A long time ago I was a part of a Linux User Group in the area. I’ve also been a part of an Ubuntu LoCo as well. I’d like to see if there might be anyone interested in doing a local meet up for Smart Homes. Not just for Home-Assistant, but all inclusive of making our spaces work with us.
Looking for interested parties right now more than anything else.
On a side note, if anyone in the greater Kansas City area is looking for help with a project. Drop me a note, I might be able to help.
Man, I’d love to get some kind of local meetup going.
According to the analytics, there are just over 56k people in the US with HA deployed - out of over 330M people that live here.
Actually, the better way of looking at it is by land area: The USA is 3.797M sq miles. With an installed base of 56k, that means one installation every ~67 square miles.
Granted, Not everyone turns on analytics, but still… On average, the next person near you isn’t exactly all that near, unfortunately.
Yes, there are pockets of installed devices, but - at least in my case - there was one guy got it, a friend saw it and thought it was cool, and so on. Meaning, chances are that if you personally know even 1 or 2 people near you that have it, you probably already know everyone in your area.
Just a sad reality. 
When you break it apart like that, yeah… it’s going to be few and far between. But then you have population density where an entire county might have 115 people due to how sparse it is. In the denser populations, there are much higher chances simply due to the numbers. Where I live the population isn’t exactly small with a number like 1.7M. I know a total of seven personally, and about 12 others on the far skirts outside of suburbia (> 1.5h drive). But you start including mainstream smart home components, there’s a chance if you throw a rock you’ll hit someone. I mean, how many people do you know that don’t have some kind of smart speaker or other type of smart device hub? I don’t want to limit the meet up to just home-assistant… I’d like all walks represented if possible.
I live in the Kansas City north land and would like to meet up with others in the area to see first hand what they are up to with Home Assistant and home automation in general. I have been using some sort of home automation since 1996 (X10), switched to HomeSeer in 1999 until last year when I got fed up with the third party developers asking for subscriptions for the plugins already paid for (integrations in HA). Also the messaging forum was domineered by one person and general know it all. I told myself, enough is enough and looked else where. Very happy I did! I really like Home Assistant and am integration more and more into it every day.
Hey Jim… I’m totally down if you would like to meet up. Just the two of us to get started at least. Drop me a DM. I’m in the northland Tue-Thu every week for work. I’m out at 6PM unless I"m doing on-call work.
To keep things going, anyone else out there wanting to meet up in the Kansas City area?
Will do, probably next week. I am responding here incase any one else wants to get in on this. Thanks.
I’m in Overland Park and would also be interested in attending a meetup.
I have not heard from the other guy so it is up in the air. I would like to get something started. I live up north but get out south several time a month.
I’m still down for a meet up sometime. Even if completely informal to just chew the fat.
Set a date for about a week out and we can meet up. You can pick the place, restaurant, library. I would prefer mid morning vs evening but I am retired so have a very open schedule.
I cannot seem to get a dialog going here so here is what I am going to do:
On Saturday, August 31 at 10:00AM I will be at the Green Hills Mid Continent Public Library (8581 N Green Hills Rd, Kansas City, MO 64154). I will be sitting at one of the tables behind the resource desk and will hang around for about an hour. I will post here on the day what color shirt I will be wearing for easier identification. I am much older with grey hair.
Any questions or suggestions post here. If I see enough interest I can reserve a meeting room, there is no charge but they are first come first serve.
Looking forward to meeting and hearing from some of you people using Home Assistant!! The library has free WiFi so we can share how we have configured HA for our sue.
Here’s the hard part for me… Mon-Fri I’m working until 8PM. Weekends are ideal as long as it’s in the afternoon and planned about a month in advance as I generally have other things I’m already spoken for. I can’t do August 31st as I’ll be out of town for the holiday weekend. I would be available for Sep 21st, maybe in a more central location around 1PM.
I visit the forums about once a week in the afternoon on Friday or Saturday as those are my slow times.
I did forget about the holiday weekend. I am retired so every weekend is a holiday weekend.
I will wait for a few days to see what others say then reschedule.
Okay, i have not heard from anyone but i will be there at 10 AM. Will be wearing agreen shirt and be sitting behind the librarian’s desk.
Hope to see someone there!
I hope that you had someone meet up with you in August. I wish that I didn’t live so far away. Regardless of what it has been (TI Professional computer, OS/2 linux, home assistant), I’ve always lived where other users have been in low numbers.
No, unfortunately no one show up. I know it was probably the wrong weekend to plan something that.
OS/2 - have not heard that term in years! I really liked OS/2 a lot and used it far after it being abandoned by IBM.
I also used OS/2 for a while after it was axed. I still miss the extended attributes that files had, where you could leave notes to yourself. Also it’s object oriented interface. You could change a file’s name at the command line and have that change made in the desktop icon, while windows would give you an error message and suggest files that had the same size.