My basic motivation for switching to Home Assistant stemmed from the fact that I no longer wanted to pay for my home security system. And, it turns out, that some of the components that I bought 3+ years ago as part of the system were Z-Wave which I was able to successfully move from the security system to SmartThings.
But recreating an alarm system using SmartThings was not super intuitive. My original plan of reusing an old Kindle Fire 7 and installing ActionTiles and using that as my panel was not successful. I would conservatively say that 1 out of every 6 days I would walk in to see the panel say “Connecting.” So finally one morning when I went to disarm my system and it said “Connecting” I went on a quest.
My background is 20 years in system-level BIOS development. Twelve years ago, that drove me to drink so I opened a restaurant. There’s not a lot of coding there but it did give me another venue to turn into a smart “home” with automated lighting.
Needless to say, I do not have a background in Linux, dockers, JSON, YAML, MQTT, Z-Wave protocols, GitHub, or anything else that I’ve scratched the surface of in the past few weeks. But I can grasp the concepts which will be important if you need to go off the beaten path for any customizations or oddball devices or use cases you might have.