It’s a project I’ve built over years and it’s life changingly good and gets better as home assistant, esphome, wled, and LLMs improve. I spend little time futzing with it as it all generally works, but obviously some minor expertise is required to make your own esp32 projects which are mostly just wiring off the shelf wroom d1 mini boards to a project board on the uart/gpio, whatever on something else. My minisplits, jucuzzi, garage door, blinds, etc all have active esphome projects, and provisioning is simple for a technical person. Home assistant is really simple too, and if you know jinja templating, you can make masterpieces.
No one has boiled it down to a shrink wrap product and that is sad for the mass. But for someone with moderate technical skills you can achieve anything your creativity and bravery will afford, and with AI coding assistants it’s gotten even easier. I had to replace most the switches with zwave switches, and build a bunch of boards and attach them to control ports built into devices I own like the minisplits, hottub, etc. But these are all not hard things to do - they’re just more laborious and tedious one time activities, and once you’ve set it up home assistant and esphome are pretty good about not breaking you in the future.
My washing machine also has home assistant integrations, etc, and I am careful to only buy things that do. And most things do one way or another.
But YMMV, if wifi works better for you, I'm still happy that Matter is being used :)
I have nothing against Thread, other than the fact that it requires specialised hardware, whereas Matter over WiFi uses what I already have in place. It’s all trade offs in the end.
My IoT VLAN is firewalled off from the Internet. Sure a misconfiguration could still mean that protection is lost, but that’s probably also de case with Thread.
Interestingly about IPv6, I have a few Matter devices who despite having IPv6 addresses, are only accessible over IPv4. I’m not sure what that means but it surprised me.
The weather station would be for solar load, outdoor temperature, precipitation and (most importantly) wind.
They’d all be coordinated with a local docker container or something like that.
Anyway, if this existed when we built the house, I’d have paid at least $30K for the system, installed and configured. I doubt I’m the only one. It’d be nice if it could control the furnace / ac too.
Edit: also, skylight openers, which are surprisingly inexpensive, except the software integration sounded like a nightmare.
I imagined using lots of sensors to control vents,
windows, blinds, and HVAC
I remember people gushing over the first wave of smart thermostats and all I could think about was how useless a "smart thermostat" was without the ability to also control windows and blinds.
That is the most time-consuming part of regulating temps and fresh air. Getting up to change the thermostat is quite easy!
Smart thermostats are also IMO of limited use for most pet owners. Yeah, theoretically I could let my house get very hot or very cold when I'm not there to save money... but I can't let my cats or dogs freeze... so that kind of clamps the acceptable temperature range.
I do accept that there is a certain sort of person for whom a smart thermostat makes sense - a person who is not home very often, has no pets, and has minimal windows. In short, single apartment dwellers. But they don't have very expensive heating/cooling bills anyway.
Also even if I spent $100,000 putting automated windows in my house, I'm not sure I trust them enough to not chop my cat in half if he happens to be sitting on the windowsill....
Nothing else is really needed, IMHO.