[magicalhippo]

I'm mainly going for Z-Wave plus, using Home Assistant as controller for now (though still evaluating that).

My A/C is on Wifi though, and the cloudy controller web page is using a REST API (undocumented but simple enough to sniff and fake), so that's the only outlier so far.

[linker3000]

I really want to love HA, but I find doing things in Node-Red so much quicker and easy to comprehend due to its visual nature. After a gap of about a year, I installed HA again a few weeks back and tried to setup geofencing using first bluetooth and then third party location services, but gave up due to the inconsistent determination of whether I was home or not. Using Node-red and a couple of tutorials I had things working very quickly. YMMV.

[magicalhippo]

Yes, I find HA a bit clunky to use as well. Mostly because the scripting is quite tedious and relies on templating yaml files.

I'll have to give Node-RED a go once I find some spare time to tinker.

[DoofusOfDeath]

I'm doing this as well. Z-Wave+ and a Raspberry Pi for the hub for my first automation device, an RGBW LED strip for my home office lighting.

Even if I wanted to pay a subscription fee to some external service for my hub, the risk of service disruption, hacking of my network, and/or misappropriation of my personal data are just too high.