Because I REALLY hate all that Clouds my initial HA add-on was just to have local Ecobee integration. This was instantly working as expected. To my BIG surprise HA instantly picked up all Switchbot devices and many more of my toys I was not even thinking about integrating them. So YES, HA is very helpful for getting rid of my "lowly clouds". Original HA setup was based on RPi but I quickly replaced RPi with ODROID-N2/N2+. The reason was a reboot time. RPi was rebooting time was about 20 min but ODROID-N2/N2+ is around 2min.
Also HA has a very nice integration with NSPanel (original version based on ESP32). This is/was a bit DIY project (original reflash requires connecting/soldering USB-RS232 dongle) but as a result I have very nice wall mounted touch screen scene controllers.
Thanks for pointing me to this. I might start with the Raspberry mainly because my neighbor has one, and my kid also wanted to mess around with one. As for HA, I'm now curious to find out if I can use all of my 2GIG zwave sensors I have around the house. Then I can just use those motion sensor for my original project and, perhaps, better integrate with my exterior camera network. This might turn into a fun project.
The Homekit integration does not require API keys and is local. No Apple devices required either. The API keys for HA were for cloud integration. I had that and dumped it for the HomeKit version. For days like today where I get notifications that the service is down, it is nice to know that Home Assistant, (and HE thanks to the HADB integration) would still be communicating and trigger the ecobees to leave away mode after I left work.
Exactly, this. ^^^^^^
