Home Assistant running on a Raspberry Pi

Smarthome visualisation with HomeAssistant

I had KNX installed in my house to automate one or two things. I started with Hager Easy, but for various reasons it soon turned out to be unsuitable for me. After I got myself an ETS licence and extracted the KNX addresses from the Easy environment, I have various visualisation platforms. There are numerous articles comparing the offers, e.g. here.

Essential criteria for me were:

  • Configuration with little/no programming (although or precisely because I come from computer science: I like it when complex technology is easy to master)
  • Modern surface
  • Wide coverage of components (KNX, Z Wave, HUE, Unifi, Doorbird, Logitech Harmony, Sonos, etc.)
  • Future-proofing (=dissemination, community, release cycles)

I experimented with ioBroker at first, but it was too much work for me to configure. The same was true for FHEM, for example, which was far too complex for me. However, I became aware of the HomeAssistant interface through ioBroker and tested it in parallel with OpenHAB. In the end, I decided on HomeAssistant because I was able to make fast progress, my KNX environment could be integrated with all other components under one interface and automation is very elegant in a mix of visual programming and simple coding (YAML-based). The community is also very large and there are really no questions left unanswered.

I installed HomeAssistant on a Raspberry Pi, you just have to follow these few steps. HomeAssistant also offers a cloud integration with which the control can be accessed remotely. This also makes voice control via Alexa & Co child's play. For geofencing-based logics, I use the app Geofency, which works very precisely and reliably. I use old iPads with wall mounts or the family's mobile phones as displays.

All in all, I am very satisfied with the changeover and the decision to use HomeAssistant. The system has been running for a long time without any major problems and since the release cycles have been reduced, updates are no longer a big issue. It is important to always make a backup that can be activated on a spare platform at any time. I haven't exhausted all the possibilities by a long shot, but that's kind of the point, that there's still a lot of room for improvement.

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