40
votes
How do you like your smart home setup?
Just interested in how people's smart homes are set up and how they enjoy things or what they may dislike/wish was changed.
Alexa? HomeKit? Google? A mix? Other?
Glitches?
Any complex or otherwise unique use cases you've set up?
I was somewhat skeptical of smart home up until recently. I still prefer to call it home automation. What really changed my mind was Home Assistant. Open source and local really made me consider it and the integrations it provides out of the box, combined with the work of the community has really made it a hit for me.
I run it as a virtual machine along with a companion Ubuntu Server virtual machine for some heavy weight tasks like object detection. It all sits behind a reverse-proxy in a segmented network. Home Assistant allows you to do a lot with a small amount of technical ability but if you’re more knowledgeable or willing to learn you can really do just about anything.
I also like using protocols like Zigbee, which means I can buy off-the-shelf “hub required” sensors and things for cheap, without them ever talking to the internet. It’s really nice.
ESPHome has also been a fun project to tinker around with and I’ve soldered together some temperature sensors as well as little devices to control my mini-splits with. The parts to build these types of devices can be had for very cheap from China.
If you like tinkering I really can’t recommend it enough. I’ve found it to be a near-perfect balance of hobby project and stable system.
Very interesting. That horror story that was top of the front page yesterday about someone getting locked out of their Alexa devices because an Amazon driver falsely claimed they said something racist during a delivery had me really thinking about ways to keep these systems while being detached from the companies that could will access away. Will def bookmark this and look into these.
Yeah, I also love home assistant. It takes some setup — definitely not as plug and play as the more mainstream options — but if you're a bit computer savvy it's great. It's really really great if you're comfortable with some light programming. I've wound up writing my own plugins for a few little things, and it's a pretty easy and convenient platform to build stuff on.
Honestly it's probably gonna self-select for people who are at least a little technical — if you're someone who's creeped out by Alexas or whatever, it's probably a good choice.
Sounds like we've got similar setups and opinions on it. Been playing with ESPHome recently too, as overkill as it sounds having some moisture sensors in my plants really helps remind me to water them.
Been looking at trying to replace my alexa devices with Mycroft/ to have non-cloud voice control. All I use them for is running some routines or giving me news updates, and I'd really like to get away from cloud (aka someone else's computer) for those simple things.
Thanks for the idea. I might actually look into that when I've got some spare time. Until now I have resisted any out-of-the-box smart home solutions offered by big tech companies mostly due to privacy concerns, but that's actually something I might get behind.
I'm very happy with mine. It's built around Hubitat as the core. I found Hubitat to be a good balance of power while not needing a ton of tweaking with the internals (no shade to Home Assistant, but it's too manual for me).
I use primarily ZWave devices.
Light switches are Inovelli. They are fine dimmers, and throughout the house they serve special functions:
Lamps use ZWave bulbs, also from Inovelli. They do RGBW as well as CT.
Security is handled by Schlage ZWave locks on each exit door, a Reolink doorbell (recording to a Synology, which also does person detection), and an Envisalink, which is a board that interfaces with Honeywell and DSC alarm systems. I don't have an alarm subscription-- the alarm arms and disarms itself based on presence and is also wired into smoke detectors. The Envisalink can email and text me if the alarm trips, and can automatically disarm the alarm when a lock is unlocked with a code. The police in my city would never come anyways if an alarm company called them...
The garage door is hooked up to a MyQ bridge so I can open and close it, but most importantly check if it was left open (this has saved us so many times from having to drive back home).
I have various sensors-- water sensors near things like the washing machine; contact sensors on the kids' bedroom doors; a contact sensor on the mailbox, and one on the garage freezer (which has saved us from losing food several times when it's been left cracked-open). These are all ZWave and run on batteries.
The blinds in the living room are on RTS motors from Bali Blinds, which I connected to a ZWave bridge called a ZRTSII. They can automatically open and close based on sunrise and sunset or when the temperature outside reaches a threshold. I want to add some lux sensors so they can respond to light rather than just sunrise since it's cloudy many days.
