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At some point you want your home automation system to do things for you. If you're maintaining your own fragile custom infrastructure you're spending more time
by aulin 3y ago
At some point you want your home automation system to do things for you. If you're maintaining your own fragile custom infrastructure you're spending more time on it than it saves you by automating stuff.
Sure it's fun and it's a great learning experience, but don't try to make it look like a better solution than a popular, proven, tested and maintained one like Home Assistant.
- hnlmorg 3y agoI built my own smart home set up before Alexa et al came along and later switched to Alexa because my wife and, later kids, took priority. My experiences with commercial smart home solutions is that they require just as much babysitting as anything you build yourself. The only real benefit of commercial solutions is that my wife isn’t afraid to add plugs et al to the smart home infrastructure whereas before it would be entirely down to me. But the cost I pay for that convenience is reduced privacy and potentially insecure hardware connected via WiFi. Honestly, if I was building something out again, I would totally optimise the set up for privacy and security rather than convenience of having a spouse connect new devices.
- z3t4 3y agoBuilding something specialized for only yourself might be faster then bending existing solutions to fit your requirements. And if you do something more advanced it will likely also be cheaper to build it yourself then buying the solution. And the knowledge you gain will be invaluable.
- theshrike79 3y agoObligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1319/ https://xkcd.com/1319/ Also: in some cases it really is faster just to make your own rather than learn the Home Assistant Way Of Doing Things.
- expertentipp 3y agoThere is always that one cronjob to bugfix, web server to restart, port being brute forced by some bots...