Introducing Home Assistant

There’s a new home automation kid on the block, and it’s open-source and a better bet for the future than Google’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s whatever. I’ve recently discovered Home Assistant, and I plan to use it to integrate Roadrunner Comfort into this responsible, private, non-commercial home automation ecosystem.

The Home Automation site is well-constructed; when you first sign up for an account, it deposits you on their blog home where the top topic on the right-hand column is “How to help us help you – or How to ask a good question“. Perfect starting point, and my interactions flowed smoothly from there. The demo page looks impressive, and the docs made me want to dive in. Until I looked at installation, which claims to be the starting point. But from there, I encountered a lot of new technology I’m not familiar with. So, I need to ask for some help in the forum, which is what was suggested to me as a starting point in response to my email inquiry. So that’s where I’m headed.

I did manage to answer my initial question, how do I add Home Automation to my existing Arduino-based product. The answer? You don’t, it’s easier just to start over with their no-code development tools. But I found that someone seems to be doing speech recognition within HA on an ESP32-S3 (our processor of choice) so we should be able to get it working on our platform sooner or later. In the meantime I’m back to school again for awhile.