Unbelievable it can all be controlled offline using Siri on an iPhone, or other voice assistants.

It can even display your electricity consumption by counting the LED pulses on your smart electricity meter that fires every 1000th of a kw/h, only takes a cheap ESP32 and a photodiode: https://github.com/klaasnicolaas/home-assistant-glow

Such a wonderful project.

Does your iPhone need an i ternet connection for this to work?

HOWEVER, Lovelace specifically is pretty terrible. Having used Grafana extensively, trying to use Lovelace to arrange a UI is so far backwards that it's constantly grating to try to create or modify dashboards. I really wish there was a way to use Grafana as the UI and embed cards as panels. The ability to drag and drop, resize, and move UI elements would be a godsend, but instead it feels like I'm writing Tk-style UI arrangement in yaml, and it's awful, so I do it as infrequently as possible.

It's annoying to have to do a workaround like that but it makes it bearable at least.

Building automation is owned by Johnson Controls, Carrier, Siemens, and Honeywell. There are some smaller manufacturers around, but those four plus Trane sell the vast majority of commercial building automation systems.

I manage electricians that wire up building automation systems, for what it’s worth.

And to be honest, knowing what I do about commercial building automation, I don’t see why you’d want to automate your home. If I was going to upgrade the lightning controls in my home, it would all be local non-networked controls from Lutron. I’m not sure what you’d monitor on your HVAC system.. do you really need to know what speed your furnace fan is spinning at? Most home HVAC systems aren’t large central boilers/chillers that send chilled/hot water to terminal units that can call for more heat/cold, a furnace can be controlled with its factory controls and an external thermostat.

Just got a Mitsubishi Electric (which is different to MHI) and a Daikin at my parents house to get online - but code for both exists and I suspect the MHI boards can be reprogrammed to fulfill the role without any hardware changes.

It's incredible that the future we wanted in like, 2010 can be had and had without selling your soul to the cloud: I can leave the house, and turn off all my lights and AC's while walking out the door, or get notified if I've left my garage open - without a single cloud provider dependency, all open-source.

EDIT: And yeah...I'm starting to eye anything which has a required cloud connection as "maybe I should just crack that open and see if we swap an ESP in..." - haven't done it yet.

[1] https://github.com/absalom-muc/MHI-AC-Ctrl/

[2] https://github.com/ginkage/MHI-AC-Ctrl-ESPHome

I’m interested in investing in an ecosystem of smart switches, blinds, thermostat and music that is future proof and I can take with me as I rent

Have some experience with ecobee and smart switches and trying to get onto Airplay 2 currently

It's basically a mini computer (sbc) with homeassistant preinstalled and ready to go.

Do expect that HA will expect some attention every few months. It's not a "set and forget" thing.

Things related to homes are measured in years or decades. HA has gotten better about it but there are still occasional "cross your fingers and pray" scenarios when doing upgrades because every single release combines new functionality, fixes, breaking changes, and introduces new issues (of course).

People come to rely on things like their lights working and upgrade management is a tough spot - "Oh this integration broke because something else changed an API so I need to upgrade but let's find out how much time I need to update my config and hunt down any other issues".

This is one of the reasons things like Lutron are so expensive. You can have it installed and come back to the house 10 years later and everything will generally work as it did a decade ago.

For things like Nabu Casa cloud and their own hardware I'm sure plenty of people would pay a fairly significant premium for a subscriber-only LTS release that balances HA power, local, and flexible with Lutron user experience.

That said open source monetization is tough, and consumer monetization is as well. Combine the two and it sounds like a complete nightmare to me.

I think the answer the HA folks would give is to point out that they are still under very heavy development and "longterm stability" just isn't something that the project has reached in a way that supports LTS. I don't think this answer is wrong - HA today is amazingly different than HA from two years ago or three years ago.

It is painful and it is why I do caution people that adopting HA means some regular investment in tooling around with it on occasion. There's a big gap still before it's ready for set-and-forget non-technical audiences.

The plug in and go hardware is interesting because when you think about it a user who is intimidated to flash an SD card and stick it in a Raspberry Pi is going to have quite the shock when an upgrade eventually becomes necessary and they encounter the challenge that is trying to upgrade even a many months old HA install (forget about years).

As they target more and more users of less technical ability and sophistication this is going to only get worse and worse. If you look through this thread even the HN crowd (which leans heavily technical) is saying things that essentially come down to "the last thing I need in my life is more time spent on Github issues and random forums". Many of them end up going back around to "full home luddite" mode because they just can't stand to have to debug a light switch.

I appreciate this all too well. Many people who know me (their nerdy friend) are surprised I use iPhone, Mac, etc. I simply tell them something like "when I spend all day doing the hard tech stuff I have to do I need to be able to turn that part of my brain off and use something dumb". When I'm checked out and burnt out yes please give me the Fisher-Price experience that is the iPhone.

The issue with your upgrade approach is the same thing as all rolling releases - the more time that goes by, the more likely an upgrade is likely to break things even worse.

If you peruse the HA community forums, reddit, Discord, etc you will often see advice like "if you're not going to upgrade every month when you do upgrade do it progressively through each release", which is still and arduous and very time consuming process.