Originally Drafted on Nov 28, 2018
12+ years ago I went looking for home automation tools. Misterhouse was a suite of tools written in perl (my preferred language at the time) that enabled a firecracker serial device to control X10 RF smart plugs. Not much has changed.
The required technical know-how was absolutely beyond your average persons interest, and that was true for all solutions which is why they were installer driven enterprises like Lutreon and Connect. They hooked you in and then gouged you on per hour service fees to maintain the fragile net of glued devices.
Fast forward to now and the idea of an IoT in your home is firmly entrenched in the minds of everyone. Personally, I think this has a lot to do with other groups of people developing technologies in other parts of the world. China and India come to mind as prime examples of evolving middle classes that will not be satisfied with merely the trappings of previous middle classes. The modern house has become a device centred environment, with "apps" required for each company as they try to capture our time and money. This drives me crazy as there is a huge disincentive for interoperability, that puts a discerning buyer at a disadvantage. Secondly the assumed prevalence of connectivity has made another annoying and potentially dangerous outcome: unresponsive electronic devices without a always-on internet. We live in a rural area and no one out here has any such expectation for connectivity.
The game has changed. Arduinos and Rasberry Pi's are ubiquitous in the DIY community and have allowed for a reliable local network to manage a households smart devices. Alexa, Google Assistant, and their ilk have allowed deep language operation (as long as the ol'internet is working).
And now for the update:
The Wide World of Open Home Automation in 2022
Well, this forgotten draft post aged like milk. Alexa and Google Assistant, fruitless in their attempt to profit, have gutted their voice assistant departments. While they continue on it is obvious that the cloud computing requirements are too intensive to justify without the profit stream of imagined customers ordering crap by voice only. If that was the goal, one wonders why Amazon has insisted on making product searches impossible by filling the first pages with sponsored crap. Every consumer now knows that the first items in an amazon search are almost certainly not the item you seek. Is that the fertile ground where a customer is would feel comfortable hitting the equivalent of the "I Feel Lucky" button (also almost certain to lead to the wrong result these days)
While Home Assistant has continues it's evolution from an amazing platform for hardcore techies into an straight-up amazing platform for the tech aware. It extends an open hand and philosophy into a space dominated by app driven automation (where user interaction can be captured and monetized). As someone who rolled their own Alexa voice skill for HA, I love their support model that simplifies that task for a small monthly fee that keeps the core development focused on users, as opposed to vendor driven platforms like Phillips Hue.