Home Assistant: Open-source home automation platform running on Python 3
I&#x27;ve been using Home Assistant for a couple of years now. I won&#x27;t go too much into what I use it for, there&#x27;s a bunch of info about that, and the guys on the Discord have entire public repos full of all their cool automations (on Github).<p>What I would share is that in the couple of years I&#x27;ve been running it, I&#x27;ve been through a dozen Sandisk and Samsung MicroSDs on my Pis _even though_ I was running my time-series database, and my MQTT server on a separate server.<p>Running on  Raspberry Pi it&#x27;s a nice toy, but when you get serious, install it on a proper box with an SSD&#x2F;spinning rust.<p>I bought a NUC-like device which is what most people will recommend to run it on, installed Arch (you can use whatever you like, Debian is probably best supported) and get going.<p>Briefly though, I log all of the temperatures and light levels in each room of my home using Z-Wave sensors, store them in Influx and graph them in Grafana.<p>I have my desk lamp turn on when motion is detect at or around my desk, I have my cameras start recording when nobody is home (based on location reporting from our mobiles using Owntracks back to my self-hosted MQTT server).<p>I have hue lights in every light socket in the home so I can switch them to various moods based on motion, time of day, lux, whether the TV is on, the weather, the temperature, etc etc.<p>The Home Assistant dashboard shows my server load in my rack , temperature in my rack (via a temperature sensor connected to an ESP8266 talking MQTT back to the server), all info on my UPS, load on various power meter wall plugs (Z-Wave) which can also be controlled on&#x2F;off via HA, it shows the current temperature and light level and motion in each room via Z-Wave motion sensors.<p>Most importantly, the community that sit on Discord are a friendly and helpful bunch so it&#x27;s nice and easy to get started.