Home Automation

Home automation? That sounds a suitably geeky thing for me to be doing doesn't it? Here are my notes on what I did and specifically on how I implemented my copy of the open source home-assistant system written in python, residing on GitHub and free.

Let me be the first to point out that I am just implementing an instance of other people's hard work here. Perhaps they made different choices to those that I would have made but they did the work and, hence, they probably know more about the problem than I do.

Now the snag with user contributed stuff like this is that the product often runs far faster than the documentation and the support. In one way this is good as the emphasis is on fixes, features and progress but the bad side is that some poor guy like me is trying to play catch-up, learn things and make my system work. Google finds nothing as the user base is small and when you do find a reference to your current problem it is usually somebody else facing the same thing and getting nowhere.

Warning
This is a fast moving field. This information will be out of date in some detail even before you read it.

These are my notes on HA so far. They are NOT in the order that I did things, they are in the order I probably should have done them.
Setting the basic system up in the first place.
Connecting it to your PC.
Making it auto-start.
Actually starting to control stuff.
Upgrading to Python 3.7