It all started with a light bulb.

No I’m not about to give you a history lesson on Thomas Edison and his enemies, but rather a story of how the idea of “smart” changed my way of life. In the beginning I bought a few smart lights for no other reason than that I wanted to spice up my rather drab dorm room while serving as an Airman for the US Air Force. The military had provided me with a relatively small suite with some provided and heavily outdated furniture and musty carpeting. I bought some Phillips Hue brand RGB lightbulbs to add a little color into my domicile and maybe turn some of the four white walls a different shade. At that time I barely used them at all. It was merely a “party trick.” Though in such a small room the 3 lights went a long way.

Looking back its crazy to think that I went from a dorm room with 3 lightbulbs to an entire house that is mostly automated and even protected by smart technology. I have successfully made the conversion to smart tech. It did take SEVERAL years before I really dove into the idea, but those light bulbs started it all.

Toes In The Water

The Phillips Hue app was manageable and while it’s gotten a lot faster over the years (no thanks to phones becoming undoubtedly faster as well), It only handled Hue devices and was fairly limited in its functionality. So onto the next.

Samsung has this cool device called the SmartThings Hub that at the time was a sort of gold-mine for smart home enthusiasts. It was compatible with a TON of smart home devices and many more could be added with the technical know-how. It was compatible with both of the unique “smart home” device to device communication types known as Zig-bee and Z-wave, and was easy to use on a phone or mobile device to control and operate your lights, locks, and even TV’s. It worked wonderfully and would’ve been perfect for someone wanting to try out smart home tech whilst not losing their mind over the setup and complication of some of the more advanced Smart Home applications out there (Yes, I’m looking at you Home Assistant).

It did have it’s downsides though. SmartThings was a mostly cloud based system which meant that If my internet went down suddenly many of my lights just wouldn’t work at all. It also meant that when I sent SmartThings a command the delay was very noticeable and sometimes even painful. No one wants to hit a light switch and wait several seconds for your request to process through the cloud and get back to your devices. While it might still technically be smart, its not cohesive to the responsive behavior that I was looking for.

Step In – Home Assistant

This guy is cool. He’s SO cool. Literally so cool I even gave him a little fan (because apparently I wasn’t enough 😒). His name is Home Assistant, and he runs the place these days.

Home Assistant is an extremely advanced and capable home Automation system. It’s broken down into two parts.

• The operating system which acts like your Windows or Mac OS computers and is specifically built to house the Home Assistant software.
• The Home Assistant Software which runs on top of the OS and is what we all know and love as “Home Assistant”

And it all fits on a Raspberry Pi (Think of a really tiny computer about the size of your palm). This little guy is extremely capable and has been running my house for about 6 months now (4 July, 2021).

Now I’ll be honest. Home Assistant is not for everyone. I’d even go as far to say that Home Assistant isn’t for MOST people. When I initially setup Home Assistant for the first time I couldn’t figure something out and I got frustrated, uninstalled it, and setup SmartThings all over again with all my smart devices. But then as time went on I learned a little bit more and saw all these cool dashboards on the smart home subreddit and realized most of them were done in Home Assistant.

So, I reinstalled it. This time, it stuck around. I reinstalled Home Assistant on my Raspberry Pi and decided to commit. I would build it up with all my smart devices and no matter how frustrating it might be, I told myself I would stick with it. And thankfully I did.

Enjoy these snapshots of my home smart Dashboard. I made it with the intention of being very simple with most of the common toggles being on the front dash to limit my time actually browsing the dashboard.

Home Assistant is POWERFUL. Almost anything out there that you can think of can be integrated with Home Assistant. And the options continue to grow at an increasing rate. And that’s without even considering using automations to do things for you and the custom apps that the community has put together.

Here are just some of the things that Home Assistant is capable of doing.

