I had a good experience with Daikin split systems, but it's really going to depend on your region and what's available in your area, or what you've already got. If you're looking for inspiration on what works well, check the Home Assistant forums.
a1studmuffin
Best place to start would be to look at the thermostat hardware you've currently got, and start searching online if anyone has integrated it into Home Assistant.
I've lived at a few houses now with Home Assistant. In all of them I was able to integrate my HVAC and automate it, but some brands and hardware are definitely easier than others.
I think the most extreme of them required a custom esphome device connected to its PCB to talk to Home Assistant, and another required me to write my own custom component.
Hardware and brands make a huge difference, but sometimes you're stuck with what you've got.
I'd argue S10 was the peak - headphone jack and SD card slot. Everything since then has been enshittified aside from minor spec upgrades.
So what's going on here? Is this related to the new US administration? Or Microsoft and Meta exchanging money to silence the competition? Genuinely confused, but it seems fairly important whatever the motivations.
I think it positions the US to lower its corporate tax rate below 15%, enticing tech companies to move their official HQs back to the US from Ireland. Of course this would likely result in a race to the bottom on corporate tax rates globally, which the agreement was meant to protect against so companies had to pay their fair share of wealth back to society.
It's how most large forums ran back in the day and it worked great. Quality over quantity.
Game Pass' revenue grew by 5.7% in the year to June, which is below the internal target of 11%. Following the service's declining growth rate, it was dropped as a metric contributing to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's pay in 2023.
Rules for thee, not for me.
True, but what you should really be afraid of these days are spam filters and hackers. As much as I'd love to selfhost my own mail server, IMHO it's just not worth the risk of important emails getting flagged as spam (both outgoing and incoming), or losing control of accounts due to a zero day attack or other means. The latter might sound far-fetched but I just saw it happen firsthand to a friend. The modern internet is a battleground!
Just to play devil's advocate, why do you want to automate your lighting? I'd consider myself an advanced HA user (been using it since 2019 and have coded several custom integrations and built custom hardware) and never bothered with automating my home lighting. I'm always walking past the light switch as I enter or exit a room anyway, so it's not a big inconvenience.
The real wins I've gotten from HA are smarter home security (door locks/sensors/cameras etc), climate control, energy management, garden irrigation, and remote control of "dumb" devices like my garage door and motorised front gate.
Edit: thanks for the insights all! Seems having kids and older houses are common reasons for automating lighting.
For couch gaming, the discontinued Steam Link hardware is still king IMHO. I tried switching to the Android app on my smart TV and have had nothing but trouble with connection quality (even over a gigabit wired connection) and maintaining 4 controllers connected to the TV at once. It seems extremely sensitive to host hardware and software issues, which often change underneath you with TV updates. The Android hardware and software it runs on is just too variable to ensure a consistent reliable experience, and Bluetooth controller support is often hit or miss.
The Steam Link hardware was amazing as it did exactly what it needed to do, and most importantly was tested more thoroughly than the thousands of Android devices that all have their own quirks and specs. I hope they bring it back.
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LGs AI Home Inside 2.0 Refrigerator with ThinkQ
Oh wow, I'm very much looking forward to this argument... "We believe pirating the copyrighted commercial works of others en masse to develop our own commercial product constitutes fair use... China bad!"