I’m planning to build several WiFi connected devices for home automation: an AC remote control and air quality sensors. These devices would send data and be controlled through a local server. I’m considering two approaches: running custom software on a server PC (hardware to be determined) or integrating with Home Assistant’s protocols and purchasing their hardware. Would using Home Assistant be excessive for this use case?
HA will connect to almost anything, maybe there is a connector for your AC unit and there are many air quality sensors
My AC is offline, I was thinking I’d just put an infra red LED on a microcontroller in front of it 😅
That might depends on how your AC is working, I recently did the same at my dad’s house and run into issues because the temp control for the unit is reading from the remote. So when I sent infrared command to turn off unit, it worked as expected for some minutes then turned back on because remote sent back command as temp wasn’t meet. Still need to do a lot of testing to find a way to make it work, might need to disable remote and use some temp sensors for the triggering part but not sure how that will work, might need to use some hysterisis friendly climate addon for that…
That’s interesting, I’ll have to read more about mine. I think I purposefully bought the “dumbest” option but will need to experiment with it just like you did
Even if you build your own thing to communicate with the AC, Home Assistant is still useful since it lets you easily automate things and interact with other devices, and you get a bunch of things included (nice UI, storage of historical data, dashboards, etc). You could build your thing as a Home Assistant integration.