I know I’ve been quiet here for some time. A promising side project that eventually fizzled, the chaos of home renovations, heavier work responsibilities, two first-time conference talks, and finally a proper vacation — all of it piled up and pushed writing far down the list. I just didn’t have the energy to sit down and write.

Now that we’ve moved and life has settled into something resembling normal, I’m actually excited to revive this blog. And the first story I want to tell is about my adventures setting up Home Assistant with a brand-new KNX installation. It’s been a ride: sometimes smooth, often frustrating, but always interesting.

Why even bother?

KNX is rock-solid at the fundamentals: lights, shutters, heating; the kind of things you want to “just work.”
But if you expect your smart home to feel truly smart with flexible automations, integrations with modern devices and services (think Spotify, robot vacuums), KNX alone won’t get you far. While it’s possible to build some of that using visualization servers, they are pricey and the UI/UX they deliver feels stuck in the 2010s.

This is where Home Assistant shines. It adds flexibility, openness, and modern integrations on top of KNX’s reliability. Done right, the two can make a powerful team. Delegating all the basics to KNX while letting Home Assistant handle the more complex integrations, automations, and most importantly: the user interface. This also means that you have (mostly) standard light switches, which makes the basics easy to control for anyone in the household.

What to expect

Since the full setup is quite involved, this is going to be a multi-part series.

I’ll walk through the basics, how I connected Home Assistant to a KNX interface and made KNX devices controllable through Home Assistant. Along the way I’ll share the hardware and software that made it work, the custom automations I built, and the “wish I’d known this earlier” lessons (quite a few of those!).

And while there were definitely moments of frustration where I just couldn’t understand why it has to be so complicated, I’m left with immense admiration for all the voluntary Open Source work that makes the integration possible at all. Even in the short time I’ve been using it, the UI for KNX in Home Assistant has improved significantly, making it even easier for non-technical users to get started. I still did all of the configuration through YAML files (also because there are some neat ways to utilize AI for the heavy lifting ;))

If you’re setting up KNX with Home Assistant — or just curious about how these two worlds collide — I think you’ll find something useful here.

Next up: wiring the KNX interface and connecting the first devices to Home Assistant. 🚀