With the last months being very quiet I toke a stab at HA Green and have to say: it came a long way. With the knowledge of MQTT I gained from Core everything was way easier this time around. Last time I tried HA was 5 years ago so the changes on the UI and backend helped on top.
I finally today decided to switch over. Core was a great ride. Thanks to everyones help I learned a lot and was able to get a stable zigbee network. Learn NodeRed, MQTT and some other things.
Since my backbone is MQTT I hope to fire up core again in the future in case there is a new use for it
I must have tried most of the existing home automation solutions out there. I started with Vera, then Homeseer, Indigo (Mac only), OpenHAB, Home Assistant Blue, Hubitat and of course Collective Core. I still havenāt tried Homey Pro (because itās price is way too high and some reviews in Amazon say itās not that great despite itās priceā¦).
Having said that, I came to enjoy the DIY approach of Collective Core. I hope it can eventually find its way towards the developers original goals. In the meantime, Iām using a separate Rpi4 with Home Assistant on the side, mostly as a front end for a dashboard, connecting to my Core managed devices via MQTT. It works and Iām happy with it, but I would very much appreciate if Core could do it all by itself. Fingers crossed for 2024 being better than 2023 for Core development.
Homey has always been on the fringes of my radar. I like the concept (or at least the marketing ) but thatās a lot of money for what may not be a āsure thing.ā
Homey Pro seems very interesting. At the moment, Iām just could have some trouble moving all my automations over to Homey, due to some functionalities that Iāve implemented in NR. For example, I use Alexa ālocallyā just to receive the text of requests (the JavaScript code does the parsing of the text, etcā¦). Alexa doesnāt āseeā my devices, in this way everything remains local even when using Alexa. I also use ChatGPT and Telegram to interact with the system. Whatās the Homey solution for these kinds of things?