Home Assistant

With Google's introduction of Gemini for Home, they show off a sleek 3D-knit Google Home speaker that lets you talk to your house like a friend, handling multi-step requests like "dim the kitchen lights, play some relaxing music, and set a timer." Wait, change that timer to 20 minutes." It handles mid-sentence corrections flawlessly. It's essentially Google's smartest smart home companion yet. However, Google has a history of a cloud graveyard, and they consistently abandon hardware ecosystems time and time again, from Nest Secure to Dropcam to Works with Nest to Revolve. Now they want you to

As spotted by Hackster.io, the Zigbee Touch Keypad gives you full control. There's no need to tie the keypad to a third-party cloud, and it's not bound to any particular service, either. All you need to do is build a system that can accept Zigbee signals, and you're good to go. Here's how the creator describes the origins of their project: I wanted a door keypad that actually looked good on the wall — slim, wireless, no visible screws, no cloud dependency. Something I could mount next to the front door, punch in a code, and have Home Assistant react instantly. Off-the-shelf Zigbee keypads exis

Bare metal sounds like the best option for anything, really. You wouldn't run your home desktop PC through emulation, would you? The same goes for the smart home with Home Assistant. There's an OS package that runs on just about any hardware that meets the system requirements, and you'll have no trouble hooking up all your smart home devices and other integrations. It all just works. There's no worrying about keeping an underlying OS updated or other software that needs to run in between layers. It's the hardware, Home Assistant OS, and the familiar web UI. For many users of the platform, this