I have Mitsubishi heat pumps, which normally connect to a system called Kumo Cloud, for which Mitsubishi wants to charge you $200 per unit (we have one in each bedroom). Instead I wired an $4 ESP32 into each heat pump, which runs an Arduino program that connects to a driver I wrote for Hubitat and allows the heat pumps to be controlled from Hubitat.
The vacuums are Roborocks and run on a schedule, but can also be summoned to a room to clean up a mess.
The TV is connected to Hubitat via a websocket driver, so I can control the lights, switch to PLEX, and start a show without touching a remote.
The primary interface that most people in the home use to manually interact with things is Google Home, either via the phone app, or via Google Home Minis sprinkled throughout the house.
I try to avoid any "magic". All light switches work normally; everything can operate without Internet. You can control the AC and the blinds with their remotes. The smart-home bits only augment functionality, adding scheduling, presence detection, and phone control.
My cousin is exceedingly proud of his "smart home" which is mostly just Hue bulbs, and all of his light switches are taped over so that no one touches them-- you have to talk to Siri to turn on any lights. In my opinion that is not how smart homes should work ;)
How are you liking your Inovellis? I ordered 30 or so Blues but it took so long to get them (and then even longer to get the replacements for the bad batch) that I became used to just having Hue bulbs on dumb switches and gave up/returned the Inovellis. A lot of that was just burnout preventing me from starting the project of installing the Inovellis and not wanting to drop a small fortune having someone else install them, especially if something went wrong before they worked out the kinks.
Super promising stuff from them though, maybe I'll give it another try someday.
I installed mine on my own, but they definitely have not gotten cheaper... I have the OG reds from 2019 that were much more reasonably-priced. They've been rock-solid though, and I like that I can tweak the driver myself. Still an enthusiast product, but the best switches I've used.
We have can lighting and I wasn't going to put $5,000 of Hue bulbs in, so switches were the way for me. Lamps do have RGBW bulbs though.
Yeah I got somewhat lucky that the former owners of my house left their Hue system behind, otherwise I'd have been more willing to put in the effort with the Inovelli switches. I still think that switch-based control is the best method, and I'm really shocked it has taken until 2023 to see some decent options come to market. I don't want to flood my home with 2.4 GHz wifi devices that rely on some proprietary app.
I have an LG running WebOS, which has a fairly well-documented Websocket control API! Lots of libraries to control it.
I have quite a large smart home set up.
It’s based around the open source software Home Assistant. I run HAOS on an Intel NUC along with Coral USB for my Frigate installation.
I try to stick to using locally run devices as much as possible to avoid any issue with control if my internet goes down. I would say I’ve managed to get around 85% of my devices running locally with the remaining 15% being things are not critical to my homes operation (Amazon Echos, Robot Vacuum).
For me a smart home is not truly smart until it can react to situations based on my needs. This means more than simply a remote control home but a home that intelligently reacts in the correct way as required. As an example Home Assistant is in control of my solar PV and battery install. It will decide whether the battery needs charging or discharging overnight based on the day ahead solar output, battery level and my usage. Perhaps it’s going to be overcast all day. Home Assistant will look at my estimated days usages and charge the battery to the appropriate level while also leaving space to capture any solar that may be spare. Perhaps tomorrow is going to be very sunny and I already have a full battery towards the end of the day. In that case Home Assistant will discharge the battery into my EV whilst also leaving enough juice to get me though until the sun comes up the next day, and all manor of variations in between the two I just described. HA is also in charge of starting my appliances based on slate output too so I am always washing my clothes and cleaning my dishes on solar power.
That’s not to mention automated blinds, curtains, lights, locks, vacuums and heating.
All of the above have automations and HA will make decisions on what needs to be switched on, opened or closed, heated or cooled based on information it gathers from sensors around my home.
