Home Assistant – a Quick Thank-You

Hard to believe it’s now something like two years since I made the break from many years of Raspberry Pi (2 through 5) and ultimately Node-Red + Node-Red Dashboard for my home automation during which I even developed and published my own packages for Node-Red (node-red-contrib-bigtimer for example) and a very large script (“the script”) to simplify RPi installations – used by more people than I care to think.

As you’ll see looking through this blog, along the way I’ve played with dozens of RPi alternatives, some rubbish, some very good but none with quite the level of support of the genuine RPi.

But I persevered and today I cannot imagine going backwards – it helps that at the same time I started to make serious use of Home Assistant (HA), AI was starting to emerge from laughable beginnings into a truly useful tool for programming.

In 2024 my Italian friend Antonio (you’ll see his comments all over the blog) convinced me that HA (HAOS) 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 HA).

For maybe a year now I’ve had the ever-improving HAOS setup running 24-7 on a mini-PC and regularly use ChatGPT (GO – around 8 euros a month and well worth it) to help me add new devices and new automations to HA.

I keep several days-worth of backups thanks to HA’s automated daily backup service.

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?

Well, HA is – and at the same time way more powerful.

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, official and otherwise.