Despite the horrific overnight shelling of Kyiv by the russian forces, many people still showed up to the meetup and had a great time together. In fact, there were more people willing to attend than we had space for, and I’m truly sorry that not everyone who wanted to join was able to make it to the event. Kyiv meetup · Luma
We listened to several talks, including:
Yevhen Labunskyi – Automation and Energy Management at Home
He shared insights on using a Victron solar power station and how he manages energy consumption in his household. I found the detailed part about automating smart home devices using Node-Red particularly fascinating.
Bohdan Sverdlyuk – No Cloud Overhead: Local Control of Smart Home Devices
I talked about the benefits of local control for smart home devices as an alternative to cloud services. The presentation covered popular local communication protocols (Wi-Fi, Zigbee, Z-Wave, BLE), the new Matter standard, and key smart home platforms like Home Assistant, ESPHome/Tasmota firmware, Apple HomeKit, and OpenHAB.
i3 Engineering – Atom Inside, Home Assistant Outside
The i3 team presented how their Atom controllers can be integrated with Home Assistant via the MQTT protocol.
Denys Dovhan – Voice Control in Ukrainian
This was a particularly engaging talk for me. Denys introduced a Ukrainian-speaking voice assistant in a simple yet captivating way. He explained TTS (text-to-speech) technologies, including the uncanny valley effect caused by overly realistic voices, STT (speech-to-text), and the use of various LLMs (large language models). He shared which language model he uses, their pricing, and demonstrated the Home Assistant Preview Edition device in action.
Huge thanks to our partners and sponsors who helped make this event happen: i3engineering, and the State University of Telecommunications and Information Technologies (Kyiv).