To me that’s what a smart home is. One that can provide additional savings and convenience to me and my family and be way more than just ‘turn lights on with Alexa’.
Edited to correct some typos and add additional information.
Recently moved to a home where the previous owner has a pretty comprehensive "smart" home setup and I absolutely hate it.
From day one we couldn't set the thermostat until the home network was online. The Ring alarm system had the previous owners account still associated and would trip in the middle of the night for seemingly no reason. The sprinkler system wont start until we agree to a subscription renewal with the smart sprinkler system.
I'm far from a technical luddite but aside from a few things (maybe lights/door locks) I'll try and keep my house as dumb as possible.
Sheesh, that is rough. A subscription for your sprinkler?? Why in the world would one even do that?
And I didn't even consider that about the thermostat. There's no offline component at all for something that's directly connected? Or is there no direct connection?
This does get me thinking about my father's new home. He recently replaced the thermostat with a Nest one and I'm hoping that isn't a turnoff for whoever occupies that place next.
The thermostat does not directly connect to the HVAC. The previous owner left a lot of their smart devices/hubs but took their Unify APs with them. Its a rather large house and multiple access points are required to cover it effectively.
I was eventually able to find a WebUI to set the temperature in my home after connecting directly to the switch in the basement over ethernet...
subscription sprinklers! that's terrible!
Back when my ex moved out during early COVID, I got myself a Google Home setup. I wish I could say why. Loneliness, dunno. Probably. I'd like to say the reason was that I am often busy with both hands being full, say when baking, and I can then still change lights and stuff.
That gives me a good first point what I love about it: I would have never thought I'd need a handsfree light/device control, but it's incredibly useful now that I have it. Vacuum robot annoys me? Just yell over that it ought to stop. Music too loud? Have Google turn it down while continuing to code.
By now I have 4 small Home speakers, and a Chromecast, and one big speaker (in the bedroom, for better sound when making it to do rain sounds or so for falling asleep). Really enjoying it.
It does have its quirks though. Especially in the past ~1 year, it feels like Google has gotten worse at understanding dialects (I'm a German, but I speak to Google in English which avoids accidentally triggering it when friends are over and we're chatting), which sometimes leads to weird issues. Just yesterday I finally renamed my group from "all nests" to "all speakers" because the former made it misunderstand "play the latest news on all nests" as "play the latest news on alnes" (a fishing village, as I have learned). Pretty consistently, too. Really weird, because this used to not be a problem. And it developed multiple small quirks like that.
I should however say that for as much as that makes it sound unusable, this is a fairly minor problem, and overall this setup has helped me a ton over the past 3 years I got it. One thing I recently did now that I'm permanently in home office mode is that I added an automated announcing routine telling me no matter where I am in the home that work day is starting, or that it's 5 minutes to the status meeting and I should go grab a coffee, or remind me that I ought to raise the table again and work some more while standing. Or look out the window to relax my eyes. It actually helps! A lot!
I might dabble into Home Assistant, see whether it works better with something like that but that's a solid bit of hardware I'd need to add to the setup.
We use Google, Hue, Kasa, and Ecobee.
Hue is a bit clunky, but fine.
Kasa is bulletproof other than their mediocre dimmer switch hardware.
Ecobee is fine, with a few idiotic idiosyncrasies.
Google has been getting worse and worse. Home Hub displays randomly ignore content blocks, and support is useless. The latest issue is telling it to play a common song — with an instruction that is confirmed to have been heard correctly — only to get back a generic "I couldn't find that, but here are some search results" answer. There is no rhyme or reason to it.
I am so glad I am not the only one. I have actually begun to dial back a lot of the home automation stuff I had set up a year ago. I had an instance where I was trying to turn on a light in our living room. I did the "Hey Google, turn on the living room lights." command. Nothing. Said it again. Nothing. Again. Nothing. Finally my wife just got up and turned the light on and looked at me super annoyed and said "Anything else you need me to do for Google while I am up?" That was kinda the point I realized that some of this stuff is completely unnecessary for me. Now all I really have are the few mini speakers and my hub and then I can turn one light on and off. I have two smart plugs that I use to remotely charge my drone batteries. Other than that everything is more or less gone.
