It's basically an enclosure + some extra integrated hardware for zigbee (and supposedly "easy-to-add" z-wave).
The ecosystem is heavily "run it on a rasb-pi" anyway, so you're 99% of the way there just purchasing or repurposing a PI, but it wasn't that expensive to back their crowd-funding and I'm happy to support an attempt at an "official" configuration that can be purchased.
I use it slightly for its own capabilities, but mostly as a bridge to bring more devices to HomeKit compatibility.
eg: I was able to add my wifi-controllable pool pump to homeASSISTANT and it creates corresponding devices in homeKIT so I can make an iOS shortcut accessible to siri: "Hey Siri, clean the pool" which turns on the pool cleaner. It's kindof like living in the future. :-P
I also found recently a "chromecast => airplay" extension/addon which... bam... now the few chromecast devices I have show up as airplay sinks for audio (not airplay2, but airplay1 is convenient for where I've got them put).
...and I just got some Samba-mount thing so I can rip my DVD's and copy them over to `/Media/*.m4v` which I can then blast out via chromecast (nice b/c both my chromecast and home-assistant PI are wired, so it shouldn't be sucking up wifi bandwidth, and keeps me from having to set up a real ).
It _really_ needs a complete overhaul of how it's thought about (ie: configuration via yaml, confusing organization of extensions, addons, configs, better update management) ... I'm a developer and I still get lost in the mental model they expose via the UI, but it gets the job done and it's got a good ecosystem and community to help figure out how to get done what you're trying to do.
It's basically an enclosure + some extra integrated hardware for zigbee (and supposedly "easy-to-add" z-wave).
The ecosystem is heavily "run it on a rasb-pi" anyway, so you're 99% of the way there just purchasing or repurposing a PI, but it wasn't that expensive to back their crowd-funding and I'm happy to support an attempt at an "official" configuration that can be purchased.
I use it slightly for its own capabilities, but mostly as a bridge to bring more devices to HomeKit compatibility.
eg: I was able to add my wifi-controllable pool pump to homeASSISTANT and it creates corresponding devices in homeKIT so I can make an iOS shortcut accessible to siri: "Hey Siri, clean the pool" which turns on the pool cleaner. It's kindof like living in the future. :-P
I also found recently a "chromecast => airplay" extension/addon which... bam... now the few chromecast devices I have show up as airplay sinks for audio (not airplay2, but airplay1 is convenient for where I've got them put).
...and I just got some Samba-mount thing so I can rip my DVD's and copy them over to `/Media/*.m4v` which I can then blast out via chromecast (nice b/c both my chromecast and home-assistant PI are wired, so it shouldn't be sucking up wifi bandwidth, and keeps me from having to set up a real ).
It _really_ needs a complete overhaul of how it's thought about (ie: configuration via yaml, confusing organization of extensions, addons, configs, better update management) ... I'm a developer and I still get lost in the mental model they expose via the UI, but it gets the job done and it's got a good ecosystem and community to help figure out how to get done what you're trying to do.