Ivyisme I plan on writing an article about my own smart home but I don’t even know where to start…
On my Home Assistant server, I currently have,
- 41 integrations (plus all the HACS stuff)
- 198 devices
- 1806 entities
The bulk of it is using ZigBee network, but I also have Wi-Fi devices here and there. This Smart Home is still under development (the number of devices will actually increase quite a bit once I add the door contact sensors, radar presence sensors and a few other things).
To answer your two questions,
What device are you currently using, and how has it enhanced your life?
As mentioned here, my smart home has a few core principles:
Local-first — I wanted to prioritize equipments that didn’t need internet access, and, even more importantly, didn’t rely on external servers. I wanted something that would either be very easy to block from the internet, or at the very least that would be easy for me to control what gets sent where.
Dumb-first — A smart home should be first and foremost, a dumb home. Everything should work as a normal house would, so that, in case anything fails, things just work as a normal home would.
Wife-approved — A smart home shouldn’t need a user guide. Whether it’s my wife, my daughter, or guests, the house should still work in a way that is intuitive for anyone other than me.
With that in mind, I decided to go with Home Assistant and ZigBee devices as the backbone of my Smart Home. I would’ve loved to have jumped on the Matter bandwagon, but despite all of its initial promises, Matter still hasn’t… Ma(t)terialized. :D
Since I was creating a smart home from scratch, I was able to plan things ahead. One of the decisions I made was to run ethernet cables through the walls to everywhere I needed (and even a fiber cable from the house lobby to the garage). I also decided to go with smart switches instead of smart bulbs because it’s cheaper and easier to control.
Setting up my Smart Home had multiple stages:
- Stage 1: Researching and Testing — Completed — I did this while I was still in my old apartment, researching alternatives for over 2 years before deciding the final logic.
- Stage 2: Installing hardware — Completed — This was done as the house was being built, so I had the support of an electrician. Made my life much easier.
- Stage 3: Setting up the devices — Completed (95%) — I actually had to do this step 3 times, because I kept having issues with my ZigBee coordinator. It’s been a few months now, so it seems like it’s stable now. I’m only missing adding the last devices, but nothing critical.
- Stage 4: Creating Automations — Ongoing (30% ?) — This and the next 2 Stages are what’s more time-consuming. Bit by bit, I’m adding automations to make my house smarter without getting in the way. I have a bunch of cool ideas, but it takes time to implement. ChatGPT has been helpful writing the yaml for several of my automations and integrations.
- Stage 5: Setting up the dashboard — Ongoing (50% ?) — The cool thing about Home Assistant is that you can integrate pretty much everything. The tricky part is how you access and control all of that. To sort this, I’m creating a dashboard that allows me to view critical information and control everything I need to control outside the created automations. I already have a good foundation of a dashboard, but finishing it will take time and skills I still don’t have.
- Stage 6: Polishing everything — Not done (0%) — There is a lot more that needs to be done to make it perfect. Hiding unwanted entities, setting up useful notifications, extract more actionable information from the server, finding a good solution for audio (the only part of the smart home I haven’t fully figured out), etc.
The smart home is now really coming together and improving my day-to-day. I have hot water the second I start showering, the kitchen exhaust turns on when I start cooking, I can control all blinds and all the lights from home assistant, I can add ingredients to my shopping list by talking to Home Assistant. There’s still a lot to be done, but I’m confident I’ll have it ready by end of Q1.
If you had the opportunity to design your smart home with the most advanced 2025 devices—without considering the budget and device system compatibility—how would you design it?
As you can probably guess from the essay above, I’m pretty happy with my smart home as it is. I went with budget-friendly options and that mostly worked for me. There are, however, a few things I would change or add, if I didn’t have to care for budget (some I intend on doing when I have some disposable income):
- Buy better security cameras. Reolink is okay and budget-friendly for the specs, but their streamings are very unstable and gave me a bunch of headaches while trying to integrate with Frigate (my software NVR). I would probably go with Dahua cameras.
- Buy a better smart doorbell. Again, same thing. Hikvision is giving a lot of headaches that I would prefer not having. There aren’t many options for local smart doorbells, but hopefully Matter will help fix that this year. In fact, I’m pretty excited about SwitchBot’s new doorbell.
- Add a smart door lock. This is another thing SwitchBot announced at CES2025. This is something I want to add at some point to the house, but not a priority right now.
- Buy better smart switches. I went with ZigBee devices from Tuya, but unfortunately, cheap devices sometimes act as cheap devices. If had no budget worries, I would probably go with everything from Shelly or wait for good Matter devices.
- Include a multi-room sound system. Multi-room audio is a nightmare so I steered away from it. With a big budget, I would probably fill my house with Sonos speakers (even with the current drama surrounding them).
- Add room presence detection to all rooms. I added a few radar-based devices to the main rooms for light control and alarm purposes, but it would be great to have ESPresence in all rooms to automate more behaviors. Radar presence on a few more rooms would also be cool.
- Add an offline audio assistant to all rooms in my house. Nabu Casa (the company that backs Home Assistant) just launched Voice PE. It would be cool to add one to each room, or better yet, develop my own, based on ESP32. With unlimited budget that would be easy, especially since there’s a lot open source stuff being done.
Sorry for the long post, I got carried away! Please let me know if you read the whole thing. I would love to hear your thoughts.
