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My interest in home automation has not died, despite the lack of blog posts. In fact, I’ve been staying busy with this hobby the entire time that I was radio silent. There’s not really a specific reason that I haven’t been blogging aside from just… life. But, here I am again and I plan to post more content soon.

Indigo Home is a great home automation platform that served our household well for many, many years. I did not stop using it due to any kind of shortcoming with the software. My core reason for switching away had more to do with Apple and the cost and limitations of its ecosystem. The MacBook Air I had it running on was getting old. It is an 11″ 2013 model, so it’s showing it’s age. In fact, it’s so far behind on macOS support that I fully removed macOS and set it up to dual-boot Windows 11 (with a TPM bypass) and the latest version of Ubuntu. Both of those operating systems continue to perform just fine on this little, old laptop. It is the same system I’m writing this post from.

Frankly, I didn’t want to spend money to purchase a new Mac only for the system to sit around doing nothing but running home automation software. They’re simply too limited, and with the removal of Boot Camp support on Apple Silicone devices, simply do not have as much value relative to the cost, in my opinion.

After leaving Indigo Home, I decided to find something that could work well on a Windows or Linux system. I tried OpenHAB, first, and while it wasn’t bad it simply didn’t meet my needs.

Enter Home Assistant from the Open Home Foundation. The name kept reappearing in forum post after forum post so I decided to give try it out. And, it turns out, I quickly feel in love with it. Over the past two years… or maybe it’s been three, I’ve tinkered with different hardware and connected gear; add new peripherals. I’ve learned much and have more to learn.

It hasn’t been smooth sailing, though that isn’t really due to Home Assistant but rather the hardware I was running it. Specifically, a friend gave me a couple of Rasbperry Pi 3A and 3B devices and over the course of a year I ran it on one of those. Over time, though, I grew frustrated with problems caused by the limited hardware and some SD card failures. I eventually had it booting from an external SSD, rather than the SD card, but random hardware issues continue to plague me. Now, I’m not saying that you can’t setup Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi (of any model) and have it work reliably. I simply grew tired of the lack of power and dealing with the random issues.

And, after a year or so, I upgraded to running it from an Intel NUC. It’s performed perfectly since then and has more power to reliably run several Home Assistant Add-Ons. I’ve had a preference for the Home Assistant operating system, Hass.io, though there are several different ways to run and manage Home Assistant.

That’s a quick catch up, but a lot happened in between that I hope to post about here.

Thanks for dropping by and I hope you come back soon!