Hope this helped clear up any confusion on what I use! Another smart home tour coming soon, so make sure you're subscribed 👏

Been a long time watcher since you were into smartthings & other stuff. I like that, whoever is into smart homes, we all come to the same conclusion that HA is amazing! I took pretty much the same path as you except our house is a big G home + Home Assistant in the backend. Hopefully, as you subtly mentionned, google won't kill their smarthome stuff out of the blue like they do with so many of their products. Great video as always!

Thanks for making and sharing this great video. I love the humor you put in especially the “Blink of an eye” joke at the end. 👏👏👏👍👍👍😊

If you just go with Crestron and a reputable dealer, who understands your wants and needs, you’ll have the best smart home ever. Everything that you show on your channel, I’m doing with one system. Dashboards, sensors, voice, activation, shades, and lighting control,it’s all there.

Google project management is poor. They can back out automation any day. Like they did with a tons of projects that are dead

Josh AI, no question.. Point blank PERIOD. Nothing comes remotely close!

I’m all in then! Home Assistant, Home Assistant. Home Assistant!

Haha the final clip reminded me of the movie Click.

Great. I was debating this too. I wanna leave Alexa too.

You will hear an echo when I through all that Amazon crap out, seriously

Timely video. Does anyone have a recommendation when starting do a smart home w/o prior knowledge? I've looked at lights but not sure if the light switch, lights or both are needed.

I use HS4 which you didn't mention but it's very powerful and very simple to use. You should check it out.

first

Great video Reed. I have noticed how alexa has gotten worse and will start switching out my echo's for homepods. As mentioned below – would love to see deeper dive into how you setup all of this. Hopefully a video for Reed's Smart Home. Happy Holidays!

I went with home assistant long ago.I did connect my nest max 10s to home assistant for voice control though. Problem is apple being apple they are petty and won't release homekit to android. I have no use for apple anything really. I don't like their phones, don't need their tv's, and frankly do not like their operating system. Personal preference but I am a tinkerer type person and tend to upgrade and change my machines. Even Ipad I can't seem to find a use for for their cost. I mean I found one program that runs really well on it but I am not going to shell out that kind of capital for a machine to run a program that costs 250 subscription a year. If they would release homekit on android I may try a homepod for homekit but that's about what they would get out of me. Home assistant has been fun to learn. I haven't really run into too many problems with it other than a few updates broke a few things. I like it enough I got rid of connecting google the hard way and just pay the yearly subscription to help fund the development. I can't program so that's about all I can do to contribute. Not much but its something. Just 2 automations I can't seem to get working. I have one working well enough. The other I just can't seem to figure out how to make it work. That's the fun of it though. If I could get my aqura cubes working that would be a plus too lol. That's another issue for when I have the time to mess with them. No loss with amazon. I made the mistake of buying the show 8. Couldn't get anything to connect to it and all it was good for was watching adds. Still sitting unplugged.

HA and Amazon for me but just waiting for some overpaid executive to decide they can monetize every Alexa feature and charge me for previously free routines. The "year of voice" was a good start for HA devs but waiting for some turnkey devices that will take it to the next level and allow me to cut out Amazon and go fully local.

The finish was cute 🥰. And same decision for me: HomeKit plus Home Assistent. Just installed for playing on a Pi4 but will go a bit bigger low-wattage NUC for it once we get our house

Every time home assistant gains more functionality, more I worried about the project take the closed source path, moving the core team to release mayor features for a hypothetically closed source version at nabu casa, and only some features for the open source version of HA, like many open source projects in the past (ask redhat).

Interesting. I started with a Lutron hub for shades and lighting, then added my Habitat Elevation hub, since it can integrate Alexa and Lutron with Z-wave, Zigbee and a number of WIFi smart devices. I don't use Alexa or Lutron for any automations anymore. Yes, they're much, much simpler but I find automating with multiple systems just serves to complicate things much worse than programming via the Hubitat, which really isn't all that bad.

as long as NOTHING , NOT ONE COMPONENT, has anything at all to do with the Anker/Eufy and their illegal storage system…aaannd so on…

One thing you will need to consider if they sort it out is the Sonoff iHost. Once you include a power supply, case and Zigbee/matter dongle it’s only a bit more that Home Assistant even if you don’t buy the 8GB RP4 (ps. 8? WTF). I think the intention is to be 75% as functional as Home Assistant but 5% as much hassle, but currently it’s also 75% as much hassle. Can run Node Red, so all you automations would work. Plus unlike Home Assistant it’s going to be both a matter Hub and Bridge, rather than just a hub. That means my Zigbee plugs etc. appear on matter. Also has homebridge so that is a tie. But till January it is only a matter bridge and the onboarding process is rubbish. There’s so much it can do but only when you’ve had it ages do you realise. You’d be fine because you can do home assistant, but I think they’re trying to sell it to people who want a local solution but also want a life, sadly it fails currently, but by your next video like this it’ll need to be considered.

Ha is not so friendly when you know zero about coding and certain things doesn't work as intended