The Great Home Assistant Monster
The Premise
Most smart home projects have a finish line. This one doesn't.
Home Assistant is the backbone of my smart home — a self-hosted, locally-run home automation platform that quietly manages the friction of daily life. It's not about flashy voice commands or party tricks. The philosophy here is unobtrusive intelligence: the home should ease the burden of repetitive, forgettable tasks without demanding your attention to do it.
When it works right, you don't notice it. The lights just behave. The temperature is already where you want it. You’re notified when the garage is left open. That's the goal.
Design Philosophy
My home setup is intentionally built around a few core principles:
Local-first. Frigate runs on-device. Zigbee2MQTT runs on-device. ESPHome devices talk directly to Home Assistant. Nothing essential routes through a third-party cloud — no Alexa, no Google, no internet dependency for core functions. This means no outages when a vendor changes their API, shuts down a service, or decides your device is "end of life."
State-driven, not schedule-driven. Most automations react to state (is someone home? is someone sleeping? is the humidity high?) rather than fixed times. This makes the system adapt naturally to irregular schedules rather than forcing a routine.
Boolean anchors. Input booleans act as system-wide state flags. Many automations check these first. Flipping one boolean can reshape the behavior of a dozen automations simultaneously.
Sensors do the work. mmWave sensors, contact sensors, smart plug energy monitoring, and on-prem camera AI replace manual triggers. The more the system can observe, the less you have to tell it.
Gradual expansion. Marathon and Power Hour Projects feed this perpetual project. Each one adds capability that cascades into new automations and refined behavior. There's always a next thing.
Much more to come…