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Looking for smart home tools
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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HomeAssistant and OpenHAB are good places to start. I don’t know too much about OpenHAB, but for HomeAssistant you can do almost everything locally.
ESPHome is a good example of a project that they fund where you can use ESP8266/ESP32 devices to create several sensors and other devices for local IoT. They also have a number of ways to bypass cloud requirements for Tuya based devices, Phillips Hue, etc.
Plus this year is “Year of the Voice Assistant” and they’re working on enhancing a locally accessible and hosted voice assistant that doesn’t require cloud access.
Edit: If you’re a DIY kind of person like I am, HomeAssistant offers compatibility with a number of other projects like presence detection via ESPresence, custom firmware for ESP32Cam via Tasmota, WLED for controlling RGB lightstrips and matrices, lots of 3D printing opportunities too. I found it a lot of fun to go through my home and find ways to make things work. Blinds, accent lighting, automations based on time and other factors, etc.
Plus the hardware requirements for HomeAssistant aren’t that high. You can run it on an RPi4b with 2/4/8GB RAM (I would suggest at least 4), a VM that you can expand later and so forth.
Since I am on the same journey as OP and tried it just recently, I have one thing to add about openHAB:
It does not come with actual login credential handling. If you want to make your smart home accessible from outside your home network I cannot recommend openHAB.
I am currently going with Home Aisstant mainly for that reason.
Very good point. HomeAssistant offers a paid service called Nabu Casa that provides you a secure way to access your entire HomeAssistant instance, including cameras, sensors, you can set up mobile push notifications, and more.
Thanks for the hint I did not know about Nabu Casa.
Although I am not clear about the benefit of the service. I thought I could achieve the same kind of access with simply forwarding ports 80 and 443 from my router to my home assistant. Is there anything wrong with my intended setup?
Well, cloudflare is (supposedly) more secure, but other then that, not really, everything in nabu casa can be achieved without it, but nabu casa is easier and supports home assistant