Hard to believe it’s now something like two years since I made the break from years of Node-Red and Raspberry Pi for my home automation during which I even developed and published my own packages for Node-Red and a very large script to simplify RPi installations – used by more people than I care to think.
In 2024 my Italian friend Antonio (you’ll see his comments all over the blog) convinced me that Home Assistant was the way to go and we spent a considerable amount of time converting over all my Node-Red and other code to run on Home Assistant. Throughout all of this I was very sceptical – as a committed user of “rpi-clone” for making daily backups of my entire RPi installation – zero effort – how could anything be simpler?
But I persevered and today I cannot imagine going backwards – it helps that at the same time, AI was starting to emerge from laughable beginnings into a truly useful tool for programming. For maybe a year now I’ve had the ever-improving Home Assistant running 24-7 on a mini-PC and regularly use ChatGPT to help me add new devices and new automations to Home Assistant (HAOS). I keep several days-worth of backups thanks to HA’s automated daily backup service.
The point of this short brief – just to thank the MANY developers out there who freely give their time and expertise to continuously improve Home Assistant and the many, many add-ons and integrations.