I don’t get as much into automating for the sake of automating. Personally, I prefer technology that makes my life easier. Anything “smart” in our house has to be manually overrideable.
That said, one thing I’m working on automating is the HVAC. Eventually I’ll have the Central heat, central humidifier, and whole house fan controls all integrated with HA. My goal is to maximize both comfort and energy efficiency. Being able to maintain the comfort level by automatically switching between A/C or fresh air (via the whole house fan) would be pretty cool (figuratively and literally).
It might be easier to have the electrician install normal switches at first. That will give you time to figure out which ones you want to be smart, which ones you want on dimmers, etc.
Sensors will all be outside the wall, although you should make sure the thermostat wire has enough for a C wire.
I don’t know about smart outlets – I don’t think they’re very common. Most smart outlets are designed to plug in to normal dumb outlets.
If there’s a good spot on the ceiling, I’d have them run some ethernet cable to a box. You can leave it covered, but it’ll be there in case you decide to mount a WiFi AP there.
I love the automation screen updates. Makes it all a bit less “techie”. I’ve been assisting my non-technical sister with setting up her own instance on a Pi. This is going to make things much easier for to understand.
I simply use an USB conference speaker/microphone plus the Assist Microphone add-on. (in my case this one from Microsoft, it works great with my RasPi.)
I actually prefer that over the Echo or other embedded devices, as it is able to pick up my voice from further away and the output audio quality is much better. (My use case is something similar to commercial proprietary systems like from Amazon/Google.)
The M5Stack Echo I use on my night stand with push to talk for quick actions, for that it is enough.
If it needs to be battery powered, the Eufy T8210C is pretty good and records to a local base station. The battery life is fine, but I would absolutely prefer to have a hardwired one if I could.
I have an amcrest one and it works great with frigate over RTSP. I also blocked it’s internet access and firewalled it on my local network so it can’t phone home.
Sounds like it’s not actually running. Restart the hass server and check the logs, which is the only place you’ll see if a dependency is preventing it from starting.
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