Home Assistant: Smart Home for Tech Enthusiasts
The Project
Home Assistant is an open-source management platform for smart home devices. This platform allows you to connect all kinds of smart home devices with each other and manage your entire home setup from a single app. The project was started around 2013 and since then its community works continuously on improvements to that platform. As of now, it has integrations for many major smart home products like Sonos speakers, voice assistants, and Philips hue lights.
In order to use Home Assistant for your own home, you either need a computer to be used as your home server e.g. a RaspberryPi or purchase the Home Assistant yellow. The last option is only viable if you do not have problems with waiting up to 6 months to receive your device. These delays are caused due to the fact that this is a crowdfunding campaign. No matter which option you chose, the Home Assistant Website contains getting started guides for them.
Setup the System
As mentioned before, you need some kind of computer to run your Home Assistant installation for you and this computer has to run basically all of the time in order to work properly. The most convenient way to do this is, using a RaspberryPi. This is a small computer the size of a credit card and has very low energy consumption. Even if you are not familiar with interacting with a Linux operating system or the terminal itself, the website contains a step-by-step “Getting Started”-Guide that walks you through the setup process.
Nabu Casa
Nabu Casa is a Company that was founded in 2018 by the originators of Home Assistant. The company’s main product is to provide a cloud service around Home Assistant. This service takes the initial setup work off the user as well as the operating maintenance. So basically, a user only needs to hook up their smart home devices to the cloud service to integrate them into their overall setup. The overall benefit of this service is, a user has no longer the maintenance work for the actual operating device.
Features
At its core, Home Assistant provides three feature sets that are worth taking a closer look at. These three core sets include a variety of dashboards, automation capabilities, and integrations with third-party products.
Dashboards
In general, a dashboard is used to display certain data to a user. For Home Assistant this would be any data that is collected by smart home products that are tied up with the Home Assistant platform. Because the setup of smart home products is individual to each home, so are the dashboards individual for each Home Assistant installation. Therefore, users are able to customize the dashboards to their own preferences.
Automation
When it comes down to taking your smart home to the next level, automating devices or letting them react to certain events is a real game changer. An example of such automation can be, automatically lowering your window blinds at sunset or sunrise or connecting them to a light sensor, and when the input passes your defined threshold, the windows will be covered or uncovered completely autonomous.
To achieve this, you can either use pre-build automation by the home assistant community or build them on your own. The last one is the way to go if you don’t find a setup that neither fits your needs nor your specific devices. And if you are not familiar with building this automation or getting stuck right into the process, you can reach out to their forums at any time. Because this is a community drive platform, someone likely had the same problem before or knows the platform well enough to guide you.
Integrations
The support for third-party products lets you integrate a broad variety of smart home devices into Home Assistant. Most of these products can be integrated throughout their provided plugins. But even if a smart home device does not have an official integration, you can contribute a plugin for this product by yourself. This is possible because, as mentioned, Home Assistant is open-source software, and everybody is welcome to contribute and improve this software. And even if you do not have the technical skills to code such a plugin by yourself, you can surely open an issue and let the community know that you need help with your specific device. Eventually, someone will pick up on this and help you to get your system up and running.
Advantages
The biggest advantage to proprietary products is, that you are not dependent on a corporation to run and maintain the service for you, though you have the option to do so. But if you want to you can completely manage the service on your own, so there is no risk that a company decides to no longer continue that service and your whole setup shuts down.
Another major advantage of Home Assistant is, that you don’t have to rely on any cloud service. Sure, most cloud services are highly available, and it happens rarely that they shut down. But this is not the point I want to make. My point is about privacy and security. For privacy reasons, this is very easy. When there is no cloud provider, you don’t have to trust a third party to secure all your data and you don’t expose literally your entire home to them. Security comes with a trade-off. In order to achieve true security for your set-up, your system must not have a permanent internet connection. This means that you won’t be able to connect to your smart home when you are not at home. But since you aren’t able to, anybody else isn’t able to either.
Disadvantages
The first disadvantage is, that Home Assistant has a very small target group and may not be too inclusive for “outsiders”. This means Home Assistant is not a “plug and play” system that can be used by anyone. You have to be tech enthusiastic and have some kind of basic knowledge to understand how to set up your system properly.
There are also some complaints about the overall documentation. Though there are some manuals to integrate a specific product into your platform, there is no general documentation about certain concepts around home automation.
It is also said that there are far more users that seek help rather than users that can provide help which implies that you are most likely on your own when it comes to figuring out certain problems with your setup.
Personal Thoughts
Though I have no practical experience when it comes to Home Assistant, I like the idea behind the project, to have a management platform for your smart home system that is not dependent on any corporation and lets you the freedom of choice on what devices you are able to use within your smart home setup.
