Before starting to present the new features I add the my setup, let me show the Home Assistant Complete Setup I have.
In the last years, I tried different things from a complete custom infrastructure built over a Django application I wrote, to HomeGenie then Home Assistant. HomeGenie has an awesome UI and you can build plugins easily. That said, Home assistant is the one I use since the last 6 months or so.
Home Assistant has a great community, lot of pre-built integration and is completely Open Source, you can create PR with your integrations and someone will take a look at it.
Voice Control
One of my requirements was to be able to control it with Alexa. With Home Assistant, it’s possible by default, but comes with 5$/month fee. On my side, I was not interested to pay for this so I dig a little bit and found Haaska. This thing will let you connect your local instance of Home Assistant to Alexa. If you want, you can even customize some functions. You’ll have to setup an account for AWS and another one to develop an Alexa skill. You can plan at least 3-5 hours to setup everything, but all steps are in the Haaska’s wiki. I did this part 2 months ago and didn’t touch it since then.
Global View
Here is a quick overview of my setup :
The green circles that are not pre-built integrations and that I have to implement on my side. I didn’t include media devices, but I also have Amazon Echos, FireTVs, Chromecasts and an Android Box. I will talk of these is my next posts.
Here is what it looks like within the UI (Sorry, texts are in French) :
In the next weeks, I’m planning to add other devices like:
- LED Strips (See Part 1, Part 2)
- Roller blinds
- Acurite 5-in-1 weather Station
- Roomba 500 Series
- Pool sensors ( Temp, Chlore, etc)
- Car remote starter
Please share your setups and the reasons why you choose other systems 🙂
