I am looking to do a massive home automation project in my new home, but at the moment I am very new to automation/smart homes and what not. Still learning programming and such.
That being said I am looking to have things started and improve/replace/upgrade things as I go and learn more on how to do these things. But the biggest requirement of all is to run EVERYTHING locally. No Cloud integration... No Alexa, or Google Pod, or Siri, or what have you....
At the moment my biggest project is smart heating at home. I've been looking at smart thermostats online, but practically ANYTHING and everything does not specify it's integration with other devices/systems. It just tells you that it's compatible with electronic devices like phones, desktops, and ipads... Which only tells me "You can install our app on your device and control it that way".... My idea is to be able to integrate things (Eventually) to a centrally managed system.
First thing that comes to mind is "Matter" and devices compatible with it as it is meant to be an open standard that can be controlled centrally regardless of who manufactured the "Smart device".... But it doesn't look like many manufacturers are adopting the idea of "Matter" and do not make things that are compatible with it....
So my question is - What are the options out there for a smart thermostat that eventually down the line I'll be able to centrally manage via a program/script I run on a local home server or something along these lines?
And one that doesn't look like this
go read the wiki ( http://reddit.com/r/HomeAutomation/wiki/index ) to learn about the basic technologies. Do some browsing to see what's for sale in your market. Pick one tech to be your foundational system (I recommend Z-Wave or Zigbee) that can provide for >80% of your needs. Figure out what your likely runner up is that covers 10-15%, and expect maybe 5% weird gizmos.
Decide if "suitable for use" is OK or if you need "best in class". Even in tech, "best in class" winds up with prima donnas that dont play nice. You will find often a company does one thing incredibly well and is a total nightmare to integrate outside their tiny walled garden. Linking multiple walled gardens together becomes a constant pain to keep active. It is often less stressful and more successful to choose "B" products that play nicely over requiring everything be "A+".
Now pick a controller than covers your two technologies and top weirdos. You want a primarily local system so look at Homeseer, Hubitat, Homey, Zooz, Fibaro, HomeAssistant, OpenHab and ISY. Decide if you want a pre-built appliance or DIY. Be aware most appliances aren't great at supporting more than 2 or 3 cameras as video needs a lot of bandwidth and storage. If you plan on multiple cameras you may need something PC based
The problem with this approach is the fact that I don't want to be pigeon holed into a single vendor for smart devices. If I go with Sony, that means that from now on - I will have to buy ONLY Sony compatible devices in the future.... Not a good plan
To be fair I have no idea what you're talking about. I will check the wiki though and hope it can answer things better
I didn't say pick a brand. I said pick a technology. Some technologies are tied inexplicably to brands but not all. Lightning belongs to Apple. But USB and wifi are multi-vendor technologies. Can you name the brand of USB? no, you buy Logitech and Microsoft and DLink and dozens more brands.
There are multivendor technologies in home automation. Z-Wave, Zigbee and MQTT/Tasmota are established, to various levels. Matter is a theoretically multivendor tech that is still nascent in the market.