low.
• Turn on the Christmas Tree lights at sunset and off at sunrise.
• Turn on the heater in the den when the TV is on and the temperature is below 65.
• Turn off the heater in the den when the temperature is above 68.
• Alexa notification in specific rooms when Roomba’s bin is full.
• Turn on/off the Govee TV lights based on the state of the TVs.

This is where the problem comes in. The automation possibilities are endless so I'm constantly thinking about new ways to automate my home and subsequently, which new hardware to buy in order to achieve said hair brained scheme.