Yeah, when I first started playing with smart home stuff I looked at commercial hardware and saw that a lot of it requires a subscription on top of steep up fro

Yeah, when I first started playing with smart home stuff I looked at commercial hardware and saw that a lot of it requires a subscription on top of steep up front costs. So I broke out my oscilloscope and soldering iron and made my own for a tiny fraction of the cost and have had great fun doing it. It used to be really hard to do this because wireless communication with hobbyist microcontrollers was either tedious or expensive (the old Arduino wifi shields were like $30-40). The RasPi and ESP8266 have really made things more accessible; you can build a central hub for $50 with a good wifi antenna and then something like a temp/light/humidity sensor is about $10. Or control lights with the $5 Sonoff switch from Itead (basically an ESP+relay on a well designed PCB, that is hobbyist friendly and lets you put your own firmware on it if you like). Or great free controller tools like Home Assistant and data management like InfluxDB and Grafana. It's a great time to be an electronics hobbyist. The rise of IoT and smart home applications have produced a surge of new and interesting products for hobbyists that didn't exist before, I'm guessing as a side effect of dissatisfaction with the state of commercial products.