I’ve built this with home assistant and esp32. At this point I’ve got environmental sensors in most areas where fans can ventilate and it automatically turns on fans to improve air quality. I’ve got my minisplits all controlled so I can keep temperatures good where we are. My blinds work to on the brightness of the room and time of the day. I have a single button I can press in my bedroom that ensures every light, door lock, minisplit, etc in the house is toggled appropriately for bedtime and the alarm system enabled. Likewise if I open a lock from inside when the alarm is enabled it disables the alarm system. I have mmWave sensors in hallways and rooms that illuminate them as you enter and darken them as you leave. My out door lighting turns on when I unlock a door to the backyard at night and turns off when I lock them. My hottub is connected to it all, as is my irrigation, etc. I’ve got wled lighting throughout the house including closets with no built in lighting that’s all motion / presence enabled to give working lighting that’s appropriate for the space. I’ve got decorative wled outdoor lighting attached to the house for holiday displays that enable at the right times of day and year. It’s all controllable via voice LLM as well using SoTA local models on a 4090 box in my basement.
It’s a project I’ve built over years and it’s life changingly good and gets better as home assistant, esphome, wled, and LLMs improve. I spend little time futzing with it as it all generally works, but obviously some minor expertise is required to make your own esp32 projects which are mostly just wiring off the shelf wroom d1 mini boards to a project board on the uart/gpio, whatever on something else. My minisplits, jucuzzi, garage door, blinds, etc all have active esphome projects, and provisioning is simple for a technical person. Home assistant is really simple too, and if you know jinja templating, you can make masterpieces.
No one has boiled it down to a shrink wrap product and that is sad for the mass. But for someone with moderate technical skills you can achieve anything your creativity and bravery will afford, and with AI coding assistants it’s gotten even easier. I had to replace most the switches with zwave switches, and build a bunch of boards and attach them to control ports built into devices I own like the minisplits, hottub, etc. But these are all not hard things to do - they’re just more laborious and tedious one time activities, and once you’ve set it up home assistant and esphome are pretty good about not breaking you in the future.
My washing machine also has home assistant integrations, etc, and I am careful to only buy things that do. And most things do one way or another.
It’s a project I’ve built over years and it’s life changingly good and gets better as home assistant, esphome, wled, and LLMs improve. I spend little time futzing with it as it all generally works, but obviously some minor expertise is required to make your own esp32 projects which are mostly just wiring off the shelf wroom d1 mini boards to a project board on the uart/gpio, whatever on something else. My minisplits, jucuzzi, garage door, blinds, etc all have active esphome projects, and provisioning is simple for a technical person. Home assistant is really simple too, and if you know jinja templating, you can make masterpieces.
No one has boiled it down to a shrink wrap product and that is sad for the mass. But for someone with moderate technical skills you can achieve anything your creativity and bravery will afford, and with AI coding assistants it’s gotten even easier. I had to replace most the switches with zwave switches, and build a bunch of boards and attach them to control ports built into devices I own like the minisplits, hottub, etc. But these are all not hard things to do - they’re just more laborious and tedious one time activities, and once you’ve set it up home assistant and esphome are pretty good about not breaking you in the future.
My washing machine also has home assistant integrations, etc, and I am careful to only buy things that do. And most things do one way or another.