[gol706]

Another pain point with making is that it's really hard to get it integrated with stuff you have bought. I built my own garage door automation with a Particle Photon board. It works great and can do things like text me if I leave the house with the garage door open using the IFTT support from my WiFi router. The problem is that it's really hard to get it integrated with any other control system that the rest of my house uses like my ZWave light switches and Hue lights.

I've been working on a custom UI that sits on top of the Wink Hub API to unify everything, but I'be been stuck with their almost completely undocumented Pubnub event API.

[evancordell]

I would check out https://www.home-assistant.io/ for integrating multiple systems together. I use it on a RasPi to integrate a few disparate systems (Amazon, Nest, RadioRa2) and it works very well. There are modules for most existing systems and it's easy to write your own in python.

[gol706]

I probably should try it. I've been writing my own partly as an excuse to learn React. I've already got a Pi with a touchscreen and a 3d printed enclosure setup to run whatever solution I actually end up using.

[yurishimo]

I know I’m a little late here, but I would look into MQTT as a transport layer for messages across your different devices. It’s super easy to interface with via python or a host of third party services.