Fibaro Home Center 2

A few years ago I bought Fibaro Home Center 2 to be able to control the lights in my apartment. I used exclusively z-wave products and it has worked well. But now I wanted to get more out of my home automation system. I want to integrate more things like TV, stereo, HEOS sound system, Google home, Chromecast etc. In addition, I want to explore protocols other than z-wave that may be cheaper and / or easier to deal with. I simply want to try something new, something more.

Although Fibaro HC2 is good and stable, it is quite difficult in terms of integration with other technologies and products. One day I was Googling something, I don’t remember what was, when I stumbled upon Home Assistant by chance. I started reading about it everywhere i could and thought it seemed interesting. But if Home Assistant is available out there, then there must be more platforms that do the same thing, right?

After a bit of googling (is that even a word?), I found a few, but it was Home Assistant and OpenHAB that attracted my interest.
When going through the two platforms and comparing the pros and cons, it was Home Assistant who came out as the winner. The decisive reason was that Home Assistant appealed to me more for some reason. And… that was really it, no other reason.

To test it, I installed Home Assistant on my media computer which is always on (kind of a requrement). I chose to use a virtual environment with Virtual Box to be able to test without it costing me anything, except time of course 🙂

I have played around a bit with different integrations and I thought it would be fun to dedicate Home Assistant to its own server hardware. This page will be my documentation, blog or whatever it is about to become on how it goes for me to set up this server and maintain it.