I’m planning to build several WiFi connected devices for home automation: an AC remote control and air quality sensors. These devices would send data and be controlled through a local server. I’m considering two approaches: running custom software on a server PC (hardware to be determined) or integrating with Home Assistant’s protocols and purchasing their hardware. Would using Home Assistant be excessive for this use case?
My AC is offline, I was thinking I’d just put an infra red LED on a microcontroller in front of it 😅
Even if you build your own thing to communicate with the AC, Home Assistant is still useful since it lets you easily automate things and interact with other devices, and you get a bunch of things included (nice UI, storage of historical data, dashboards, etc). You could build your thing as a Home Assistant integration.
That might depends on how your AC is working, I recently did the same at my dad’s house and run into issues because the temp control for the unit is reading from the remote. So when I sent infrared command to turn off unit, it worked as expected for some minutes then turned back on because remote sent back command as temp wasn’t meet. Still need to do a lot of testing to find a way to make it work, might need to disable remote and use some temp sensors for the triggering part but not sure how that will work, might need to use some hysterisis friendly climate addon for that…