It’s been a fun year playing with creating home automation software, but totally unproductive. I had decided to write my own Mac Mini, Swift based programming to control all my IoT devices. I did this, and then ran into lots of issues trying to interface with all my IoT devices. To make matters worse, the things I was trying to interface with kept changing (eg. new Samsung Smartthings APIs, programming language, etc). So while I think I came up with a pretty powerful code base for automating my home, I hadn’t actually automated anything in the past year. So I’m going to call that a fun learning experience, but I need to change direction if I actually want to automate my RV home.
Home Assistant v0.91
I experimented with using Home Assistant. For me, it actually made things much more complicated. There are no off-the-shelf solutions for automating the 12v lighting system of an RV. So I have to create my own IoT solutions, and integrating that into another system like Home Assistant just adds another layer of complexity.
Rolling My Own
So having experimented with using Home Assistant, SmartThings, and Homekit, I eventually ended up using the Alexa skills I wrote awhile back, along with Patriot custom Photon coding.
I updated this post after-the-fact to avoid confusing new readers that stumble upon this blog. I don’t use Home Assistant and don’t want folks looking for Home Assistant help/info here.