Home automation has exploded in the last 5 years. The advent of the voice assistant has really made the home automation environment accessible to everyone. I have jumped on the Amazon Alexa bandwagon. I use Alexa in every room to automate the simple tasks of turning things on and off. “She” is also useful for timers and things that should happen as a result of the sun going down or coming up.

I looked at a hub for my home automation and came up with OpenHab as the solution. It provides integration for many disparate systems and doesn’t tie you into any one manufacturer. It also has a generic connection to Alexa which means “everything” works with Alexa. Well, at least everything that works with OpenHab.