Home Assistant

By Home Assistant Write a Review!

0 Like Visit Website

Product Details

Home Assistant is an open-source community-powered home automation system. It can run on a Raspberry PI or any local server. It has a rich library of connected devices, supported services, sensors, camera and smart car services.

Home Assistants provides a vast and seamless integration with Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and the open-source voice assistant Mycroft.io.

With Home Assistant there are 1400+ supported services, and devices. You can easily browse them in the Integrations Library as they are classified under dozens of categories featuring: VoiceUI, Alarm, Automation, Car, Energy, Sensors, Health, Image processing, Multimedia and media players.

Home Assistant is the newer cool kid in the neighborhood. It is a growing community with a very user-friendly approach. The tagline of this Home Automation Software is Simplicity. It is developed in Python and in the same way as Domoticz, you can extend its functionality by using plugins.

Installation :

The installation process for Home Assistant is very similar to OpenHab. You just need to download and burn the image of HassBian, officially supported by the Home Assitant project. Ten minutes after inserting it into the Raspberry Pi the system is up and running. The installation time might be a bit longer depending on your internet connection. The first thing that it does it to download the latest version of the software.

Configuration :

The project has gone the route of making decisions on behalf of the user. The first time that it runs, the system tries to discover all the devices in your house and adds them to the UI. This is practical if you have very few things but for more complex implementations it is limited. If you want to do more customizations there is some file editing to be done. They have chosen YAML for configuration files. I guess this is about preference but I don´t find it very intuitive.

Flexibility :

Home Assistant can definitely cover most people needs. The auto-discovery function works fairly well and the system makes a pretty decent job guessing your needs. I think it is definitely on the right path, but in my opinion, it still lacks flexibility.

Automation:

If XBase is painful, Yaml is by far worse to define automation rules. It is also very inflexible. Same as OpenHab with JSR223, in Home Assistant you can use AppDaemon to write the rules in Python. Python is very easy to learn for non-developers, you can do fairly complex things with just a few lines of code.