The infuriating part for me is that it's all happening within native Google applications. It's not like we use a lot of third party integrations, but they work more reliably than Google's own apps. The only one that never worked properly was Ring. And I guess Spotify had issues, but we moved back to YTM which is where most of the new problems are.
And support, even with a One account, is absolutely useless. I went through their troubleshooting steps before finally giving up at "Well, try creating a brand new Google account" after problems persisted across all of our family's accounts.
Sounds like my decision to slowly shrink the footprint of Google in my home was the right one. Next I just need to ditch Google Photos in favor of something like OneDrive with Microsoft.
Now that Google Photos has finally added the ability to archive multi-selected photos I can't think of many compliments there, actually.
Their editor needs the ability to adjust pen diameter and their portrait effect is godawful compared to Samsung's, but it's a damn good app these days.
I quite like Hue. Mostly the only thing I want to automate is lighting (both on/off and temperature) and it does all that without an Internet connection 👍🏻
But I’ve also discovered that it’s very easy to call the Hue API with Python and get some custom logic going, which is great for powering on my subwoofer from the HTPC.
My setup isn't complex not revolutionary. But I just wanted to chime in and say how much I love Hur and Homekit.
Adding new devices is easy. Controlling it all from Homekit is easy. For me it's been fantastic! I love having schedules set up for all the lamps. I literally haven't thought about turning on or off lamps for years now. It happens occasionally but the schedule is so solid that I don't have to do much besides telling Siri goodnight and everything shuts off (if it isn't already).
I'm not sure how many other smart devices I would get. I might consider an oven, but more? I don't know.
As low key as possible. I've tried various smart home setups but invariably everyone wants you locked into an ecosystem, which is not a great place to be in. At the very least the setup should be within my own control which rules out the big three. HomeAssistant is pretty decent with its integrations.
I don't know if it counts as smart home, at least I consider it to be, PiHole is an important fixture, with a little display screen just for fun. And an eink dashboard with weather and calendar.
Would you mind giving a rundown of your eink dashboard? Hardware/Software/Setup? It’s been something I’ve been thinking about doing for a while now, but haven’t made up my mind how to do it.
Apologies for late reply. I've basically been using this project: https://github.com/mendhak/waveshare-epaper-display it also includes the shopping list, so it's a Raspberry Pi (any really), picture frame, and a Waveshare 7.5" screen.
I don't, not much anyways. All I have so far is a couple smart bulbs and plugs. I have several more not in use now, for the holiday lights. I'm using Google Home with various no-name vendor bulbs and Wemo plugs. I hardly ever use voice controls and I don't have any google smart speakers. Been waiting...and waiting...for Matter stuff to flood the market, but that doesn't appear to be happening? More of a trickle I think, but I have not paid very close attention.
Glitch wise, it's always the Google Home app that doesn't respond reliably. One minute it's fine, bulb turns on instantly... then ten seconds later I go to change that same bulb's brightness and nothing happens.
I do use Google Action Blocks app to set up weaker versions of Apple Shortcuts. A page on my phone is filled with Action Blocks that silently execute an Assistant command, so like "set the bathroom light to candlelight color and 1% brightness" has an icon I can tap to put a bulb into "nightlight mode".
It's clunky but it's working well enough to keep it going. I wish for better though, hopefully from Matter compatible stuff eventually.
I hear ya on Google glitches. I have speakers and whether it's the app or commands by voice, more and more it just won't get what to do sometimes. The Wear OS Home app also just won't let me turn off lights now lol
"It's clunky but it's working well enough" is honestly the best way to describe this.
