Open-Source Home Automation
I have a pretty big install of Home Assistant. You can see a screenshot of my main dashboard here.<p><a href="https://i.imgur.com/pJAGAZT.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/pJAGAZT.png</a><p>When I built the house I decided that I was looking for a Home Automation system that was going to be:<p>a) Open source, or open standards<p>b) Everything can be done entirely locally<p>I settled with using the KNX system for the primary actuators for the house, with Home Assistant for automation and control.<p>One nice property of KNX is that it's distributed, you don't need any central manager for the system to work, so if you press a light switch, then that sends a packet on the KNX network directly to the light actuator. Then there is an IP/KNX bridge to allow you to interact with the KNX network to hack on it.<p>All the "light" automation in the house is all done using KNX programming. For example, walk into hall, light turns on. You don't need a central authority for that. The motion sensor just talks to the light directly.<p>For anything more complex, Home Assistant get's involved for all the more "global" automation via the IP/KNX bridge.<p>And of course you can control everything through it's app. I love how fast and responsive it is since it's local. It's maybe 100ms at most from clicking the button in the app to the light being on.<p>The main thing I can't do without the cloud is voice control. I'm using Google Homes for it which Home Assistant exposes all my devices to. Local voice control systems really suck compared to Google unfortunately.<p>Another thing I'm happy I did is just put sensors for everything everywhere through the house. Here is a screenshot of <i>most</i> of them.<p><a href="https://i.imgur.com/5VeMuE1.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/5VeMuE1.png</a><p>I actually have more data then this that I haven't bothered to hook up  yet since it hasn't been important. Like the motion sensors also provide light levels and so on.<p>Overall, I would definately recommend Home Assistant.