In progress of building a house and have been investigating home automation ecosystems. Broadly my requirements are, in order of priority:
- Wired or mostly wired for core functionality (e.g. I don’t care if blinds stop working once in a while but lighting, heating and HVAC must be rock stable);
- Must be decentralized (i.e. no cloud; I’ll have a home server, but would rather things continue working when that inevitably goes down too);
- Either cheap or extensible with proper planning.
And so KNX appears to be like a good option, but it isn’t cheap. What really doesn’t sit right with me about KNX, though, is the encrypted component database and proprietary Windows-only tools. Seems like a weird place to spend some inconvenience points at. Especially given that I’m a software engineer and tinkerer by profession, so I will definitely want to fiddle with the automation extensively and craft my own components too.
As thus, are there any alternatives to KNX that are more open to tinkerers?