I started a few years ago with Telekom smart home (our ISP in Germany is having their own smart home devices) because I got a good deal as an employee there. Soon I found out that it‘s quite limited because it‘s made for the normal consumer who don’t want to know too much about technical stuff, so I switched to Home Assistant which is now running on a Raspberry Pi. At the moment I run various light systems (IKEA, Philipps and some other no names) in it, have a weather station in it, my LG tv is fully controlled via smart phone/laptop now, and I just start to install Shelly’s on all of our blinds because: why not? In my old flat I also had the radiators in my smart home system but now with floor heating it‘s a little bit more complicated but I am looking forward to solve this with some ESP32 boards in a far future 😄. And the doors have at the moment sensors to see if they are open or not, I also want to get more for the windows to get a whole overview again after I lost have of my sensors with the moving to the new flat. And Roborock and Bambulab are also integrated in Homeassistant 😄 Last but not least: the raspberry pi is running AdGuard and Bitwarden (both with a fallback on my miniserver + backups on a NAS) which is playing nicely together with OPNSense. It‘s not a lot but I am quite happy with it and my wife as well.

I think this covers the basics.

• Home assistant running under proxmox on an ancient hp micro server
• ZZH zigbee gateway stick
• Xiaomi/Aqara light switches, with one more switch than circuit going to switch to act as a button for lamps
• Ikea
  • Bulbs for lamps
  • undercounter strips with zigbee for office mood lights
• Nest hubs for music + 4 room house amp system
• Tado for heating