There’s so much you can do. If I wanted to I could even make it monitor my Steam Deck’s battery.

Home assistant is the shit. I’ve got lighting automations based on time of day and via motion sensors within specific timeframes.

Many sensors. Motion, climate, humidity, you name it.

Home theater automations. If I want to watch something, I tell voice assistant (Siri in this case) “turn on home theater.” It turns on the TV, receiver, and Apple TV, and uses the receiver’s API to switch the input to the media input. When I hit play on a video it turns off the living room lights, and if I pause or stop the video it turns them back on.

It has monitoring for all my thermostat sensors, solar, batteries, keeps track of my fridge and freezer temperatures, list goes on.

It also fully supports zigbee antennas and Bluetooth devices over Wi-Fi with simple esp32 Bluetooth extender configs. HAOS is just an outstanding piece of software.

I dunno about that. Hyundais are cheap, and until recently they were pretty reliable cars. I drove an '07 accent for 14 years with zero issues and minimal maintenance. I only replaced it in late 2020 because I was having a house built and moving to a rural area, and needed something that could handle country roads and at least light off-roading.

I compared a bunch of CUVs (compact SUVs) checked out all of them, and finally got it down to the Honda CRV, Toyota RAV4, some Hyundai (Tucson maybe?), and a Kia Sportage (I know, it’s basically a Hyundai, and vice versa).

Every single one of them had some caveat. The Hyundai had a high dash and infotainment blocking part of the view, the CRV had a low front end that caused issues with low obstacles a CVT that struggles with uphill driving. The RAV4 was nice, but cost at least 30-50% more expensive than every other car with few discernable advantages. Plus, several other cars I looked at were CVT with dual clutch, which can burn up and overheat just going uphill.

In the end, it actually was down to the Hyundai and the Kia Sportage.

I bought the Sportage because it was all around balanced, still had an ICE engine, AWD, and Kia Finance had a good deal I qualified for. I got the previous year’s model new from remaining stock with a zero interest rate. Sweet deal, total cost was like $24k. It’s been a good car. Some minor issues and a bit of recall work with the dealerships, but I haven’t had any major problems with it, and I barely have to do any sort of maintenance, just like the old Hyundai.