I’ve previously written about my experience building a cohesive smart home, and since it’s been a year and a half, I wanted to update, especially since now I’m spending so much (read: all) of my time at home!
What’s the Same?
So I’m still using Home Assistant to connect to all of my smart devices. It controls everything and allows me to do some really neat things with schedules. Home Assistant has grown a lot and is a more mature product, and now is fairly on par with something like HomeKit or another smart-home system.
What’s new?
A lot! I’ve moved from hosting my Home Assistant in a VM to hosting it as a series of Docker Containers (and don’t worry, my next blog will explain what that actually means). Additionally, I’ve ditched my Ikea setup as the hub became corrupt after an update and no longer connects to the bulbs. It also corrupted either the bulbs or the remote, as neither connect to one another anymore. As a result, I’ve switched to powering the lamps in my living room using Wi-Fi controlled outlet plugs into simple LED bulbs.
Months ago, on a random trip to Home Depot to buy some screws for a drawer, I found WiZ bulbs. They’re a new, smart-home system that uses Wi-Fi rather than Zigbee or Z-Wave (the two major smart-home protocols). The ones I bought are made by Phillips but aren’t a part of their Hue line (and aren’t compatible with Hue). As it was only $15 for an RGB bulb, I took a gamble and tried it out. They’re actually pretty good! After some tinkering, I was able to connect it to my Home Assistant setup.
Finally, there is now a company called Nabu Casa that offers a service that for $5 per month allows you to connect your Home Assistant setup to Google Home, meaning I can now voice control all of my smart lights.
A Time for Everything!
I’m NOT a morning person. The windows in my bedroom face into a parking lot with numerous light-polluting streetlamps, so I’ve installed black-out curtains so I may get ANY sleep. Unfortunately, this means that it is still fairly dark when I want to wake up. I’ve solved this by scheduling an RGB bulb in my bedroom that slowly turns on a blue light in the morning and over about 40 minutes gets to full brightness around when my alarm goes off. I’ve coupled this with a schedule that turns all my RGB lights slowly red after 6 PM. I plan at some point to replace most of my bulbs with RGG, but that’s a project for another day!