Also I was under the impression Matter had kinda come and is integrated with these apps. But I guess the problem is those that make these accessories are just continuing to make devices form fit a specific platform (I see many made exclusively for HomeKit and Alexa, leaving Google out with no mention of Matter). Apple, Amazon, and Google gotta get on these partners to make Matter a priority.
I have a mixture of stuff. I initially started with a couple WeMo Smart Plugs. I've since replaced those with TP-Link Mini Smart Plugs and bought more of them. All of my lamps are connected to the smart plugs. Then I got a free Google Nest Home Mini and that was a game changer, since I could just talk and things turn on/off. I did not thing I'd like that feature as much as I do. I purchased another for my guest bedroom, along a 7" Google Hub for my living room/work desk area. Power company sent me some Tuyo color-changing LED WiFi bulbs for free which are kinda cool. I use those in my bedroom. Power company also had a program to get a free/low-cost Smart Thermostat, so I got an Ecobee 3. I live in an apartment so I just installed it myself. I love having a programmable thermostat that I can control from anywhere.
I also have a TP-Link indoor camera in my living room. I live alone (well, with a cat), so it makes me feel better to have. I initially wanted an NVR-style camera system (Like one of those Ubiquiti Unifi ones), but living in an apartment, I feel like it'd just be a hassle with cabling. Plus, I'd need to upgrade some of my Unifi stuff. More trouble and expense then it was worth for a single camera. And most other NVR cameras and systems are just god awful. I don't get why NVR software from like Northern or HikVision are so terrible.
While I have all the individual apps and use those for the more detailed setup and scheduling, I do use Google Home app for just day-to-day controls, especially of the plugs and lights.
A friend told me about Home Assistant, and I see several people here talking about it. Might have to look into this some more!
I halfway like mine, and halfway don't. My smart home is somewhat split between a local openHAB setup which I'm very happy with, but then the other half still runs on Alexa devices. My problem so far is that I haven't found a great replacement for Alexa to get voice commands into my devices. I tried Rhasspy in a server/satellite setup but even after some extensive work I just wasn't able to get it to respond to wake words and parse commands reliably enough.
I did find that Shelly devices make for a good transition between the two systems, though, giving me some time to find alternatives and work out the issues. They work well with openHAB but can also be controlled via Alexa. At some point here I'll get more time to take another crack at bringing it all fully local. The eventual goal is zero cloud interaction whatsoever.
I did try Home Assistant as well, but I just couldn't get over that unless I dove into YAML files there was no way to group devices to respond to the same command. Most of my overhead lights are composed of more than one smart bulb. The fact I couldn't just link multiple bulbs into a single controllable light source in the default interface really put me off from it. Maybe that's changed by now?
Edit: Something I should note: If you're looking at smart thermostats, I'm extremely happy with my Venstar one. It's one of the few smart thermostats I found that wasn't rent-seeking or bound to a cloud service in any way. You can set it up for cloud control if you want, but you can also leave that feature disabled entirely and just use a local API, and it plays very nicely with openHAB.
this is getting better. If you do zigbee lighting directly through ZHA you can set those groups up through the GUI. You can even link switches to the light groups in the zigbee network such that the commands don't have to go through HA for it to work. For lights through a hue bridge you have two options:
the HA developer group has been slowly migrating all of the manual YAML configuration stuff into GUI configurations instead, but that work is still ongoing. It's been getting consistently better and they have a reliable release cadence but it's still far from perfect too. It might be worth trying it out again though if it's been a while
My setup is what I'd call "a good start" - the base is Home Assistant, running on a VM on a server in the closet. We've got most of the lights on Z-wave switches from Inovelli - dimmers where we need them, including multiple dimmers for the same lights. The garage door is hooked up with OpenGarage - that was a big one, to be able to geofence it off my phone.
I want to take another crack at wall-mounted touchscreen dashboards - I have one installed and running using a Raspberry pi, but I honestly just need to figure out the actual UI portion before it's any good. I know people say "make automations, don't use dashboards", but you see - I like dashboards.
