Daveion wrote: ↑Fri Dec 02, 2022 1:36 pm
Would you mind explaining a little bit more what this and maybe advantages. For some reason I can't get the link to work properly and a zip file will not expand on my mobile? Will have to get to my laptop.
Sure. First step is to ask if you are familiar with Home Assistant (
https://www.home-assistant.io) ? In short, it's a home automation platform which allows you to integrate lots of different devices from different companies in one place, so prioritises interoperability over closed ecosystems (e.g. Google, Amazon, Apple etc.) It's a bit different from the likes of Google Home as it's not cloud hosted (although it can certainly use cloud services to control devices if needed), but rather runs on a low-power computing device in your own home (a Raspberry Pi is popular), which means it continues to work even when your internet is broken - important for security applications.
A good practical example - if you have played with home automation, you'll soon find that every single device has its own app which only controls devices made by that one company. If you have a few different devices, you'll soon have a phone full of applications that all control individual devices, but won't work together. Home Assistant is designed to fill that gap, by supporting lots of different devices in one place. But that's only the start of it. Once you have them all in one place, you can start doing some really cool things that integrate *all* of your home's devices, and not just the few that happen to come from the same company.
The ID.3 has been supported through a third party "custom component" (this is how many integrations are added to extend the basic support of HA), but the Cupra actually has a very different API (because: VAG), so it's taken a few months for someone to document the API and implement it in HA, and this has now been done, allowing the car to become part of the overall home automation scheme.
I should add - it's very easy to get up and running with HA. Just need a spare RPi, and follow the numerous tutorials on getting it running. That said, it's still quite a "techy" product and the learning gradient can be pretty steep, but it's improved enormously over the last 2 years and you can do loads with it just pointing and clicking a mouse now.