For those of you who are following me on Twitter, you might have seen my Philips Hue bridge was acting up in the past couple of months. Major bandwith usage, automations not being triggered at the appropriate times, and even the internet connectivity wasn’t working anymore. The bridge is also about 14 years old, so it might have been its time to shut down.
A relative cheap solution would be to buy a new Philips Hue bridge and set that up. However, lots of my friends are very fond of Home Assistant to automate everything, including their Hue lights. Because everyone is so positive about it, I thought I’d look into it too.

From what I understand, Home Assistant is a platform with a nice frontend application which enables user to add devices to it, so they can be used to automate stuff. For example: when turning on an Xbox, also turn on the lights in the game room.
I’m not sure how many devices are supported, but it looks like hundreds (or thousands) can be integrated. At least most of the popular devices are supported for automation.

In the IoT world there are two major communication protocols, Zigbee & Z-Wave. For a consumer, like me, they’re pretty much the same. The protocols differ on a technical level, of course. For Home Assistant to talk to my Hue lights and accessiories it needs some kind bridge to make sure the machine where Home Assistant is running on can communicate with the Zigbee hardware. For this, I’ve bought the Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus.