I co-owned a company that specialized in home automation a while ago. We sold Crestron products. I have to admit, its overpriced and overbuilt for the average home, but its pretty dope. Its all self contained, so no need to connect to outside servers to operate. As long as your home network is running, so will the system. Here is a great video showing off a system:
Control4 is company I tell most regular folks to look up. They are much cheaper than Crestron, but still expensive. You can save money if you can wire your home yourself, limiting most of your cost to just equipment and setup. Everything is integrated, so you are operating everything from a single app.
I'm shocked to still see a huge chasm in home automation. Consumers only see these fragmented control ecosystems, all designed primarily to harvest customer data. Then you have the legit home automation systems that are either still being sold mostly by high end home theater companies, like the company I use to own, and limit setup to a specialized programmer. At the end of the day all we need is a good software program running on linux, and a managed router with some extra connections like POE, IR, and 12v. This way everything is hard wired and any enthusiast can program it like they use to do with universal remotes back in the early 2000s. The bulk of the money would go into wiring and not into the programmers pocket. Our company used an outside programmer and he could charge as much as 10% of the jobs price tag ($20k in programming for a $200k job).
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