Home Automation – Then & Now

The state of home automation has come a long way from when I started my home automation journey.

This is what I had to do just a few years ago to simply control the lights in my house

• use an android app called Automate from Llamalab, which listens for “ok google” catchphrase
• Automate invokes relevant activity on a custom Android app (which I developed)
• The Android app sends Bluetooth commands or API requests to the device.

I would have probably spent hours developing this simple automation workflow back then, but now I can develop way more complicated automation with Home Assistant in minutes. I am so grateful for the open-source community which makes integrations (about 2000 integrations as of Feb 2022) across different ecosystems possible with a single hub.

I have been using Home Assistant for years and I have witnessed how fast it has grown over the years. I had to write all of the configs in YAML and it would take me a long time to test simple automation since any changes to the config file required a restart. Nowadays, I hardly open a YAML file and everything is done through a nice GUI. It also has traces to debug past automation runs and real-time highlighting when working on automation to see how it is being triggered live. This is a dream come true for home automation enthusiasts and I highly encourage you to check it out.

I am going to start a new series of posts showcasing my home assistant dashboards soon, so stay tuned!