• When I leave home, Home Assistant will know and ensure that all my doors are locked, my lights are shut off, and that my security system is armed. When I come home, the opposite will happen. This has also allowed me the security of a home alarm system, without the annoyance of remembering to shut off my alarm.
• There are two motion sensors currently that will turn on the lights in my kitchen and stairwell (which until I automated, I would never ever use). The kitchen motion sensor will not turn off the lights until it has gone an entire two minutes without detecting any motion at all. The stairwell one is much shorter (~15 seconds)
• I set a timer in Home Assistant to tell me when my laundry machine is done. When the timer completes, it will flash my living and bedroom lights to remind me to swap them over.
• I can turn on either my Desktop PC or my Plex Server PC remotely through Home Assistant in the event of a power outage or I am away from home and need access to something on either of my computers. Of course the power will have to come back on first. Home Assistant will boot up as long there is power and then through Home Assistant I can power on the other devices, if they don’t reboot themselves.
• Even with no internet, I can still use Home Assistant on my home network and control most devices because I have everything setup to operate locally. No cloud necessary. This includes the motion activated lighting, un/locking my front door, and using any of the smart light switches throughout the home. This is my main reason for switching to Home Assistant in the first place. No more cloud, no more big brother to snoop through all my stuff. I have broken free, and If I absolutely had to, could even disconnect from the internet entirely, given I don’t want external access to Home Assistant.

The Now – Evolution

That’s right. We’ve moved up in the world. Now onto the good (nerdy) stuff.

Smart Home, Smart Server

Home Assistant is still running and controlling the house, and will likely keep that position for the foreseeable future. I take comfort knowing that even after a power outage, when power returns the Raspberry Pi will reboot and Home Assistant will come back to life within a few minutes. This is ESSENTIAL for something that I need to control and operate my home both when I am home and when I am away. But another part of the smart home that I haven’t talked too much about yet is the server.

When you hear the word server the first thing that comes to mind is likely a huge room with rows of tall cabinets and wires running everywhere. And all of these cabinets have these flashing lights all over black panels. An “at home” server doesn’t have to look (or cost) anywhere near the imagery depicted here. My current home server is simply a repurposed desktop PC that I was able to make useful again after rebuilding my current daily driver computer.

For those of you that are close to me, you know that I run and operate a Plex Server for my multimedia content collection. Plex is a home media solution that allows me to stream my movies and tv shows directly from my home’s server without requiring me to take a hard drive with movies all over the place. And the best part about Plex is I can allow friends and family to use the service and stream my content as well. At this time of writing the server is hosting about 1100 movies and 100 TV shows, so being able to access those from anywhere or at anytime as long as I have an internet connection is a wonderful convenience.

This is all accomplished with the help of a frontend server management operating system called Unraid. In fact, it’s what you are viewing this website on as well. How neat is that? While I’m rather new to Unraid itself, I’m very confident that Unraid will be around to stay. I even just upgraded its hardware to support the load of my increasing plex userbase.

A home media server running Unraid can accomplish a ton of things. Plex is just a small part of what this server has to offer. I am also running a TV service (dizqueTV) in my house that allows me to setup TV Channels with my plex content. Some examples of channels I’ve setup include an Marvel Cinematic Universe channel that plays MCU Movies and a MTV channel that plays music videos 24/7. Another feature that I’ve setup with Unraid is a cool DNS solution called Pi-hole that acts as a network-wide ad blocker. I will be writing a blog specifically on Unraid to go into the nitty gritty of running an that type of server.

My home router recently received an upgrade as well as my off the shelf router just simply couldn’t handle the heavier loads that Unraid (specifically Plex) was throwing at it. So I installed a Unifi Dream Machine Pro and have been reaping the benefits ever since. It is much more capable than my previous router and is also way more secure and capable of handling the threats that I might expect doing this sort of thing. I have also recently installed a server rack to tidy up the basement and keep all the ethernet runs in the house from getting out of hand. Overall these are the bones of the house, and I couldn’t be happier that I made these changes as it has significantly improved internet dropouts and stability. I highly recommend this route for anyone considering operating a server or web service such as Plex.

Times Are Changing – Synopsis

I have loved the adventure this smart home has taken me on. As time goes on I am always finding new and creative ways to automate and make my life easier, and it all started with a light bulb over someone’s head. The best part is starting a smart home is becoming easier and more accessible to people who may not be as tech savvy.

But with this can come some inherent questions as to what will be around in a few years. Change isn’t always good. But some companies will support a product and suddenly drop support out of the blue and then you are left with a brick of a product. So while I highly recommend moving forward with a smart home, I also definitely advise that you do some research into what will be sticking around and what is barely hanging on so that your home stays smart for the foreseeable future. I can say that Home Assistant is a solid option but it is not meant for anyone that doesn’t have a techy background of some sort.