[dosman33]

I've been watching the Home Assistant scene for a few years now waiting for a time to dip my toe into the water. I'm fairly selective about what I would possibly even want to automate. During the stone age I was a user of X10 devices, I had most lights in my apartment wired up with it. Also diddled some with X10 scripting automation at my hackerspace using the fire cracker X10 serial interface. However X10 taught you one thing: it worked when it wanted to. It worked great for me for years and then suddenly it'd quit for a few weeks, then start working again. Even wiring in a phase-coupler couldn't guarantee reliability and I finally gave up on it after it mostly refused to work in my first house. Listening to all these stories seems to reinforce HA is just as reliable as X10 was back in the day, lol.

After moving on from X10 I found another poorly known "automation system" called Home Heartbeat as I was away from home a lot. Having some reassurances the doors were closed and the basement was not flooding was good at that time. Seems like the main thing this system was intended to do was to allow remote water main shutoff and then provide sensors (although the water shutoff valve was unobtanium, lol). I picked up the system and a bunch of sensors on clearance as it went discontinued. This was a system that was just a few years too early to market, it had some features that would be considered hokey today, but could be repurposed into a useful tool. It used an early Zigbee wireless mesh for sensors (door open/close, overhead door tilt sensor, water sensors, motion sensors, etc). The base station had an integrated modem, but also had a USB port for computer integration. I wrote some perl to digest the USB status output and that made its sensor network entirely accessible the way I wanted, I had status updates viewable on my phone from there. I was considering integrating it into HA at some point, but another problem the system had was that the sensors were AVR based rather than ti MSP430 with low-power features, the sensors ate CR123's like candy.

At this point I'd just like a page to view all the wireless temp sensors around my house in one place. I don't need another light-switch-with-more-steps.

On another note, any users of Mr. House here? (Pst, hey kid... you like perl AND home automation? I got just the thing for you!).