Home Assistant Introduction
Hello everyone. I am a user of DAppNode and I also use Home Assistant. If you are unfamiliar, here is a description from Wikipedia
Home Assistant is a free and open-source software for home automation designed to be a central control system for smart home devices with a focus on local control and privacy.
Here is a demo of what a Home Assistant dashboard looks like: Home Assistant Demo
DAppNode as a Home Assistant Add-On
Home Assistant is useful for much more than just smart home automation. It supprts over 1000 brands IoT brands thanks to the more than 1900 open source integrations that are supported. Home Assistant is also extendable via Add-on.
Add-ons allow the user to extend the functionality around Home Assistant by installing additional applications
Many FOSS applications are available as add-ons to Home Assistant already. Some examples include TOR, DuckDNS, WireGuard, Plex Media Server, Bitwarden, Matrix decentralized chat, Folding@Home, VLC and many more.
For many reasons, I believe there will be a considerable overlap between the people interested in DAppNode and those interested in Home Assistant. Both communities focus on a new emerging tech (IoT vs Crypto) and both are open source with a focus on privacy and local control. Home Assistant is run locally 24/7, just like DAppNode, making them a perfect match to run along-size each other. However, it is currently difficult to run both Home Assistant and DAppNode on the same machine. This is because the most popular way to run Home Assistant is via their custom OS. Similarly, the best way to run DAppNode is via the custom DAppNode OS.
I myself am running Home Assistant OS in a virtual machine, while running DAppNode on the base OS via the script installation. This isn’t ideal, as I would like to avoid using a VM and would prefer not to run DAppNode via the script installation on a regular Linux OS.
Benefits to DAppNode Ecosystem
Implementing DAppNode as an Add-On for home assistant would allow users to run both of Home Assistant and DAppNode without the complications of manually setting up virtual machines or docker containers. Simply install the Home Assistant OS to your machine, click to install the DAppNode add-on and you are done.
The tighter integration would vastly simplify the setup process and would give users of Home Assistant (who already run a local IoT node 24/7) the option to start running blockchain nodes with the simple click of a button. This would align with the main objectives of the DAppNode DAO as outlined in the following quotes from the forum:
Work towards a future where decentralized hardware infrastructure is more prevalent, easier to access and simple to run
Provide a robust, stable platform that makes node setup and operation easy for everyone with basic technical skills.
This has the potential to considerably increase the number of people who run local blockchain nodes, by tapping into a community of like-minded people who already have the necessary infrastructure to run DAppNode and who already run a dedicated local machine in their home 24/7.
This tighter integration could also add additional features for DAppNode users, since Home Assistant is capable of triggering actions on thousands of supported devices based on virtually any trigger condition. A simple example to illustrate my point: You would be able to easily configure Home Assistant to send a notification to your mobile phone based on the conditions of your DAppNode instant. Like if your node is disconnected from the network, for example, but the possibilities are endless.
Closing
I am very excited about the possibility of this proposal becoming a reality. If you believe this is a good idea, I would love to hear from you. If you are against this idea for any reason, please reply so I can understand as to why. If you have any other relevant thoughts, opinions or considerations, please join the discussion as well!