In early 2017, I started playing with home automation. At the time, (and still to this day), a major goal has been to create an automation environment that did not need any sort of Internet connectivity to work, and was based on something that appeared to have a decent-sized community behind it hopefully leading to long-term support of the solution. At the time, this led me to selecting two open-source projects to install and learn how to configure: OpenHAB and Home Assistant (HA). After some time, I decided that OpenHAB felt more intuitive to me and did what I wanted, so I went with that product. Both had and still have great support, so that was not a concern with either.
I have not had any major issues with OpenHAB over the years, and, (even if some of the solutions seemed a little “kludgy”), I was able to implement what I wanted. However, I had occasional hiccups with the system losing control of certain devices, and the web / mobile interfaces started to show their age. While people have created modern-looking dashboards in OpenHAB, those took web design skills that I did not have nor wanted to learn. I also like to keep things as “out-of-the-box” as possible to make maintenance as well as rebuilding the entire system from scratch easier. Plus, when some of my “smart” light switches and power outlets stopped working, and I bought a new water sensor for under the kitchen sink after the garbage disposal rusted through flooding the area without me noticing for a while, some of the new equipment I bought were not yet supported by OpenHAB. Therefore, in late 2024, I decided to revisit HA.
After a couple of months playing around with HA on a virtual machine, but switching back to OpenHAB as the main automation controller when done, I finally decided in early 2025 that I was ready to make the switch to using HA full-time. It supported all of my devices including the couple of things that OpenHAB did not yet support, (as well as some new ones that I had no idea could be added to my automation configuration). It also had a more modern-looking adaptive interface by default. While I have no doubt that if I mentioned the unsupported devices in the OpenHAB forums, and took some time to find and use code that others wrote for the user interface options, I could address my issues with OpenHAB. But unlike when I first worked with HA, this time it clicked with me a lot more and was easier to build something that I liked than with OpenHAB. While I prefer function over form, having both is a definite positive in my view.
At this point, I have all the main functionality implemented in HA that I had in OpenHAB barring a few things on which I am still working, namely:
- Being able to tell my voice assistant to “open / close the garage door” instead of “turn off / on the garage door”. (The latter is how I started with OpenHAB, but over time it gained features to allow the voice assistant to recognize the garage door as a “door” that could be opened or closed.)
- Being able to control my thermostat with voice commands e.g. “turn up / down the temperature”, “set the heating temperature to X degrees”, etc. Again, this was not possible with OpenHAB given my equipment until around 2020.
- Having a “vacation mode” that did various things including turning lights on and off based on how they were used a month ago, (presumably when someone was living in the house). This makes the interior lighting look more natural than static “turn this light on or off at a certain time every day” type rules. (Of course, the pattern would start to repeat after a month if I was away from the house for longer than that.)
I am pretty confident that I can address these gaps. For sure the first two could be solved by signing up for the HA “cloud” subscription. While I am fine with supporting the HA project by paying for their service, I really want to sever my use of Amazon Echo devices for voice control and bring everything including voice control fully in-house. Both OpenHAB and HA have ways to do that with pros and cons on both sides. However, the fact that HA supported more things in my house, (including adding some integrations with things like the solar and battery backup systems), and let me make modern interfaces on tablets and phones without having to know web design, finally drove me to make the switch. Maybe in another eight years I’ll switch again back to OpenHAB or something else, but at least for 2025, HA is now what I am using as my core home automation software.