The other big project I need to finish is the thermostat. Our house has a very strange HVAC setup that combines zoned hydronic heat with two separate air conditioner units, creating a weird overlapping mishmash of zones. Instead of trying to find smart thermostats that could handle all the zones, I built a single controller board to connect to all of them and be controllable over a REST API, and then I'm going to just let HASS be the actual control. I need to do the rewiring to get everything all connectable in the basement, and it definitely has the highest consequences of downtime, so I've been a little hesitant.
The only thing that's really stuck for me is wifi controlled thermostats. In particular, being able to turn vacation mode on/off from the road.
My setup is fairly simple. Alexa for voice control and grouping, Hue bulbs for built-in lights, and TP-Link Kasa switches for things that plug into the wall like floor/table lamps, sound machines, etc.
I briefly forayed into Homeassistant and think it's super cool, but I haven't put in the time to make it a critical piece of my infrastructure. I ordered and returned Inovelli Blue switches just due to the enormity of having to replace every wall switch in my house, stress of figuring out which three-way configuration my house uses (we have a lot), and the time delays from ordering to shipping and then re-shipping since my order was initially from a bad hardware batch. Would still highly recommend checking them out though, they seem like the most full-featured smart switches out there.
Alexa is annoying and seems to become worse at understanding every day. But it gets the job done for the most part. The Kasa switches are great. I had Wemo before but they were unreliable so I got rid of them.
Would love to get more into Homeassistant if I ever get the time. I was frustrated that Alexa integration wasn't easier without having to pay for a subscription, but that's a minor thing.
I like my smart home dumb.
I programmed my own GUI for my Raspberry Pi that handles a few things at home. It has small touchscreen with temperatures and some buttons to turn various things on.
If I need to control that from other place, I SSH over OpenVPN to the Raspberry and turn the thing on manually. It is not user friendly but it is completely under my own control.
If I wanted I could make for example a webpage so I could access it in more user-friendly way over OpenVPN. I may actually do it someday.
I'm old school, I want my stuff do be working even offline if need be. And I'm willing to lower my expectations or limit functions to make it happen. This is why my smart home is actually dumb.
Mostly good but there are a few aspects that are not quite perfect.
I'm using Home-Assistant with HomeKit, which has actually been great for almost everything. To have better control over my smart lighting I have deployed several ikea tradfri zigbee controls around the house for each room that has smart lights. This works pretty well but they run through batteries fairly quickly which is kinda obnoxious. I've been exploring hard wired smart switches, too, but I haven't found the right ones yet. I've also tried Lanbon touch screen switches, they are nice for automation but the lack of tactility for physical controls is a major complaint. I've got a couple of NSPanels to try instead, next, but I haven't made time to set them up yet
I've also been able to avoid the cloud for almost everything connected to it: I have a MyQ garage door opener, so I got the homekit bridge for it to eliminate the cloud link. The one thing I haven't gotten off the cloud yet is I have an 2 head older ductless mini split system which I am controlling with a pair of sensibo airs for the time being
I've used a bunch of stuff along the years - Wemo smart outlets (this is where I started, and I'm impressed that the ones I bought a decade ago still work flawlessly), Google (just for voice automation), Lutron (for some light switches) and z-wave switches (this is all I buy now). Hub is smart things, which I'll switch to Hubitat when it dies.
Overall, it does what I need which is pretty basic.
I went all-in on HomeKit when I owned my last home (not that long ago). I also used HomeBridge to get some devices working with HomeKit that otherwise wouldn't and to make some work better. I hated it.
There were a few things that worked well. My TV was pretty solid. I could get it to turn on and off and switch inputs when I needed it to and that was handy. I was also using SSH to turn my media computer on and off, and that was pretty solid. I had my Sonos soundbar set up as a fan in HomeKit. It's a little weird because 1) it looks like a fan in HomeKit and 2) you can only adjust the volume of the Sonos once it's on and that doesn't happen until you start sending audio to it. All in all though, my media setup was pretty solid.
