I’m looking to get a thermostat with a “sleek” look like the Nest or Ecobee, but it looks like both of their Home Assistant components require making your own developer account, and after dealing with that for Alexa I’d really rather not go to the trouble. I thought maybe Honeywell Lyric would be good, but this thread Honeywell Lyric Thermostat makes it look like it’s not really ready yet. Does anyone have any experience with any of these, or a similar one, that you would recommend?
When you begin with any open source project, be prepared to do some work. Some of the work will require doing things you have never done before. You learn stuff! If you aren’t prepared for the work, I would look at a home automation Hub like Wink, Smarthings are Vera where the messy stuff is done for you.
I think anything else is going to be a lot more trouble than making a developer account. I ended up picking RadioThermostat because I needed two, they’re relatively cheap ($75), and they don’t require a cloud account. But, they’re slow to communicate with and they certainly aren’t sleek at all. I wanted an Ecobee, but I couldn’t justify the cost of two of them and requiring a cloud account to access it is a deal break for me.
Just in terms of functionality, I switched from Nest to Ecobee for the extra sensors I could place around the house. Frankly, the software for Nest is much better from a user interface perspective, but ecobee does work, and I like having the sensors to use in managing temperature and occupancy. The developer account for ecobee is free and didn’t take long to set up, and I think I’ve logged in to it a total of 3 or 5 times setting it up and just to check something. I don’t really use it now (directly), so its somewhat of a set it and forget it thing for me.