Hi, my name is @dohpaz42@lemmy.world and I am a HomeKit user.

My draw to HomeKit is the ecosystem, and its ease of use for me and for my kids (we are all iOS users).

I have been reading about the differences between both Home Assistant (HA) and HomeKit (HK), and I do like the idea of having more control over everything, and exponentially more devices available to me through HA.

In fact, what inspired my research is to look for an alternative to myQ for my garage door opener. And while I have found ratgdo that can do everything myQ can do, and more, it’s my basic understanding that HK support is not as great as HA.

I do understand that to use HA, I will need something to use as a dedicated hub; I have a few Pis running in my house already that I could easily make into a dedicated hub. So that’s not an issue.

I am also tech savvy, but I do not wish to spend all of my waking hours tweaking things. More importantly, I want to know if my kids can easily use HA devices without them having to be tech savvy.

Can HA be set up in a way that my kids can just point and click using apps on their devices? Can anybody help show me (screenshots, videos) what that might look like?

Thank you in advance.

  • ohshit604@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    5 hours ago

    I don’t use Home Assistant personally as I also use Apple products, if you read into Homebridge it’s a piece of software that turns smart devices that are not HomeKit enabled devices into HomeKit enabled devices, and enables new functionality to devices that are already HomeKit enabled. Definitely worth considering.

    This was significantly cheaper than converting all my Apple products into android products.

    To quickly spin it up I would suggest reading into Docker and Docker compose, docker takes applications and containerizes them and lets them run over your network with little configuration.