Comment by torginus

I think we are in a middle of a dark age.

I was just playing around with home automation, and I have built quite a few custom devices over the past few months.

Just to illustrate what I mean:

I have an old furnace - it's interface is literally: pull this pin down to ground and the furnace starts up. It's incredibly easy to work with. Later furnaces from this manufacturer have some proprietary protocol that seems very difficult to interface with, from what I gathered from the internet.

But, even yet more modern versions support the standardized OpenTherm protocol and is very hackable again.

Something else: Hardware tends to be amortized away into a commodity. A ton of modern devices essentially run on ESP32s, raspberry Pis (or some other open SoC) or smartphone hardware with Android.

I (and others have) just started hacking around with an ESP32-S3 based HMI - it's and LCD screen married to and ESP32-S3, integrated into a very nice case with a small touch screen panel. I was able to whip up a custom professional looking GUI in a couple weekends and integrate it into my (fully local, open source, HA-based) home automation system. It runs ESPHome and uses LVGL to draw the UI.

I've had friends over and they remarked about how nice it looked, and asked about the brand and were suprised when I told them I hacked it together. It looks good enough that you could sell it and works very well.