New to HomeKit - simple question

🧰 Built-In Apps and Drivers HomeKit
1

I recently become aware of using HomeKit to talk to Ecobee thermostats, which seems to bypass the Ecobee "Cloud",

I gave it a try with my two Ecobee units and it seems to work fine.

While reading about HomeKit there is a lot of mention of something called Home Assistant.

What is it?

Thanks much, Frederick

2

Home Assistant (HA) is another solution for smart homes. It can run either on a supplied device, Raspberry Pi, or in a container on a NAS or computer. It interfaces with many services (usually cloud based) that are not supported on HE. You then share the HA devices to HE to control the devices. Some people do the reverse, and share HE devices to HA and use the dashboards (and rules?) on HA.

Fun rabbit hole to go down. Search the forum, there is a ton of stuff describing how to do it.

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3

Hi,

Being the curious sort and a fan of rabbit holes, I ordered a Home Assistant Green.

It arrived today and is busy doing it's initial preparation.

Thanks for the info on the product.

Frederick

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