The Smart Home Project

When I started looking at a Smart Home controller for my new house, something that struck me as being quite 'cool' (if you're a geek like me) was a 3D floorplan with interactive icons. When I settled on Home Assistant, there were several people showing implementations with simulated lights turning on and off and switching between day and night. So, I decided to create an interactive floorplan for my home, but I also wanted to simulate the amount of daylight in the image and add other elements, like motion sensors, and coloured lights, etc. Below is the Ground floor as a work in progress.  A few basic pre-requisites that you'll need (all of which have plenty of tutorials on how to set them up): Home Assistant up and running Home Assistant Community Store  (HACS) installed in Home Assistant Config Template Card frontend add-on through HACS to enable JavaScript and CSS support A means to upload image files to Home Assistant (I use the Samba Share Add-on) Some smart lightbu...

I made the decision that we would use consumer tech in our Smart Home (see this post) and the lighting system we settled on was Philips Hue. I will explain why we went for Philips Hue over other possibilities in another post at some point. However, when using a system like Philips Hue (or any of the others with their own controllers) there is a choice between performing the automation natively in the system controller, doing it within a central control system (like Home Assistant) or some form of hybrid.  In my experience, there is always a slight (but noticeable) delay if trying to perform all the automations within the central controller. I know that some of this comes from the particular platforms that are being integrated, e.g. the Philips Hue integration polls the Hue Bridge rather than accepting push notifications for motion sensors, etc. However, there is a second issue; namely, what happens if my central controller is offline for some reason? If my Home Assistant machine f...