Agile development methodologies are widely used in software development for their flexibility and light weight processes. Hardware projects often cannot use agile methodologies to their fullest capacity and may lean to more traditional project management approaches. It gets very challenging when software developed in an agile way needs to be tightly integrated with hardware or depends on hardware features.

We will look at some of the issues caused by different dynamics of software and hardware development cycles, discuss possible approaches to solving them, and I will also share some lessons I learned from my experience of driving development of software and hardware for electron microscopes.

Home automation is a rapidly growing area where Open Source impacts the ecosystem in a significant way. Open Source projects and solutions are often focused on privacy and security and allow users to build fully local home automation.

Let's have a look at the most popular home automation software - Home Assistant, how it is architectured, how the ecosystem looks like, how to leverage the ecosystem, and what you can achieve by using it.