When I started to get my feet wet in smart home automation, I bought some devices that can control my lights and some appliances like an electric fan thru my mobile phone. I know very little about them so I purchased some devices that were available locally.

When they arrived, I was excited to get things going. Setting them up was pretty straight forward since I know my way around electronics and networks. I got a smart switch and a smart socket working in no time and I was able to access them on my mobile phone using the manufacturer’s mobile app. As an added benefit, I was able to turn on/off the light and the fan using voice commands.

All was well UNTIL the INTERNET went down! As it turned out, these devices STOP WORKING when there is NO INTERNET CONNECTION! Huh???!!! So I struggled to disconnecting the smart devices and connecting my lights and appliances directly again.

This was an unacceptable setup for me! For one thing why should these devices stop working when there is no Internet? So I decided to look for solutions to the problem and this is where I discovered Home Assistant and ESPHome.

Home Assistant

It’s a home automation system that can be setup to work without the need of an Internet connection! I enables you to integrate smart devices. From Home Assistant (HA) you can control, manage these devices and create automated tasks that helps people in managing their very own smart home. There’s so much more to it that I can put on this article and during the next months I will share the things I learned in home automation — tips, tricks and automating tasks.

ESPHome Builder

What’s even more interesting to an electronics engineer like me is that HA paired with the ESPHome Builder platform, I can create my own smart devices. It allows me the make my own smart devices that I can install in my home to control different things like lights in my house.

Moving forward with a mission

After initially setting up Home Assistant and connecting some devices, I’ve made a decision to come up with a local only smart home setup using devices I have created using ESPHome. There are several reasons as to why I decided to journey into this path.

1. Repairability – As part of my decision to be prepared of disasters, I have decided to make my own devices using ESPHome from off the shelf parts that I can easily stock up to make repairs.
2. Easy Access – Not everyone has access to ready made devices that are available in the market and not everyone could afford them. I want to empower everyone to make their own devices so that they can reap the rewards of home automation.

After almost a year of learning and creating Home Assistant devices using ESPHome Builder, I’ve learned a lot. I’m here to start posting about my journey and share some of the devices I’ve built to make my home automation experience a little bit better. I’m going to post about tips and how-to’s starting with setting up my own local Home Assistant server to creating different devices that control things in my home. I’ll also post videos at https://youtube.com/@igerry so subscribe to my channel to get notified whenever I upload new content.