I have gone in a geekier direction. When I bought my house in 2015, one of the first purchases I made was a SmartThings Hub. While wifi is convenient for smart home, it isn't as secure and I didn't want my household devices like lightbulbs to be using my wifi network. So everything I have (with a few exceptions) is Zigbee or Z-Wave. I really like the system and find it to be a lot more reliable than wifi and Bluetooth devices, but a bigger pain to use since there really is no central interface that is intuitive for guests and others in the house to use (the SmartThings App leaves a lot to be desired). So to solve this, I got an old Nexus 7 tablet running ActionTiles mounted to the wall, which acts as my central "control panel".
Recently (start of 2021) I've switched away from SmartThings as it's had a lot of reliability issues and am now using Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi as my central hub instead.
I have several Google Home Hubs (now called the Nest Hub) which I use to give me an easy voice interface for my smart home. I can say "Hey Google, turn off the living room lights" or use their built in routines like "Hey Google, Good night" which then sends the commands to Smartthings to actually execute the actions on my system. Since installing these, I've been using the tablet on the wall much less as I think voice is a more intuitive interface. This also gets me access to all the features of the Google devices like weather info, my commute, access to my calendar, reminders, etc that SamrtThigns doesn't do (and work well since I am in the Google ecosystem for my business software) and augment the actual smart home devices.
I also decided in my smart home, it makes more sense to use smart switches over smart bulbs (unless the bulbs are for colour) so I am working on swapping out my light switches with smart switches which is proving difficult with an old home and no neutral wire. The devices I am using in my setup are:
- Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant
- Shalage Connect door lock/keypad (one on each door)
- Ecobee thermostat
- Several Sengled RGB bulbs (I've found the comparable to Hue for a fraction of the price)
- Tintable white bulbs in the office and living room so I can adjust the white temperature based on the activity
- Several Zigbee and Z-Wave smart plugs from various brands
- Various Zigbee and Z-Wave light switches (still installing these)
If anyone is interested in Home Assistant, or has questions about my setup, let me know I'd be happy to discuss it. There are a lot of innovations coming in the near future for smart home compatibility which are exciting, and look like they will support many of the existing protocols which means I likely won't have to redo my whole system.