I invested a lot of time in Home Remote then I sold my house and dismantled everything, packed it away and been just occasionally monitoring this forum. I plan on buying a new house over the next year or so, so I am looking into playing around with Home Assistant. It seems to be the popular choice right now in the DYI Home automation space. I already have a mini pc that I haven’t used in years to convert to a dedicated HA box and I understand I will need a USB antenna as well. I also understand that the polling limitations of older of non plus zwave wall switches has been overcome by Home Assistant so that would be great since I have many older zwave switches and seems like I may not need to buy new zwave plus switches. I still need to test this. Anyway Home Remote was fun and I hope some of you were helped out by some of my tutorials on YouTube but seems like this project has lost support, updates and a dramatic slowdown in user participation here. Anyone using Home Assistant please let us know of your experience. It seems like it may not be as customizable as Home Remote was but still some of the panels look pretty polished from what I have seen.
Hi John,
I completely understand. You switched from iRule to Home Remote (which was a big change), and I know how much work you put into your projects. I’m sticking with Home Remote for as long as possible (everything still works, and thanks to AI, it’s not that difficult to create your own plugins). I wish you every success in buying a new house and integrating your devices into Home Assistant. I’ll drop by the forum from time to time to see if you’re as active there as you were here.
Thank you for all your great posts and helpful videos, which made it easy for me to get started with THR. We’ll miss you here! 
See you soon,
Kalle
Thanks!,.Yeah part of it is since I retired, I just really need a new challenge and project. 
I use both Homeseer and Home Assistant for my home automation needs. I think Home Remote is better suited to just handling AV equipment rather than home automation.
HA has a steep learning curve, much steeper than Home Remote’s. I still use Homeseer as it is easier to use and configure. The Home Assistant has better device integration, so it does serve me.
I do not see that either Home Assistant or Homeseer handles AV devices very well. You will need to keep TheHomeRemote or similar around for that functionality. There are ways to cross communicate between systems, so I let the system that can handle the device the best do the work, with the other systems just sending commands to that system.
BTW - I use a new ZWave 800 stick controller on my Homeseer system, and it handles older ZWave devices just fine (except for a couple of very, very old devices, that were due to be replaced anyway).
The new ZWave system allows for inclusion from a controller far away. The very very old ZWave devices may not understand that “full power” inclusion.
I think Home Assistant has come a long way in 2026 as far as the learning curve. Years ago it was heavily reliant on coding yaml but now has more of a drag and drop UI which keeps coding as a option. Along with that is a hugh user base that contribute their own modules, themes, etc as well as their knowledge. Honestly as complex as my Home Remote build seemed all of the heavy lifting was done by Multi System Reactor (MSR). MSR is a conditional logic engine that runs along side of other home automation systems like Home Remote, Home Assistant, etc., hence the name Multi System Reactor. I ran MSR on my Nvidia Shield which was perfect since it was a low powered always on solution… At the time I was one of early adopters of MSR and was one of only 2 beta testers for the developer for his major 3.0 update. I highly recommend.MSR to run along Home Remote or whatever other system you are using. It is still activity supported and upgraded… We will see where Home Assistant leads me. I have a lot of down time right now to dive into a new project. I took Home Remote as far as I could and some of the new hardware I want to implement has native support in Home Assistant. I am looking at moving away from my legacy Yamaha receiver setup to the Wiim Ultra steamer with wireless speakers for auxiliary rooms.
I agree with David that THR is better for AV. For me at least.
HA has come a long way in the last 5 years I’ve used it and I rarely find an integration that does not exist. Both HA and THR have their place in my home. THR on the wall and table top tablets and HA is the in depth dashboard from my phone.
I put HA dashboards into my THR project and it is amazing! In HA I created dashboards using kiosk mode and bring them into THR using Web Browsers. No reason you cant do both!
Heres a couple examples… ignore the falling snow flakes haha
And a full instance of HA using one of my tabs-
The best of both worlds.
BTW: good to see you back around!!
Looks great JDamore!
I just re-built my entire interface via Home Remote to incorporate adding Home Assistant to my already existing Hubitat ecosystem. I still prefer the Home Remote designer to YAML. I’m not necessarily bad at YAML, but I just got tired of updates bricking certain parts of my YAML dashboards that I was experimenting with, so I took a bunch of the concepts I had done in my YAML HA dashboard, got busy in GIMP making my own designs, and programmed it all in Home Remote. Funny thing is, I only got involved with HA because my old robot vacuum finally died on me, and I couldn’t easily hack my new one into Hubitat/NodeRed, and HA was the answer. I really like HA for the weird “can I do that?” ideas. My current favorite is being able to remote start my truck or my wife’s vehicle from the comforts of my bedroom wall mounted tablet 
I probably need to post some screenshots of my new work.