Journey of a Smart Home
Introduction to the Madness
These days, smart homes're all the rage. And for good reason, as once you dip your toes into how a smart home can work for you, you start to see possibilities.
This is especially true for those who are disabled in some way, shape or form. I am a disabled individual as well, and so upon learning the existence of a smart home, it took some time before I could bring that vision to life because I'd always wanted to have some way of knowing when someone's at the door. Someone's calling.
Or simple, basic but truly helpful devices that let you know when things're needing attention or about to fail. Things like... a fire and smoke alarm, for example.
What Platform?
I use HomeAssistant as the central hub, specifically the HomeAssistant Green which is a great way to get started on your smart home. I also use the SkyConnect to connect with as many devices as possible and keep them local and off the cloud.
Why off the cloud? Well... for starters, I can't guarantee how long a given technology would work or for that matter the support and updates for whatever I add to my platform. So it needs to be local. This way, I can be reasonably sure that if some device loses support, it'll still at least be controlled by the HomeAssistant Green.
These are the starting point in which you can build your smart home. A lot of the things I use do run on wifi and bluetooth. Some are also zigbee-based. I'm slowly switching away from wifi because I'd like to reduce the reliance on wifi for my tech needs. By the time you're done setting up a home, you could have easily 20+ wifi devices on your wifi network and... well, that can be a problem, particularly if you're in an apartment complex with competing wifi networks, much like I am.
What Protocols to Use?
So now that you have a home automation platform, the next consideration to deal with is to choose how you want to connect the smart devices to your smart home. There's a few such protocols in-use, like Z-Wave, Zigbee, Thread and Matter, not to mention the venerable HomeKit for Apple users.
Ultimately, they all do the same thing in that you can do things with them. For me, I chose the SkyConnect because it deals with several protocols all at once on its own when powered by the HomeAssistant Green!
This more or less lets me not worry too much about what protocols is in use but lately most of these tend to work with Tuya, a cloud-connected smart home ecosystem that I've had troubles with, mostly in the form of the app on my phone acting up and incorrectly detecting states of a given device.
What's the next step?
Setting one up, of course! Personally, I would suggest getting the HomeAssistant Green mentioned earlier here because it simplifies set-up for you and allows you to get up and running quickly.
Instead of showing you how to get started with this, I'll simply refer to the excellent tutorial on getting started with HomeAssistant Green here.
Got all of that sorted? Excellent, let's proceed to the next step -- selecting your hardware and automating them! We'll be focusing on specific bits of hardware and how we can automate them to best serve your needs.
Index of Posts
Filed under: SmartHome - @ February 17, 2024 9:52 AM