Add features but don´t take away basic opperation Using connected smart bulbs means the old and simple switch on the wall is useless. With smart bulbs you need an constant power for it to function corectly. Turning on and off a light using a wall switch is so common that it is hard to unlearn. You could use a sticky note over the switch offcourse to prevent people from using the switch. Another way is to hardwire the bulb(s) so that no matter the state of the switch the bulb(s) are connected. This leaves you with an useless switch on the wall but at least your automated lights will keep on working. You can remove the switch entirely if you like but that can be more work than it’s worth. And it can be usefull to be able to use a fysical switch in case of an automation not working for what ever reason.

Improve the Family Accaptance Factor For a while I use the webinterface of to interact with Home-Assistant via a webbrowser on my PC and the Home-Assistant app on my phone. This works great but using a PC to view the current temperature in my livingroom is not the most convenient way. Now days most houses in the Netherlands have a thermostat in the livingroom to view the temperature. The apartment I rent doesn’t have a wallmounted thermostat control panel. Because I did have an temperature sensor connected to an Wemos d1 with ESPHome connected Home-Assistant could measure and show the temperature on it’s dashboard. I had an old 7inch tablet lying arround wich was way to slow to be usable for anything else than showing a webpage.

For a couple of years the Raspberry Pi I running OSMC was housed in an old settopbox I bought at a secondhand shop in my town. There was no power brick with it which droped the price a lot. There was no airflow at all which resulted in an system that got a bit warm. So started looking for a beter case but never found a appealing replacement that also had a FAF (Family Approval Factor). Until a couple of months ago while browsing Thingiverse.com for 3 Printable cases and among the standaard box there was a case based on the Mac Pro I liked the looks of it. And do have an 3d printer so way not. I started printing and after a couple of long prints talking some 24+ hours of printing I had the parts ready.

For a while I have had an DIY Ambilight behind the TV the LEDs where of the so called pixel LEDs consisting of 50 individual controlleble RGB LEDs.

Start cheap build from there After my first steps in Home Automation I soon got a couple of cheap lightbulbs from Milight that where controllable by Home Assistant. At that time I didn’t know about a serious drawback, which is the reason I do not recommend them. There is no feedback from the bulbs to the controller. Which means that the controller has no idea about the real state of the bulbs. For instance they are controllable with an remote when you use the remote to turn a bulb on Home Assistance still think that bulb is off.

I am a strong believer in offline availabilty of media even today where it seems everybody is using streamingservices like Spotify and Netflix I like my media to reside on my own server. An internet outage is a rear thing in the Netherlands but there is always a chance. That is one reason to keep my media offline. Another is that the media I buy in hardcopy (CD, DVD, BlueRay) is really in my possesion. Especially for video there are so many different services almost everry production company has his own streaming service.