One of my long term ambitions is to investigate how Home Assistant could be useful in a scientific research and development environment. To put this in context, 10 years ago when I worked in a laser lab the computer boffin in out group had built an environmental monitoring and automation system, which monitored the AC, power, output of lasers, incidents of interlocks etc. In many ways the functionality was identical to home-assistant, but required significant work and expertise to build and maintain.
The software for interfacing with hardware in science is LabVIEW, and most scientific hardware will come with LabVIEW drivers. In fact, where I currently work I want to interface with a high precision barometer that has a LabVIEW driver, but unfortunately the LabVIEW license is quite expensive and we don’t have one. However there is now a ‘maker’ version of LabVIEW (https://www.labviewmakerhub.com/doku.php?id=get_labview) which has a 45 day free trial, and is then about 40 euro to purchase. So now I have a low cost way to use supported hardware with LabVIEW drivers, and my next thought is how could I ‘link’ labview with Home-assistant and build an automation system for the science research environment… So my question is, has anyone investigated Labview-HA integration already, or is thinking of doing so? Is anyone using HA within a science environment?