How to Choose the Brain for Your Home: Options for a Home Automation Hub

 

You can do Home Automation without any sort of hub. I still have one, the Wink hub. I chose it over Smart Things, the biggest competitor, for various reasons, but both have their place.

However, I have been moving to my own homebuilt system. I centered on a project called Home Assistant.

There are alternatives…OpenHAB, which uses Java, but Home Assistant has a good combination of ease of use and flexibility, so I am going to focus on it.

Home Assistant has a very active community of people and developers, which is an advantage. It is a Python based implementation and there is a distribution specifically for the Raspberry Pi making it easy to get started. New releases with new features happen about every two weeks.

I’m running it on an always-on system I already had, rather than a Pi, and I’ve spent a lot of my spare time building in support for items…and I keep adding piece after piece of integration.

Next up, my first integrations.

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