My name is Justin Lewis, but many call me Jlew. I graduated from RIT in 2011, Computer Science. I was one of the original members of FOSS@RIT in the days before MAGIC.
I haven’t been very involved in the foss community or foss@rit since graduation besides a few patches to some foss projects.
I have recently been interested in Home Automation, favoring Home Assistant as my central hub as it is fully open source and python. Professionally I spend most of my time in Java but have always loved python.
Yes, I have been running home-assistant for a few years now. For the most part it runs some simple light automations and also acts as a home security system. Most of the smart devices I have use ZWave as I try to avoid appliances that require internet access (a few exceptions are my Nest thermostats and chromecast devices).
I also have ZoneMinder running, driving a few security cameras around my home (with some minor integrations into HASS).
Overall I like HomeAssistant. But I feel it is not quite at an ease-of-use level necessary for the less technical. I have not looked into their Hass.oi os image which claims to resolve some of the configuration challenges home assistant has. The place where I have run into issues is how it maintains entity id’s and has changed a few times with limited backwards compatibility. But now they seem to have put in a mapping layer that should fix many of those issues I have run into in the past.
If anyone wants to talk automation, I would gladly join those conversations!
Happy to see you back here again.