It is very often suggested to use a phone to control a smart home system, of course this is a universal and convenient solution, it can either be some kind of application installed on the phone from the manufacturer, for example, there are such offers from Xiaomi and Tuya, and accordingly, you can use these applications to control devices and configure scenarios, turn on and off sockets, switches. and different relays, different sensors to watch, and in principle it is also quite convenient, but the limitation is that for each device, for each ecosystem, you will need to use your own application, who are usually not friends with each other, of course.

You can use any aggregators for this you can use either Yandex, or Apple, or Google, of course there is possible to connect different devices in different ecosystems and to try to do something, well, for example in my opinion is the most advanced course of Yandex turns out that you and the script writing is quite convenient and, in principle, quite well developing its own ecosystem, besides, Yandex and he uses devices such as Tuya, mostly wi-fi device, but recently the principle of Yandex has released a column smart Yandex station second, which already has the ability to connect zigbee devices directly, mostly Akara devices, but it also turns out that you can create a script with devices directly inside the system and the Yandex application, without using any other third-party applications.

Smart home systems such as OpenHAB or Home Assistant also have their own applications, for example, I have both of these systems deployed on a smart home server, then I can connect to both using their applications, it was possible to upload to the Yandex smart home system, but the integration itself into OpenHAB, it has not been supported for some time now, and I had to do my integration with about the same logic, that is, the simplest devices are switches and sockets, and different light bulbs, which work like Lights, but for example, I also made additional different types of devices that the Yandex smart home system allows you to make, there are quite a lot of different devices there, and since I know what my devices can do, what parameters and sensors they have, of course I immediately skip this too and made special classes, which describe these devices.

For example, if it's a light bulb, it can not just turn on and off, but also control different brightness options, modes, and the OpenHAB application itself allows you to work remotely, that is, they have a free server through which you can log in and watch, essentially the same interface and everything that is locally available and through the application is also available over the Internet. The Home Assistant, for example, also has a cloud there, but it's for money, it's paid, there are also some universal phone applications, for example, that allow you to make some dashboard options for management, for example, it can be through the MQTT protocols, you can configure the application to access this server and receive values from it, and then represent the value as visual objects, for example, there is a value of 1 or 0, on or off, then you can process it so that it appears in the application as a switch and you can switch it if It's easy to send some parameter value to the application, then you can also display it in such a dashboard, but of course they are quite inconvenient, so you need to configure each sensor and device separately, I tried, I didn't like this topic, and there is also a problem that if I want to use a remote connection, then I need to use some kind of external MQTT broker, for example, there are separate sites, but they also have restrictions on either the speed of requests, for example, how many requests can come per second, which is sometimes not enough for example, I have a lot of requests per second in my smart home, and very quickly this server will of course start rejecting messages, so you can only send the most necessary commands through it, and thus, of course, you can make such a setting, the server itself is also unavailable from time to time for some reason, maybe this is due to the fact that the server is not in Russia, and the signal is also of poor quality, or the Internet may not be good enough, and it is not very convenient.

There is also such an IFTTT site, this site allows you to set up rules, if something, then do something, such a site is, of course, interesting in principle, and you can do all sorts of integrations there quite well, you can use web hooks to request connection to external sites, but they have now restricted the free versions there only there are three connections, you can use the parameters to try to get around it somehow. I made such settings, but by and large there is no big point in this, and this interface is not so convenient to use all the time, it was used more in the beginning, I tried it for integration with smart home systems if I didn't need to send commands over the Internet or receive any values.

I also set up a connection to my smart home via Telegram, which is probably the most convenient way, of course, you need to specifically visualize all the commands there, if I need to turn the device on or off, then I have to make a special button accordingly, describe it in scripts that will show me and give me this opportunity, or some kind of sensors. for example, which will also show me some value, but for example, it is also transmitted to Telegram and I can request an image from the camera, and the corresponding picture is sent to me.

For example, Yandex also has the opportunity to set up a bot via Telegram. This is, in principle, a very interesting feature. It appeared not so long ago. It allows you to simply write a text in Telegram that will actually be processed on a specific column, because it is linked to the desired column, and you can ask Yandex for some information and, accordingly, it will come to Telegram. The answer is, let's say the value of the sensors or some other information.

Basically, for remote access and control of a smart home from a phone, I use Yandex smart home. Of course, there are some limitations, you can also control it by voice, which is quite convenient, but for example, since there is no phone connection to a room, you need to tell each time which room you need to perform what action, for example, if it is a speaker. if it is being used, then it is being linked and it understands this automatically, so it may turn out that, for example, by requesting to turn on the light, I will simply turn on the light in all rooms.

Well, the common problem with probably all these systems is that it is very difficult to make multi-user access, now you can, of course, make different settings that allow you to connect to the same ecosystem from different accounts, from different phones, but in general it's all just now at the experimental level and it's almost impossible to fully use, for example, if you use voice control, then from the speaker, for example, some speakers can determine who is speaking and who the user is, but for example, Yandex even has the ability to configure a specific single voice as the main one, the rest are additional, but in reality, for example, this parameter is not transmitted to the smart home system in any way and no script can be made based on this information, well, for example, I also have Apple HomeKit configured on iPads, but in general I don't like it in principle, of course they advertise and praise it a lot, but I didn't see it in the there is no user-friendly interface, maybe it is more comfortable in some ways than the Yandex interface, but by and large Yandex is more familiar to me because, for example, it looks more like the OpenHAB interface or even the same Home Assistant.

Automation in a smart home should be useful and create additional comfort, but sometimes everything goes wrong… The reasons for this, and how to configure everything, see on my channel.