Automation madness

If you find the built in automation thing a bit limiting you can always drop in the Node-RED integration and really go to town! It arrives nicely pre-setup with lots of handy widgets. You just have to follow some pretty simple instructions to add in the agent within HA itself and off you go.

As big Jon mentioned, you can run HA "Supervised" which means you get to run it on a full OS which is very useful. He perhaps over-looked the bit about Debian current being the only supported option! They do get a bit forthright about this. I redeployed a couple of ill advised Ubuntu based VMs with Debian and restored from config backups.

I have deployed quite a few of these beasties for customers. They are so handy for things like printer fleet management and monitoring. There is a card (in HACS) which will automatically gather up all entities and display statuses when a certain trigger is hit. Ideal for many batteries or toner statuses. At another customer, I set one up at the beginning of the pandemic so they could turn their work CAD boxes on and off using WoL and an integration that sends shutdown commands to Windows. The hardest part of that was sorting out MS's idea of power management for NICs.

Grab a slack handful of ESP32 and the like and with minimal skills and perhaps a soldering iron, some wires, breadboard and a 3D printer, you can create all sorts of things. ESPHome is ready to do the programming with a pleasant webby IDE and does all the heavy lifting.

Frigate and a Google Coral is ready to do security cameras and web cams. All covered with an add on and a GUI.

If you get a microphone(s) sorted out then you can setup a wake word "OK computer" and do text to speech and speech to intents. You can, via a Nabu Casa sub, gateway Amazon Echos and the like to take advantage of them but insulate yourself from direct contact.

The ZWave and Zigbee implementations are now very solid. Zwave was patchy in the past but now it is reliable, at least at the HA end.

If you have a static IP or can use dynamic DNS and you can forward ports 80/tcp and 443/tcp, then grab the nginx proxy manager addon and use its Lets Encrypt feature. Or you could spin something up on the host OS (if you have one)

HA is superb for turning loads of phone apps into a single pane of glass. For example my car (*sigh*, yes it has an app - Seic MG4), home power supplier (Octopus) and my car charger (Zappi) all have apps. They also all have integrations for HA. I don't bother with the phone apps much. Another very popular integration is automated rubbish/recycling scheduling. Grab "Waste Collection Schedule" via HACS. It will almost certainly support wherever you live or you can use an .ics file or a manual schedule.

Recently someone added browsers for several discovery mechanisms (DHCP, SSDP and Zeroconf) into the web GUI - genius!

The pace of development is insane but the core product is rock solid with a few wobbles along the way, just like Linux itself or any other huge and complicated software system.