Magnus Hedemark (He/Him/His)

Oh I could nerd out on this at length.

My old house was 100% HomeKit based and I had a lot of regrets. And so did my family, who had to share the house with the really primitive home automation. There were many nuances to the automations that were wanted but not available on this really bare bones home automation platform.

Earlier this year we all moved to a bigger home. I decided right up front to put in the extra work to build something more sophisticated, and more locally controlled. What I ended up with was Home Assistant based.

There's a little bit of WiFi accessories, but mostly to communicate with MQTT. Also some Z-Wave and some Zigbee. I'm not sure you can ever have just one of these options and get very far. For example, while there's a plethora of cheap-and-good temperature & humidity sensors out there for Zigbee, as well as smart light bulbs and switches... if you want recessed door sensors, you're probably stuck with Z-wave. Same is true in a number of other niche areas.

Home Assistant is proving very capable of giving me the sophisticated, nuanced automations that I always wanted. But it does come at a cost. The learning curve is high. And the architecture is still... dated. Monolithic. It's getting better. There's a push to move Z-wave integration natively into MQTT which will help. But like every time you make a config change, you have to restart it. Many of the useful config changes still force you to edit yaml files and deal with the very opinionated whitespacing therein.

I think there's a lot of room in this project and the surrounding community to create looser couplings between HA and its integrations (the MQTT model being an excellent one). There's a lot of room to simplify the UX without "dumbing down" HA's capabilities. Take it for a spin, see what you think, but be ready for a bit of a learning curve!

The mention of voice assistants is an important point. I think there's a good rule of thumb when it comes to home automation:

It's hard to improve upon the UX of a light switch.

Voice assistants are kind of a pain for turning lights on and off. I'd rather just hit the switch.

Can you improve on the switch, though? Yes, I think you can.

Someone moves into a space, so that space is now "occupied". Push out a lighting scene to the smart devices in that space based on some simple rules (is the sun above or below the horizon?) ... and then turn them off again when we're quite sure the room is no longer occupied.

*Automation* is a passive thing, does not require our direct input. Doesn't require switches, doesn't require voice commands. It just requires us to move through a space, and the space adjusts itself for our comfort.

I *can* control and monitor my devices through a voice assistant, and sometimes do. But quite a lot of my home upgrades are replacing dumb switches with smart switches, and triggering those switches based on presence and time of day rules.