I thought it would be appropriate to ask this now, considering I posted by first smart home video almost exactly 4 years ago.
I’ve gone from 1 shelly switch and an inovelli light switch, to close to 200 devices, 95% of them being cloud free. A home that can operate itself while I am gone, alert me to almost anything that would require my attention. A wife that hated the frustration of going through the growing pains when my Node Red’ing wasnt that good, but now is the first to let me know when something isnt working as it should anymore. And a kid who constantly leaves the lights on at other peoples homes because she is so used to them just turning off on their own.
I got exposed to HA on purpose. I knew once we purchased our house that I wanted a smart home. But all I knew at the time was Google, Samsung. I think I just searched for alternatives and HA was the first result. And I’m glad it was.
So whats your story? How did you get exposed to HA? How far have you come?
I’ve been into it for about 7 or 8 years… lost track.
I previously had a miCasaverde Vera 3 controller for my home automation but got p!$$ed off with it always crashing and tech support being hopeless so I threw it in the bin.
I had seen videos on youtube from Ben (who seems to have vanished from socials) and he was talking about Home Assistant, so I jumped in and haven’t looked back.
I started looking at “Smart Home” solutions back in 2018. After a 3-month trip away from home, I knew what I needed. I wrote up a requirements list. To summarize:
Monitor on/off times for heating system.
Monitor temperature in various rooms and, especially, unheated spaces.
Remotely reboot security cameras.
Possible future: Door & Motion sensors.
Nice to have: Remote light switches, “away” schedules.
Dovetailing into this project was an existing interest in trying out one of those inexpensive Raspberry Pi things I’d been hearing so much about. Add that to my long-held preference for open source, and it came down to two competitors: HA and OpenHAB.
HA won, largely based on the what seemed to me like more active development and a thriving community here on this forum.
The rest, as they say, is history. I never did get into door and motion sensors, but I was happy to find I could integrate things like my existing smart thermostats.
I should add that times have changed since then. HA is rapidly moving away from the RPi platform, at the same time RPis have been going up in price. The price/performance advantage is gone now, taking that platform, and by extension, HA, out of the category of “cheap enough to just give it a try.” Today you need a more significant commitment in terms of hardware. I don’t think I’d have taken the chance with HA if I had started with the hardware options available today. I hope this barrier to entry doesn’t limit HA’s future.
Gotta be 8. I’m pretty sure by the time I found my way here (late 2016) you were already posting away!
I kept leaving my garage door open at night. I happened to have a MyQ garage door opener and was looking for ways to utilize that to automatically shut it at night or when I left. I looked at a few systems (almost bought a Wink!) but I stumbled across HA and it seemed to be a good outlet for my nerdiness. The rabbit hole was gone down. What is amazing that pretty much everything in my house is smartified and I don’t think I’ve spend more than $3-4K on it. Hundreds and hundreds of hours of time invested though. Absolutely worth it!
Life hasn’t been leaving me much time to play on here lately, Thankfully HA is so stable now it doesn’t require much babysitting! Back in the “old days” (like before lovelace was a thing) the HA experience could be downright painful. How many hours did I spend waiting for the 'ol RPi to boot up every time I changed an automation?
August of 2017 for me. So it’s been a little over 7 years. I had an ADT Pulse system. It was the alarm keypad which tied into a hub which had a built in zwave controller. I had 1 motion and three door sensors and a plugin module to control a lamp. A friend told me about home assistant. I dove in head first, bought a zwave dongle a smart lock and some more switches/outlets.
About 16 years into making a smart home. First some smart plug and light, programming things together and after a while I started to use HomeSeer. While adequate at first it started to feel sluggish and badly maintained. With 1 or 2 updates a year things quickly where falling behind. The I found HA and boy what a difference. 3 or more updates every month. All my devices became so much better and as a thinkerer by heart I love the control I have over my system. No way I would ever step back to another solution. It got everything I need and more
I think you can still use a Rpi to get a feel for it, but yes its not as cheap an option as it once was. With the prices now, you may as well go and buy a used tiny tower and then be set if you do want to keep building. I got my whole setup running on a Lenovo thinkcentre that I picked up on ebay for $75.
While I have always been into tech, graduated with a bachelors in IT back in 08, I am glad I wasnt really into smart homes until fairly recently as it seems like back even less than a decade ago, the scene was much different, much more frustrating, with lot less options.
hi , i did get in to it becouse i wanted to read my electric housemeter , hanport and did get a smartmeter gateway
it works and i have its homepage up most of the time,
but i did read about home assistant and integration, and here i am
now i have som esp32 s2, learning how to use them, have 8 of them upp and running, going to be more
som part of my solarsystem is up to
have control of my hotwater, batterybanks, rf and temp ,
will soon be 58 years old, but i try to learn somthing new every year
next is windspeed, doing som homemade sensors, 3d printed
and a esp32 cam is on the way
i realy like the home assistant program, and i do se many possibilities
