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What do you think of when you think of a smart home? Wi-Fi compatible light bulbs, video doorbells, robot vacuum cleaners connected to the cloud or smart refrigerators perhaps? Brands like Google / Nest or anything that is activated with Amazon Alexa? While often offering real convenience, these devices are also typically designed to invite and lock users into manufacturers’ ecosystems. Create a cool piece of hardware, you’ll make a sale. Create awesome hardware that extracts recurring monthly service fees for cloud storage or to unlock additional features, and you’ll get lifelong sales.
To compound our collective frustration, these ecosystems are often incompatible with each other and require several different applications for control. Not only are subscriptions and upselling part of the game, but the underlying business models for these products are built around planned obsolescence and user data mining.
Fortunately, people who aspire to a smart home in 2021 have at least one viable alternative: Home Assistant. This open source software is the proverbial “binding them in the dark” ring. It’s the glue for smart home equipment spanning all kinds of manufacturers, from behemoths like Google to minnows like Shelly. It is a project that aims to change all of the smart home traps listed above by bringing local control, privacy and interoperability to the fore.
By acting as a single point of configuration for multiple ecosystems, Home Assistant occupies a unique and powerful place in the modern smart home. It is aware of the state of every feature in your home, so it can do useful things like close the garage door if you left it open when you went to bed or left your defined living area. I will also never get tired of seeing the lights automatically turn off an hour before sunset.
If that sounds too good to be true – all the benefits of a smart home without the drawbacks associated with out-of-the-box solutions – today is the day to see for yourself. Let’s go over the basics needed to build your own self-hosted, subscription-free home automation system. Using the Home Assistant project as a foundation, we’ll cover some of the must-haves for new technology, highlight some of our favorite open-source home automation projects, and give you a quick primer on how to put it all together.
Home Assistant, the basics
Considering the title of this article, this note is a bit awkward. But when you initially choose to build your smart home with the Home Assistant project, it is a optional $ 5 monthly subscription. This is administered by the company behind the project, Nabu Casa, which was founded in 2018 to ensure the sustainability of the Home Assistant project. For the company, these fees allow Nabu Casa to pay a small number of employees. For you, the $ 5 per month fee allows your local Home Assistant instance to work effortlessly with popular cloud services like Google Home or Amazon Alexa, and also allows you to access Home Assistant from anywhere with minimal configuration. That said, it is certainly possible to mirror these two functions without a subscription using a reverse proxy yourself if you wish.
While there are other choices in this space such as Domoticz, OpenHAB, or Gladys, Home Assistant will be our focus today as it’s free, open, and has a * huge * community behind it. As of this writing, it has over 1,700 integrations with all kinds of supported devices, services, and hardware. Plus, it’s also a regular feature of Github’s trends page.
Versatility is the real magic of Home Assistant. Indeed, it speaks 1,700 different languages and brings them all together in one place. Build a smart home ecosystem with Home Assistant at its heart, and devices from completely different ecosystems can finally talk to each other. Would you like the lights to turn off automatically when you turn on the kettle? With Home Assistant, you can do it!
Let’s look at a more realistic example of useful automation based on this principle. Suppose you have two sets of lights on totally different circuits that you always want to sync, maybe the downstairs hallway lighting and upstairs lighting. With Home Assistant monitoring the status of these entities, it can react and do things automatically. In other words, if light1 is on, then turn on light2.
It’s time for some key terminology: Home Assistant performs such Actions when certain conditions are met or triggers happen. This allows for the construction of complex logic such as “turn down the thermostat, make sure the doors are locked and all lights are off. when the sun is below the horizon and no movement is detected for an hour or guest mode is not activated. Think about how many apps you’ll have to open to do all of this on your own: an app for the thermostat, a smart lock, and motion detection via at least a camera or sensor.
Without a little Home Assistant glue in the middle, most home devices aren’t really “smart” or “connected”. They are remotely controllable, which is an important prerequisite for being automated, but this should not be confused with automation.
Automation is your home reacting to the time of day, the weather, your presence, etc. without need to manually activate devices every time. With Home Assistant flexing all of your muscles, in theory, it’s possible to build a house where you shouldn’t need to touch a light switch or thermostat, because your automations are created with enough care and thoughtfulness.
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