the flying squirrel

As I mentioned briefly in the New Year bullet post, I've been messing with Home Assistant a bit at the new house. I'm trying very hard not to fall down a rabbit hole of just continuously buying crap.

I do like the idea of lights on timers. And, rather than some noisy timer switch or something, I can run a whole Home Assistant server and have it do the timers!

But honestly, Home Assistant is up there as one of the best open source projects in the world. There so much it can do, you find yourself making big, insane plans for what it could do. And then you gotta wonder is whether this grand plan you have is actually going to improve anything in your life or is it going to be a frustrating, fragile headache that you constantly need to fiddle with.

What's worse is the hardware side is an absolute mess of competing and compromised standards from companies whose primary goal is to get you to fully buy into their ecosystem, collect as much data as they could hypothetically monetize and top it off with a monthly subscription fee.

We managed to clear out the remaining stock of Leviton Zigbee switches for most of the smart switches in the house. Leviton has mostly moved over to connecting to their own centralized service with Wi-Fi. Terrible. Matter is the new emerging standard, but "standard" is a bit of an overstatement. Support is spotty and a significant fraction of devices require Wi-Fi. I bought the ZBT-2 Zigbee and Thread (which is the non-Wi-Fi Matter mesh radio protocol) hub, not realizing that it only supports one protocol at a time. And since we've got Zigbee switches in the wall, it's a Zigbee hub. If I want to do Matter, I'll need another Thread hub. Annoying. My bad, but still annoying.

The whole home automation thing is full of gotchas, and I think my plan is to take things slow, take on a small project here and there and avoid the temptation to just go on AliExpress or Amazon and buy a tonne of gadgets that probably aren't going to work.