Home Assistant is great for many things but it requires setup and maintenance. Some of the things I do with it:
- voice control via Rhasspy (and Raspberry Pi)
- control various room lights via voice. Lights are through Hue. For example, "bedroom lights on/off/percentage" Percentage is the brightness. "Movie lights" adjusts the lights as to how I like them when watching a movie or gaming
- control the TV via voice, eg. "Watch Hockey" turns on the TV to CBC
- bedtime routine, which checks for garage door closed, turn off the TV, turns on upstairs lights for 5 minutes, then turns it all off. If the lights flash green, the garage is closed. If red, go check, it's open. (flashing is 15 seconds)
- voice control does NOT open/close the garage door; I feel that's too insecure
- find a movie to watch by title, actor, etc.
- tell me the date/time, weather conditions and forecast via voice command
...and more
For your "I'm not a programmer" look into NodeRed for Home Assistant. It kind of makes it so you use blocks to build your code. It does get messy though but there's much less yaml or code to worry about.
As for the maintenance aspect, I didn't update HA or anything for a couple of years. Then I did. Which promptly broke everything. I'm still cleaning up one month later as I find the "broken" NodeRed nodes.
I also chose HA and Rhasspy as nothing leaves the home network. It all happens inside.
ers
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