As described in the last article I use the manual installation of Home Assistant. To get a system up and runing very quick I prefer to use Ansible. For the installatino of Home Assistant I wrote a role. You can find my Ansible role on Github. In the same repository (in the near future) you can also find some other roles which might be useful when installing Home Assistant. The variables whcih can be used to configure the role are described in the README of the role.

My first encounter with home automation was to measure temperatures and later switching power sockets working with 433 MHz radio these and these). To be able to view the temperatures and to control the outlets I wrote a small web server in python. But to do real home automation it is better to use a system which is already used by many people and you have some kind of community who can help you if there are problems. My choice for this is Home Assistant.

Home Assistant is based on python and open source. It allows to control many home automation devices from different manufactures. These devices are used as Components. For these components you can create automations which can be executed automatically in case triggers and conditions (Trigger) are matched. For example you can play music automatically when you get home. The section Components gives you an overview about which devices Home Assistant supports (e.g. Sonos). Systems similar to Home Assistant are openHAB, ioBroker and FHEM.