by Matt Knight
Wednesday March 31, 2021 • 2 min read
Our home automation system was recently featured by Ars Technica in their article about achieving smart home nirvana without a subscription.
What happens when two techies live together in a 180 sq ft RV? Well, we optimize every square inch with the best technology we can!
For us, a huge part of that has been home automation - using smart technology to make RV life more comfortable, more efficient and more secure. At the heart of our system is an open source project called Home Assistant running on our Intel NUC.
Home Assistant is the glue that binds together thousands of different devices and smart technologies into one central system - everything from our temperature sensors to our thermostat, our solar and electrical system to our networking.
Home Assistant offers a lot of power to set up clever tools like automations and scenes, but a big part of it is the dashboard - the central hub from which we can control almost anything in our RV.
Last year I shared some more information about our Home Assistant set up, and specifically our dashboard. It's just been picked up by Ars Technica, a major technology news website. In an article titled How to achieve smart home nirvana (or, home automation without subscription) written by Alex Kretzschmar, our dashboard was used as an example of the power of Home Assistant.
Aside from being an author for Ars Technica, I also know Alex Kretzschmar as co-host of Self-Hosted - a podcast all about free and open source technologies that you can host yourself.
Even cooler, his co-host on the podcast, Chris Fisher, is an RVer just like us - small world!
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