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A kernel developer plays with Home Assistant: case studies
The first article in this series provided an overview of Home Assistant, its community, and its capabilities. It was deliberately short on descriptions of interesting things that can be done with Home Assistant, though — the reasons why one might actually want to use this program. In this closing article, we'll look at how Home Assistant was used to solve some real problems.
Solar panels
Electrification is good, but it is even better in the presence of abundant electricity; thus, some years ago, an investment was made to cover my roof with solar panels. The result was indeed abundant power, about double what the home and the (non-Musky) electric vehicle actually used, which was a good thing. But the situation could have been better.
The panels came with a monitoring system from a company called SunPower; it collects data on panel performance and grid usage, reporting it all to some system in the cloud somewhere. The company produced a reasonably competent app that provided information about current and past performance, including data on each individual panel. Naturally, the app was the only point of access to that data, a fact which made me a bit nervous. Depending on a "free" cloud service from some vendor often does not go well.