Ecobee-Suite VS Home Assistant

b) you need some better 3rd party ecobee integration toolkit than what Ecobee provides native to your smart home automation. For example, in smartthings they call it a device handler. I downloaded a custom device handler for ecobee from a gitlab project called SanDOOD\Ecobee-suite (https://github.com/SANdood/Ecobee-Suite)

If you happen to have SmartThings or Hubitat, then Ecobee Suite Manager could help. https://github.com/SANdood/Ecobee-Suite

In the midst of all the incoming recommendations for Home Assistant (which are all very valid!), I'm going to say Hubitat for one reason: Universal Ecobee Suite

Have you found the Hubitat Package Manager yet? Event Engine is just one of a plethora of custom apps from bptworld I found while browsing the list of apps that have support for Package Manager. It will not only install/remove apps/drivers for you, but it will also notify/install updates. I was so pleased when I discovered the Universal Ecobee Suite was also supported by HPM. I did not relish the idea of having to manually track each of the child processes and manually update the app and driver code whenever there were new versions.

Example time! I have a sunroom that is heated with a free-standing gas stove/fireplace. With the Universal Ecobee Suite, I was able to use the temp reading of a door sensor to turn the stove off/on based on room temperature as compared to the target temperature set on the ecobee. What I could never get to tie in with ST was the several wall mounted convection heaters that "help" some rooms at the periphery of the house. They are plugged into zigbee smart outlets and I wanted them to only be powered if the ecobee mode was set to 'heat'. I could not figure out how to get this working with ST. It took me about 15 minutes to get it done in HE. And then when I installed a heated floor in my basement office I was also able to tie thermostat there into the same automation so its target temp follows the rest of the house as well. I also consider HE's "interface impairment" a personal non issue because I'm the only one that has to deal with it. I like my automation as unobtrusive as possible, the rest of my fam wants physical butons/switches/voice control. They don't want touch screens everywhere with status readouts and such.

Most notably, (and as a recommendation to u/waffles-n-gravy), the Universal Ecobee Suite so so far superior to the stock offering. With it, and my Hubitat, I've got a gas stove heated sunroom, a radiant floor heated basement room, and around 6 convection wall heaters all tied into my ecobee 3's status/mode/setpoint.

I use Hubitat (and the wonderful Universal Ecobee Suite) to tie it all the Ecobee's temperature setpoint and operating mode. I've also designated a couple contact sensors on doors to shut the whole system off if left open for too long (we periodically air out the house during the winter months, and it's so nice not to have to run all over the house turning things off, and then forgetting to turn something back on.

Why didn't I go back to HA when I got fed up with ST? Partially, the rPi I had used for HA was running my 3d printer, but mainly because I really fell in love with the Universal Ecobee Suite on ST and I knew it was also available on Hubitat. With UES, and Hubitat, I've managed to tie 3 different supplemental heating systems to the Ecobee's operating mode and temperature setpoint. I know I could do all this with HA, but we're back to the time availability issue. Hubitat was the exactly what I needed exactly when I needed it.

The Universal Ecobee Suite (for either Hubitat or SmartThings) is amazing for this sort of thing, and I know there are Honeywell thermostat drivers available for Hubitat. I would guess SmartThings has something similar available. The UES/Hubitat combo has allowed me to tie 3 different supplemental heating systems into my ecobee's target temperature, operating mode, and current state.

Apparently the same issue has been reported with Philips TV [1] and Fritz!Box [2] as well.

[1] https://github.com/home-assistant/core/issues/73643#issuecom...

[2] https://forum.openwrt.org/t/minidlna-creates-new-media-serve...

The plug would transmit power readings to my Home Assistant setup.

Home Assistant can cast dashboard/media/etc to your display and has shopping lists. https://www.home-assistant.io/

If you provided MQTT support like plenty of IoT companies do, then any open source home automation tool can integrate! Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/) have a grading system, so a local-first implementation would give you their highest score since they also really care about privacy. https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/12/classifying-th...

It's hard not to raise a little smile at Google's automation scripts, which bare a not-entirely-passing resemblance to those of a certain other, more comprehensive home automation system...

You might consider looking into "Home Assistant".