bt-mqtt-gateway VS openhab-addons

Don't forget Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). Its ubiquitous from Raspberry Pi to your phone, as well as lightbulbs, sensors and so on. The basics of BLE programming are also quite accessible and you don't need any expensive equipment to work with it. You can set up a BLE to MQTT gateway such as [Theengs Gateway](https://gateway.theengs.io/) or [bt-mqtt-gateway](https://github.com/zewelor/bt-mqtt-gateway) on a Raspberry Pi to convert BLE advertisements to MQTT messages and integrate these devices into other platforms.

bt-mqtt-gateway

I recently did a patch for https://github.com/zewelor/bt-mqtt-gateway so it could be used for blind control via mqttthing

I used open hab https://www.openhab.org/ for a while and really liked it but had trouble getting it to work with the ZigBee USB stick I bought. So I switched to home assistant and have been on that for a couple years now. Both are solid. I like HA a lot but the one down side for me is I have to pay the 5 bucks a month or whatever it is for the cloud access to control things when I'm not home. Openhab has instructions to set up your own server for remote access.

openHAB (version 3.6.0): Vendor and technology agnostic open source home automation

Here's what I did at my house. I don't control based on dew point and I only have one HVAC unit, but you could pull this off with openHAB and Venstar thermostats. Venstar was the only brand I was able to find with a local API to control the thermostat. You can set up rules in openHAB to perform what you'd like. The rule engine is powerful and flexible. I'm not gonna lie. It's probably going to be a lot of heavy lifting to get it going but it's rewarding once you've set it up.

OpenHAB (like Home Assistant; open source, need to run on own hardware)

openHAB Beta (version 3.3.2-beta): Vendor and technology agnostic open source home automation

While I don't care about the whole carbon boogeyman spectacle I do care about minimising our environmental impact as well as dependency on, well, as many external things as I can. One of those things is electrical power so I put about 14.5 kW worth of solar panels on a barn roof, connected to a 10kW hybrid inverter [2]. Since I don't like external dependencies I do not use the supplier's "cloud-based" management feature (*Fronius Solar Web* for those who care about such details) and disallow the thing access to the 'net. Instead I made my own system based around OpenHAB [1], a bunch of ESP8266 microcontrollers hooked up to things like the utility power meter (which has a handy P1/HAN port just for that purpose), a heat pump, a water heater, a small heater in the feed storage etc. The thing gets hourly electricity prices for today and tomorrow and creates a schedule to enable/disable devices based on demand, price and energy production from the inverter. Once I had everything set up it has worked fine without the need for intervention. This does not yet include the washing machine and dishwasher since these devices do not offer an easily automatised interface and because scheduling their use also depends on what we put in them and when we want them to clean those things. I just check the graphs to decide when to switch them on which works fine, no need for more automation.

Our electricity rates - both use as well as returns for power we deliver to the net - vary by the hour. Using the interface to the utility meter and the inverter I get readings every 10 seconds, the inverter also tells me the net frequency so it is easy to see whether the net is overloaded (frequency clearly below 50 Hz) or oversupplied (clearly above 50 Hz).

[1] ...but I have not yet connected a battery since a) we can sell overproduction and b) batteries are still too expensive. I expect battery prices to go down once enough used electric car batteries enter the market.

[2] https://www.openhab.org/

Openhab3 (Smarthome)