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Cake day: October 27th, 2023

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  • I didn’t say pick a brand. I said pick a technology. Some technologies are tied inexplicably to brands but not all. Lightning belongs to Apple. But USB and wifi are multi-vendor technologies. Can you name the brand of USB? no, you buy Logitech and Microsoft and DLink and dozens more brands.

    There are multivendor technologies in home automation. Z-Wave, Zigbee and MQTT/Tasmota are established, to various levels. Matter is a theoretically multivendor tech that is still nascent in the market.


  • go read the wiki ( http://reddit.com/r/HomeAutomation/wiki/index ) to learn about the basic technologies. Do some browsing to see what’s for sale in your market. Pick one tech to be your foundational system (I recommend Z-Wave or Zigbee) that can provide for >80% of your needs. Figure out what your likely runner up is that covers 10-15%, and expect maybe 5% weird gizmos.

    Decide if “suitable for use” is OK or if you need “best in class”. Even in tech, “best in class” winds up with prima donnas that dont play nice. You will find often a company does one thing incredibly well and is a total nightmare to integrate outside their tiny walled garden. Linking multiple walled gardens together becomes a constant pain to keep active. It is often less stressful and more successful to choose “B” products that play nicely over requiring everything be “A+”.

    Now pick a controller than covers your two technologies and top weirdos. You want a primarily local system so look at Homeseer, Hubitat, Homey, Zooz, Fibaro, HomeAssistant, OpenHab and ISY. Decide if you want a pre-built appliance or DIY. Be aware most appliances aren’t great at supporting more than 2 or 3 cameras as video needs a lot of bandwidth and storage. If you plan on multiple cameras you may need something PC based