Is this a good start? I have a few items connected to a philips hue bridge pro atthe moment. I want to expand to sensors for doors, windows, leaks and move my solar dashboard to HA.
Is this reasonable? I am aiming to get everything as matter if possible going forward and I guess I will only need the hue bridhe for the direct hue products like the sync box.
Yes! This will cover a lot. And the HA Green is super easy to set up, as far as home assistant deployments are concerned. I don’t have any extra antennas yet and I’ve automated so much of my existing smart home stuff with just the Green.
Any cheap and/or easy automation recommendations to try?
I am in bed right now but tomorrow I can take a look at my setup and suggest some things.
A couple examples: I connected my litter robot (litter box) to HA and it notifies me when the cats break something, and I can see statistics of which cats use it and how often to keep an eye on their health. I have it turn on the portable air filter after a cat goes and leave it on for 15 minutes. I also automate 2 dehumidifiers based on humidity sensors I built with some tiny wifi microcontrollers and hard wired humidity sensing chips (I can tell you more about that with specific models later)
I also control a roomba-style lawnmower with HA.
Lots of other little things too like sunset-based light triggers and doorbell-triggered events and stuff.
All of these are things I already owned before I set up HA. Just browse through integrations and also get HACS (a community extension store built-in to the UI) and see what you already own that can be connected. I bet it will be more than you expect.
The easiest automations are blueprints.
