I’ve been futzing with home automation projects for longer than I’ve had a home, but it sure has gotten easier lately. Twenty years ago I was cobbling together individual hardware sensor and actuator pairs for automations with no central coordinating system and no logging. Ten years ago I was buying third party automation sets where everything was controlled by a cloud service and everything worked well until that company lost interest in the product they’d sold you and then everything stopped working suddenly. Now there are great local control options, with open sensors, open acutators, open controller software, and great history keeping. I’m buying parts from many companies, but the continued working of my setup doesn’t require any of them being around next year.

Best yet a lot of the cloud-required stuff I’ve bought in the past (those whose companies are still in business) can be made to work with my local set up until I can replace the cloud-based components I’ve already installed. It’s all local going forward, with a good backward compatibility path.

I’m using Home Assistant as my central coordinator, and so far I’ve been very pleased with what it has to offer. I’m particularly impressed with it statistical history system. It’s doing prometheus/borgmon style numerical value retention with reduced frequency as data ages. All that data is in a local sqllite database and easily extracted and backed up. I’ve been able to pull in all of my existing cloud-based devices and have been rolling out z-wave and zigbee local devices as I go.

A week of temperature and humidity history
1354 x 1302 (caption: a week’s worth of temperature and humidity history - click to embiggen)

Some of my favorite simple automations so far are:

It’s a terrible shame that Home Assistant uses YAML files which don’t support durable comments, but at least the history can be tracked in a git repo with commented history.

So far when purchasing parts I’ve found the Innovelli stuff to be incredibly high quality. The Sonoff stuff a good quality to price trade off. The Moe’s and Tuya zigbee stuff is pretty hit or miss.