I had a lock that was convenient but unpredictable. It was a Level lock which I love because it doesn't look like a smart lock. Just looks like a standard lock. It has some sort of proximity feature which is supposed to unlock the door for you. That rarely worked. I'm not sure if it's because most of our trips didn't take us far enough from the house or just general unreliability. I know there were many times we went far outside the minimum radius and it still didn't work. You were also supposed to be able to touch the lock to open it. Worked like magic… about 1/5th of the time, which is not really better than it not working at all.
I had all my lights on HomeKit via Lutron Caseta switches. Those were rock solid, but getting the sensors and automations set up to have them do what you wanted wasn't as easy as I would have liked. It's virtually impossible to use a motion sensor to keep a light on while someone is in a room and allow it to turn off when it's unoccupied. Even just having the stair lights turn on when someone was walking up was way harder to tune than it should have been.
I had my bathroom fans hooked up and wanted to use humidity sensors to turn them on or off based on the combination of humidity and temperature since I read that ideal humidity levels changed based on the temperature. This turned into something like a dozen automations per fan/sensor I wanted to automate.
I had cameras and mini split controllers that were hard to get connected and harder to keep working. It was just a non-stop hassle. The fact that so much of it depended on having internet access to work was the icing on the cake.
Then, there were times when it was really handy. I could make sure the door was locked from anywhere. I could turn the AC on and off while I was out. I could look and see if a package had been delivered and sometimes the system would notify me of that fact proactively.
Even the stuff that worked well was prone to weird failures, many of them with HomeKit at the root. Siri would just stop acting on commands that had worked the day prior. Siri in general is pretty bad, requiring very precise commands to do the thing you want her to do. You would think you could just speak naturally and make your house do stuff, but I didn't find that to be the case.
If I ever go down that rabbit hole again, I'll probably start with Home Assistant and be very selective about what I replace with smart devices. Right now, the door locks and light switches we've had in homes, virtually unchanged for the last 80 years, may not be as convenient, but they are reliable and that's the most important thing.
I have only a few lightbulbs and some temperature humidity sensors.
I setup home assistant and I like it but I writing automations in yaml/the ui is not for me. It takes too long and feels like the wrong tool for this. I avoid python wherever I can, so I wrote my own service that listens to mqtt and automates things, writing instructions back to mqtt. It's basically a rust version of https://github.com/stapelberg/regelwerk But allows me to write automations in a proper language.
I do love how easy it is to add new devices to HASS, so many integrations. So I still use it for that and for its dashboard.
If the device supports mqtt directly I use that, otherwise I connect it to home assistant and use https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/mqtt_statestream/ to get events into the bus where I read them from my automation server. For example I have a few LE Bluetooth sensors that are supper easy to connect to HASS, from there events are published to mqtt where my automation server uses them.
For zigbee devices I use zigbee2mqtt to do that.
There are some glitches which is why I don't add anything else to this setup. Everything works but sometimes bluetooth loses connection to HASS, or zigbee2mqtt doesn't update the lightbulb state which means hass thinks the lightbulb is still off. It's kind of annoying because to fix this I'd have to go into the zigbee2mqtt's source and figure out what is wrong, which I don't want to waste time on.
I have a lot of lights, a few switches, and three google assistants / nest whatever. The switches have fans plugged in and are all on either timers or triggered by weather. I also use NFC tags to set lights in my office, which is really handy for me. I also have NFC to play my favorite mix on Spotify -- pretty handy since Google assistant is getting worse by the day.
I really like my ecobee. It's pretty much the only smart home item I own and it works great, especially in the winter. Having it automatically lower and raise the temperature depending on if I'm awake, asleep, or out of the house helps me sleep and wake up comfortable. As a kid I had baseboard heat and it was always a battle to get out of bed on cold mornings, to the point I'd dress under the covers. Plus I'm really forgetful so I'll forget to adjust the temperature before I leave, which makes the ability to adjust it via my phone super helpful.