Internet Of Things / IoT / Connected Home / Smart Houses

It's a few weeks since I removed all of my smart home tech, and while I'm not exactly missing it, I've decided to put my spare raspberry pi's to use again, one of which has been loaded with hassio. I'm approaching it much differently this time round. Last time I jumped straight in at the deep end and tried to add too many things at once, which caused them to break or not work correctly. This time round I've set myself a few ground rules:

1. I want everything to exist only on my local network (that means no apps or third party cloud)
   
2. Everything must still operate as if my gran (or similarly not technically minded person) could walk in and use it
   
3. HA will be used only to integrate devices and not as a front end (hence the importance of step 2, and the reason for keeping it local only)
   
4. Appliances/devices will only be made smart/automated if there is a genuine benefit to it
   
   

As you can imagine step 1 and 2 could rule out a lot of tech, and involve a bit more diy, but it should mean that it's safer from a security standpoint, and also prevents me from taking the all at once approach again.

So far I have set up HA with mosquitto to link it to a sonoff rf bridge flashed with tasmota, which receives signals from my 2 code rf door sensor that accurately shows the state of the front door. It can also receive rf signals from my cheap wireless doorbell and send push notifications to my phone using pushover. After a lot of trial and error I have now figured out to send rf signals and control rf plugs. I have also managed to set up a device tracker for presence detection using our asus router. With all of this I have an automation running nicely to have the downstairs lamp come on if it's within 1 hour of sunset (or any time after) if the door is opened and mine or my girlfriend's phones are on the wifi (our new router is so powerful they usually latch on at the end of our road).

The benefit of this is that it was super cheap (18 for bridge, 10 for doorbell, 7 for 2 code door sensor and 15 for three rf plugs), but it's also a local network only setup and actually useful.

My next plan is to fit flashed shelly1 switches into ceiling light crowns so that switches can be used as normal, but lights can be used for automations. I also plan to integrate some of the cheap PIR motion sensors into automations soon. My bike shed is quite close to the rf bridge so trying to figure out if I can link it to my house alarm somehow.