Home Assistant is indeed an "aggregator" for a lot of different home automation devices. Personally, I find it very useful to have my Nest, my ZWave devices, various ESP8266 "things" (garage door controller, temp/humidity sensors, my doorbell, etc), along with my Chromecasts, and the home/away status of my wife and I all rolled into one state machine (plus a lot of "general" information... the time, sunrise/sunset timing, current weather in my area, traffic conditions, etc).
Having all that information in one place means those various components can be controlled intelligently, based on all the available information, rather than just the small island each of them would be on their own.
A Pi is totally optional, BTW. You can run HA on pretty much anything that runs Python3.
Wonderful , this summarized the capabilities of this HAss
> A Pi is totally optional, BTW. You can run HA on pretty much anything that runs Python3.
> Home Assistant supports sensors and switches using GPIO pins (if you're running on a Pi, obviously)
> Home Assistant is indeed an "aggregator" for a lot of different home automation devices.
> Having all that information in one place means those various components can be controlled intelligently, based on all the available information, rather than just the small island each of them would be on their own.
https://home-assistant.io/components/rpi_gpio/
Home Assistant is indeed an "aggregator" for a lot of different home automation devices. Personally, I find it very useful to have my Nest, my ZWave devices, various ESP8266 "things" (garage door controller, temp/humidity sensors, my doorbell, etc), along with my Chromecasts, and the home/away status of my wife and I all rolled into one state machine (plus a lot of "general" information... the time, sunrise/sunset timing, current weather in my area, traffic conditions, etc).
Having all that information in one place means those various components can be controlled intelligently, based on all the available information, rather than just the small island each of them would be on their own.
A Pi is totally optional, BTW. You can run HA on pretty much anything that runs Python3.