Welcome, Folks

It all began September, 2016, with a Philips Hue LED Starter Kit. The adrenaline rush was immediate – simply turning a light on from my phone and changing its color. But you know the feeling; a drug was unleashed.

Seeking the rush again, just few weeks later, I bought a second device: a Samsung SmartThings Hub. Followed by a motion sensor and a smart outlet. And it kept growing...

I have a vivid memory of proudly showing some coworkers my SmartThings dashboard with color and effects controls for two DMX uplights in my living room. I had written both the Python app (running on an ARM SBC with the USB DMX dongle) and the Groovy driver for SmartThings to talk to it locally via a REST API.

Pi Day!! March 14, 2018 – The next step: Home Assistant (HA) OS installed on a Raspberry Pi. Shortly thereafter, SmartThings was taken off-line.

I out grew the Pi pretty quickly and moved to Home Assistant Supervised on an Intel NUC. After a while, HA was then moved to a docker container on a server.

Home automation became my hobby. It has been a process; I've learned a lot. I did a lot of things wrong; however, it has been rewarding. I'd like to invite you along to join me along this journey!

I will be producing YouTube videos and adding the reference content here for those videos.