Migrating to Home Assistant: Goals

It’s been a while since I’ve done an update on Wodehouse - largely because not much had changed in our configuration. But, we’ve recently done a bunch of upgrades (removing gas line, installing heat pump, ERV etc.) and collected a variety of new bits and bobs (such as Lifx, Bird buddy and Span).

Because, inevitably, a smart home owner ends up acquiring a hodge-podge collection of devices from various manufacturers, managing those devices and automatons play nicely with each other gets a bit cumbersome.

Because of this, we’re in the process of migrating all the brains of our operations to Home Assistant. It’s not complete, but the goals of our migration are:

  • Downsize our hardware needs (we have had an explosion of proprietary hubs!)

  • Build resilience to manufacturers moving away from open compatibility with our existing hardware or even turning off their services

  • Centralise our automation logic, for better maintainability and sanity of remembering which service runs what

  • Have accessibility to our services from the web, rather than needing half a dozen different native applications

  • Make more of our systems available offline

  • Continue to ensure automatons are progressively enhancing the house

  • Monitor and adjust our energy use more accurately and easily

So, that’s the plan. I also want to do more short posts here, because writing long reviews is arduous and honestly kind of boring. I will also be doing a site migration to 11ty, because the terrible Squarespace UI is also a major energy-sapper and I’d like to stop paying them for the privilege of torturing me.

Command and control dashboard - Google Home Hub

According to Squarespace’s analytics, one of my most popular posts on S&S has been the command and control dashboard I made about a million years ago that allowed me to casually control my lighting etc. from an always-on android tablet. I started to build a version 2, intending to make something a little more charming and polished, but then something happened.

I bought a Google Home Hub.

Google Home Hub in picture frame mode

Google Home Hub in picture frame mode

This little tablet-screen format Google Home is pretty much exactly what I had wanted in the first place.  

It’s a really attractive piece of physical and digital interface design. It sits merrily in my kitchen informing me of all sorts of things around the house.  It tells me about my calendar, it shows me who is at my front-door (via the nest doorbell) and I can pull up the backyard camera to see what the squirrels are up to instantly. I can ask it to play me YouTube videos or make phone calls. It’s really good and well thought-out and I’m seriously tempted to get a second one for my home office.

Google Home Hub showing rooms and controls

Google Home Hub showing rooms and controls

It has most of the elements I wanted from a custom dashboard - I can pull down screens to show light switches in rooms and toggle them on and off or adjust dimmers and such, and see how things are currently set.  My only real complaint is that I can’t set to be a dashboard-first i.e. show that as the default screen instead of my calendar and the weather.  I also wish I could just install this Google Home Hub software on any small tablet or phone (even if that was restricted to Android models).  I could imagine having mini dashboards in other rooms, that way.

Google Home Hub quick overview home control screen

Google Home Hub quick overview home control screen

Minor requests aside, if you’re googling around for a simple command and control dashboard for your SmartThings or similar Google Assistant-compatible smart home systems, check it out. It’s a lot less faff than installing some custom code I forked on github once, I promise.