Head first into the Home Assistant Rabit Hole

Part one of... several

Since we moved into our house, I've been slowly building out our ideal smart home. What started with a nest thermostat and a smart things hub controlling a few lights has turned into... well, a monster. Currently, we're now sitting at:

• 9 Cameras
• 164 Sensors
• 58 Lights
• 101 Switches
• 62 Binary sensors
• 59 Automations

And that's just what home assistant actually knows about and has enabled.

Throughout this process, I've learned in a "trial by fire". There's really not a "one-size fits all" when it comes to home automation, and it seems that every system that works well ends up being a mesh of various protocols, manufacturers, and witchcraft. I'm going to try to document some of my experience here, but it's going to be spread out over a few parts.

How it started

We've been in the google ecosystem for years. It actually started about 10 years ago when we bought out first nest camera to use as a baby monitor. Since then, things have grown - first came a google home speaker, then a nest thermostat, then a second nest camera, then a smart things hub and a few light bulbs. And it doesn't end there. We rock android phones, had youtubeTV, have youtube music, and even looked at the nest secure security system before it was shut down. We even went the Stadia route for gaming for a while.

Throughout it all, when it came to our smart home setup, the SmartThings hub was definitely the first time I felt like I made a mistake. It was the first time I had a problem that really made me grumpy.

A disconnected smart home

When we moved into our home, I needed to replace a bunch of CFL bulbs the old owners had in place. I figured, why not go all in? We bought some cheap zigbee bulbs and replaced all of the bulbs and can lights with them. We even used some fancy RGB recessed lights in our kitchen. Everything was great for weeks until we started to head to bed one night. "Hey google, goodnight!" - Normally, this would kick off an automation to tell smart things to turn all the lights off. Instead, an error - "Something went wrong", she responded. Our internet was down (thanks spectrum), so google assistant couldn't help. No worries - I opened the smart things app to turn the lights off... and nothing. Since smart things doesn't run locally, without the internet we were dead in the water. Sure, I could turn off wifi and access smart things, but it had no way to get back to the hub in the house to send commands. Now I had to go through the house turning off lights who's switches I hadn't touched since moving in. Finding the right ones was half the battle.

First major upgrades

Over the next few days, we had more internet issues that just rubbed me the wrong way - Why do I need the internet to control a light? The controller is sitting right here, it should run without heading out to the 'cloud' before processing! I looked at options, and we settled on purchasing a Hubitat to replace the smart things hub. This doesn't solve the google assistant issue when the internet is down, but it does solve the local control issue - I could now open the (extremely ugly, in my opinion) Hubitat app and control lights manually. Great, problem solved..?

With the new found 'freedom,' we added even more "stuff" - Door sensors to know when doors are open, a tilt sensor to detect our garage door status, some motion sensors to automatically turn lights off when we aren't in rooms for a while, some in wall smart switches to control things like our outdoor lights, and even a few more cameras from other brands. But the cameras were always a little bit of a pain point, as there was a subscription fee to record data, and I didn't like the idea of any cameras inside the house knowing the footage was being sent to some data center to be analyzed for marketing opportunities.

Enter Synology

As time went on, one issue I wanted to solve (unrelated to the smart home) was shared storage and photo backups here at home. I had a 12 year old Western Digital NAS that I had been using, but it was showing signs of being close to dying. I ended up purchasing a Synology NAS, loading some hard drives in it, and configured it to backup our photos and docs automatically from our phones. And it was GREAT. I even configured local VPN access so that we could always connect to our local files while on the go.

And Then Came Home Assistant

I had learned about home assistant when first exploring hubitat, but it seemed to require a lot more setup than I wanted to put in at the time - I'd need a raspberry pi and separate zigbee and zwave dongles. Hubitat included it. But then I heard about some of the integrations. Apparently, from what I was reading, home assistant was better at automations than hubitat and could also talk directly to Hubitat, letting it handle all of the zwave and zigbee connectivity.

Even better - It could run in a docker container rather than on a raspberry pi directly. Since the Synology NAS can run docker containers, why not give it a try? I had already been running Pi-Hole for local DNS and ad blocking, and had a few other docker containers running. I decided to give it a shot and tinker. Maybe it would work? Maybe not? What's the worst that could happen?

Stay tuned for part 2...