It's been some time since my last blog post as I was busy moving and settling into my new home. It's given me the opportunity to discover the magic of home automation and right now the name of the game is Home Assistant. Through Home Assistant, one may run a local server (I run it on a Raspberry Pi 4) that may connect to smart devices and unify them all in a single UI. The greatest benefit of this is that now these devices may be automated together and they may now be controlled remotely even when away from home. Another amazing thing about Home Assistant is that it allows the community to extend its functionality through the Home Assistant Community Store (HACS). HACS essentially allows the user to download custom device integrations and UI customizations from GitHub. Sounds cool? Because it is! My current automations are as follows:

• Turn off all the lights, change the alarm system to "Away" and start the Roomba when all home occupants have left
• Re-dock the Roomba when one of the home occupants comes back
• Change the alarm system to "Night" after 10pm
• Change the alarm system to "Home" after 7am unless no one is home, or when someone comes back home from 7am to 10pm
• Send an alert to all home owners when any of the wetness detection sensors turn from "Dry" to "Wet"
• Flash all lights red when when the router disconnects from WAN for over 3 seconds
• Turn the lights on to 40% in the living room when a home owner comes home after sunset

Now that the summer's here, I'll be looking to automate my A/C using an IR blaster and to automate the positioning of my window blinds. More about my dive into home automation in part 2!