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Hello,

Here is a first post about home automation that I set up at home.

So already I got the 5 in 1 smart home starter kit for a test, which includes: an Aqara hub, a door/window sensor, a wireless mini switch, a smart plug and a motion sensor. I subsequently bought back some of these sensors/buttons individually and also have several Yeelight bulbs and LED banners.

I started using Mi Home for a while, but it didn't work for me for several reasons:
- The application was rather long to open (at least at the time)
- Although my bulbs are European server compatible, it was not possible for me to assign them to them because the rest was only China server compatible, and impossible to make interconnections between servers for automation (this is still the case today).
- Therefore my bulbs were on the Chinese server, but unfortunately impossible to associate them with Google Home (it seems to me that now it is possible)
- The possible automations remain few and limited (for example, we know that the door is open or closed but we do not know if the person enters or exits).
So I asked myself if it was possible not to go through Mi Home, but through another application that would allow me to do the same thing without these constraints.

By doing this research, we quickly come across many home automation systems compatible with Aqara smart home products: Domoticz, Home Assistant,... These are simply programs that must be installed and configured on a PC, NAS or Raspberry Pi to have control over home automation. I tried several of them to finally choose Home assistant, for the following reasons:
- It's totally free
- It is aesthetically more beautiful than the competitors
- It's very responsive and opens almost instantly
The only disadvantage being that it is much less easy to configure than the others... It is necessary to make a few lines of code not very complicated rather than simply having to click on buttons.

Thanks to this, the possibilities of automation are endless: You do what you want with the sensor data, and you can associate Home Assistant with many services like IFTTT in a very advanced way, and not just stay within what is allowed by Mi Home.

For example, by associating the data from the Aqara door sensor with the location of my phone sent back to Home Assistant (no panic, everything is stored on your device that runs Home Assistant, it doesn't go up on unknown servers), we are able to know if I enter or exit, to automatically turn on or off the lights for example. And even know if someone else is already at home so as not to force the lights on while this person is quietly in the dark watching a movie.

Moreover, these home automation systems are not only compatible with Aqara. For example, it would be possible to associate a Aqara button with a competitor's bulb to turn it on/off. Even if personally I only have Aqara because I don't want to pay more for nothing!

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