Home Thermostat

Buffy · January 12, 2021, 5:20pm

You can take a look at @wendell’s thread here, too:

HA01 The Nerd's Ultimate Guide to Reasonable Home Automation (WIP -- early draft -- thoughts welcome!) Wikis & How-to Guides

*Note the following writeup is at best a draft status. I would love to hear from those in the community that have done, or are doing, this. At some future date I want to turn this into a video, but I am using this writeup to organize my thoughts. Much to my surprise, there is a lot of good documentation out there but not a lot of the dots are connected for new-comers. Worse yet I see a lot of ‘not invented here’ that makes accomplishing something reasonable unnecessarily difficult because other guide authors shy away from ready-made commercial solutions e.g. for sensors or outlet control. Assume I know nothing. Educate me. Let me know what you have first hand experience with, and what works for you. * Getting Started – Goals I am aware of commercial systems and I have direct (computer janitor level) experience with many of them including OnQ, Vivint, Wink and several others. In my view these systems are much more of a grift than something actually usable. A commercial system that does what we want does not exist. An open source single-vendor system does not exist for home automation. It is easy to get caught up in the novelty “gee-whiz” aspect of that. If you know me through my other work, you might be thinking “oh no” but in reality I’m pretty practical. The philosophy we’re after here is the best technology gets out of the way. The technology on star trek: tng wasn’t cool because it was the over the top and in your face (looking at you, st: discovery season 3) it was cool because it was really good at reading your intent and getting out of the way. Do you really need a tiny LCD screen everywhere you currently have a light switch? For me, if you want to replace all my light switches, you’re going to need to meet my expectations of something just as functional and reliable as a spring and some bits of metal while also offering me a new compelling feature that I actually want. If you want the gimmicky stuff, this is not the guide for you. What do I actually …