There’s an important tradeoff built into the Alexa ecosystem that many users don’t realize at first.

Home Assistant is great at bringing all your smart devices together, but if you use Apple devices, you probably want to control those same devices with Siri

As your Home Assistant setup grows, automations can quickly become complicated. Multiple sensors, repeated conditions, and copy-pasted logic make things harder to maintain than they need to be.

Ever wonder if your internet is actually down—or if it’s just acting up? With Home Assistant’s Ping integration, you can turn your smart home into a simple internet monitor that gives you instant visual feedback and notifies you when you’re back online.

Once you've set up an automation to turn lights on and off, you'll find that sometimes that's not what you want.  You may prefer to have the lights simply stay on.  Here is an easy way to do that without interacting with the dashboard or using voice prompts.

So you've installed Home Assistant and it's working.  Great, but it doesn't do very much yet.  You probably don't have a lot of smart home devices lying around.  Or do you?