Everyone likes home automation – if it works! We’ve all been excited about that smart switch or wireless light that we can control from anywhere in the world, but how great is it really? For a few ‘smart’ devices it may seem work well, but once you begin to accumulate more than a handful of devices you will quickly begin to realize that you have as many apps as you do smart devices and you will begin to start asking questions like:
- Which app controls which device?
- Do I have to download all these apps for each member of my family?
- Wouldn’t it be nice if I could control all my smart devices with a single app?
- Why can’t I connect my smart devices together?
All of these questions can be answered with a tool called Home Assistant. In the most basic of terms, Home Assistant is a tool that pulls all of your smart devices into a single app. I will save the details of Home Assistant future posts, but it aims to do the following and much more:
- Be Free and Open Source (FOSS)
- Improve your privacy by reducing the need for internet based cloud services
- Control all the smart devices in your home from a central location
- Connect smart devices in your home in order to trigger perform actions like: When there is motion in the hallway, turn on the light
- Provide a single app (web or mobile) to control and manage all your smart devices
Home Assistant may not be the ‘silver bullet’ for every situation, but I am willing to say that it is unequivocally the best home automation solution available today (as of 2020). Anyone interested in taking the next step in home automation should consider Home Assistant. Stay tuned and in the near future we will be discussing how to get started using this great tool, and why it is (in my opinion) superior, but friendly with other alternatives like Hubitat, SmartThings, and HomeKit.
(Full disclosure: I was not paid or in any way incentivized to speak so highly of Home Assistant)