Introduction

I love remote control and automation, and control systems in general. Implementing some sort of home automation has always been something I wanted to do. Interestingly, home automation is not a new thing… It’s been around since the 80s!

Checkout this video showing X-10 products from the 80s/90s:

Home automation is not new, but was also not very popular, practical or affordable back then. I had never heard of these products back in the 90s, which was probably not surprising considering that the only thing I was interesting in back then was playing Quake and Doom on a 486 PC!

Home automation has gradually become more accessible, affordable and mature, with some great products on the market today.

Products

Starting out, home automation can be quite daunting. The market is a bit of a minefield, with various platforms and products, most not working well together, with some requiring gateways / hubs, cloud accounts. Interoperability, ease of installation and privacy are significant considerations for me (and likely many others) when choosing products.

About 3 years ago (as of January 2025) I started renovating our home, I had the opportunity to create the infrastructure necessary for home automation. This was essentially just putting in the necessary wiring, control panels, back boxes, ethernet ports etc. I did a garage conversion and created a study / electronics lab, and I pulled down and replaced all the old Artex ceilings in the foyer and open plan dining room. This gave me access to all wiring on the ground floor, including the kitchen and lounge.

Just prior to this I was investigating various home automation products, and discovered the Shelly range. I was happy I did, because Shelly products are ideal for the level of integration I wanted. They are compact, affordable and compatible with various home automation platforms. Some of the features of the mainstream control products are:

• WiFi connectivity with built-in web page for configuration
• WiFi access point for initial configuration to connect to the network
• Bluetooth
• No hub required
• No cloud account required
• HTTP, MQTT protocols

I have since installed many Shelly products – mainly dimmers, relays, and RGBW controllers. Most of my home automation is around lighting, but I plan to expand that.

Home Automation Platform

After reviewing various platforms I settled on Home Assistant. Compared to other smart home platforms, Home Assistant stands out due to its extensive customization options, open-source nature, local control over devices, a large range of supported integrations, and a strong community, allowing users to deeply personalize their smart home automation with a high level of flexibility and privacy compared to cloud-based systems.

As of January 2025, all I have been able to do is spend a small amount of time familiarising myself with the functionality of Home Assistant, and have created some simple scenes and automations just to get things working, but it needs a lot more work – especially the dashboards.

Here I am using a Shelly BLU Motion PIR detector to switch on a single spot light for 30 seconds:

This second automation turns the light off when no further motion is detected:

I have chosen to use two other platforms that are commonly used with Home Assistant: Node-RED and ESP Home.

Node-RED is a low-code, visual programming tool for integrating hardware devices, APIs and online services, and in context of home automation allows you to visually create complex automations. It uses JavaScript and has a plugin system which allows you to install packages that add ‘nodes’ (the building blocks of your flow), thereby extending the functionality of Node-RED. This makes it a very powerful solution.

There is a package specifically for Home Assistant (node-red-contrib-home-assistant), which adds nodes that allow you to automate all your hardware devices.

I have not created any automations using Node-RED yet.

Below is an example automation I found online:

ESPHome is a system to control your microcontrollers in Home Assistant using configuration files. For example if you have an ESP32 that is connected to some relays and sensors, you can read the sensors and control the relays in Home Assistant. This is extremely powerful!

I have not had the time to even try ESPHome yet.

HACS is a community store for Home Assistant and has a lot of additional functionality that you can add to enhance Home Assistant.

Installation

I have installed around 30 devices so far.