Home Assistant

Did your mom ever tell you to be home before the street lights come on? That’s the guidance I give to my boy as he roams the neightborhood with his friends but he’s 12 and easily distracted so, I’m often sending “Time to come home, bud” messages. I got bored with that tonight and decided to let Home Assistant do it for me.

I’ve moved my home automation logic from the ISY994i to Home Assistant but it took me a while to get the responses to activity outside the house right. What I want is for motion to trigger a response (i.e. lights come on) which is simple. Then I want the system to wait until the motion sensors have been off for a while before reverting the initial response. This turned out to be harder than I expected.

I build my first curstom integration for Home Assistant. My Recteq integration lets me monitor and control my smoker without having to expose it out to the Internet. My overactive imagination keeps coming up with scenarios where some hacker manages to burn my deck down…

IFTTT has changed their business model and wants to charge me to continue using a handful of integrations. This turned into an excuse to take a look around at alternatives to running all the glue logic for my home automation system in “the cloud”. I discovered Home Assistant is the perfect solution for me.