I've been interested in the smart home space for a long time and, as I've moved around, I've smartified a few different homes. As a result, I have some practical opinions/reviews.

The purpose of this repo is two-fold:

1. Centralize this knowledge for sharing with friends.
2. Reduce the amount of Googling others have to do to answer some of the questions I had.

There's a lot of different smart home philosophies out there. Mine is generally:

• Devices should have a failure mode where if the smart home hub is down or if the Internet is down, the devices should still be usable.
• To the extent possible, controlling my devices shouldn't require a hop through the cloud.
• Ideally devices aren't using Wi-Fi as their backhaul as I don't want my Wi-Fi network clogged with devices that don't really need Wi-Fi.
• If devices require an app/login, I want the app/login to support 2FA. This is a hard requirement for security (camera, locks, etc.) devices.

My smart home journey started with HomeKit but (at the time) I found a lot of smart home equipment didn't support HomeKit. That led me to Home Assistant an awesome open source project that acts as a hub and can integrate with ... almost everything through a rich system of plugins. And, once you have devices in Home Assistant you can expose them to HomeKit, Google Home, and Alexa.

Currently, my setup is that I have:

• A Raspberry Pi 4 that is booting off an SSD (booting off an SSD is important as Home Assistant will log alot and wear down an SD Card).
• Z-Wave, Zigbee, and Bluetooth USB sticks connected to the Raspberry Pi (through USB extension chords as there's too much interference if you connect directly to the Raspberry Pi). Specifically, I use a:
  • Zooz ZST10 Z-Wave stick
  • Home Assistant SkyConnect Zigbee stick
  • Sena UD100-G03 Bluetooth stick
• Home Assistant and ZwaveJS running in Docker containers and the USB sticks routed to the docker containers.
  • It's relatively easy to do so by mapping the /dev/serial/by-id/X device to your container.
• After everything is configured in Home Assistant, I expose the devices to HomeKit and Google Home.
• I subscribe to Nabucasa Cloud to make it easy to expose Home Assistant to Google home (and to support the Home Assistant project).
• Some of my devices require use of Home Assistant Community Store (HACS).
• I've added some devices writing some glue code using hacs-pyscript.

• Alarm Systems - I recommend Abode
• Blinds - No straightforward recommendation, all options have tradeoffs
• Cameras and Doorbells - I recommend Arlo
• Ceiling Fans - I recommend Modern Forms
• Garage Door Openers - I recommend ratgdo
• Lights - I recommend Zooz switches and Sonoff outlets
• Locks - I recommend U-Tec locks
• Thermostats - No straightforward recommendation, all options have tradeoffs