How-To

Home automation.

“Walled gardens are prisons that disguise themselves as safe havens.” — Cory Doctorow

Jack Gangi

22 Feb 2025 • 3 min read

Smart assistants really are cool. It's the future we were promised. More or less

I was in from day one and I live a very automated lifestyle. First thing in the morning my shades go up my music plays and my cats get fed. At night the room lights go off and the access lights automatically go on giving my house a nice blue tint. The climate is adjusted depending on the tempture outside. If I have the door open for more than five minutes the heat or AC will turn off until it's closed again. when it works it's amazing and when it doesn't work it makes you wanna rip your hair out.

I'm a diehard Apple fan boy so naturally I chose Homekit with Siri. Combined with HomePods around the house and some Apple TVs it works........just OK.

I've done plenty of extensive testing and I've concluded that most of them work just OK. The voice control and smart buttons work around 90% of the time. That number gets a lot lower when you lean heavier on voice commands.

In my unflinching quest to remove as much from the cloud as possible I decided it was time to bring the Home Automation in-house. There are a few platforms to choose from but one seems to rise head and shoulders above the rest, Home Assistant.

I'm not going to go too deep into installation here because there are plenty of better places you can go for that. Suffice to say it is available on just about any platform this side of the Commodore 64. A popular choice seems to be the Raspberry Pi. There's also a Docker container.

The website goes into great detail about the different choices and even has an option for buying pre-configured pieces of hardware.

💡

One important caveat to note is the feature set of the different versions. Well most of the difference is aren't a big deal the big one to look out for is add-ons. Not having add-ons will leave you hobbled. Add-ons provide services or tools that run inside Home Assistant, while integrations connect Home Assistant to external devices or services.

Every smart device I add to The Millhouse is first set up in Home Assistant. From there, I use the HomeKit Bridge to integrate devices into HomeKit, Mostly for features that Home Assistant doesn’t quite have down yet— like voice commands. More than that in a bit.

**“With every voice command, we barter convenience for pieces of our autonomy.”— Bruce Schneier“**

For example, I can group several living room lights and pair them with a switch directly in Home Assistant. Then, using the HomeKit Bridge I import that lighting group into HomeKit. So if I hit the switch Home Assistant handles it while if i ask siri turn off the lights, HomeKit takes over.

Voice control is also something that is coming to the masses in the form of the Home Assistant voice preview edition smart speaker. A very bare bones privacy respecting alternative to Siri or Alexa.

With the words preview edition right in the name I probably wouldn't throw out my mainstream smart speakers just yet.