Conclusion:

With Home Assistant you can make your house smarter. This way you could switch all your lights on remotely and ensure that your heating goes out when you leave home. The possibilities are of course endless. The review above is therefore a small impression of the possibilities, because if we are going to deal with all of these, we can still write full pages.

The nice thing about HASS is that you can start automating your house in a relatively cheap way. In addition to the free software, you also need hardware such as a Raspberry PI and a USB Z-Wave stick. You can get this in a set from around € 80.

The installation is fairly simple but it is not completely plug and play and will sometimes be a bit of a search for the less experienced user to get it working.

Device support is in perfect order. That way I could add my tested Z-Wave products without any problems and they did what they had to do. Other devices such as the Xiaomi Gateway and Ikea TRAFID also work great. These only require a little more perseverance to get working. Fortunately there is a large community to help you.

The interface is simple. I have to say that not everything speaks for itself and that you often have to google to figure out how something works. Certainly for starting users, this can sometimes be quite difficult.

Making rules is not very simple, but with some research you can work it out. It is better to install the Node-RED add-on. With this you can get your house smart in a somewhat simple way. However, this also does not necessarily work. If you want to make complex rules, then programming experience is a requirement.

Home Assistant gives me a bit of mixed feelings. On the one hand the system feels open and the possibilities are endless, on the other hand it is all still in its infancy and you have to use the HASS website almost every time to find out how something works. This can sometimes be frustrating.

Another point that I want to mention is the stability. I had a few times that the system no longer wanted to start up and that my devices were gone. This is not necessarily due to HASS, but that an RPI is not the most stable system for running home automation. This is of course quite annoying. Fortunately there is a good back-up system.

Tested with:
HASS: 0.84.6