The author discusses their desire to automate their home and the challenges they faced due to complexity and high prices from vendors. After purchasing smart devices, they were underwhelmed with the limitations of available apps and sought out a more customizable solution. They settled on using Lua and the Mako Server to create their own smart home software, giving them full control over their devices via a REST API. The lightweight Mako Server, which supports Lua and several useful features, allowed the author to create a simple web application for controlling their smart devices that could run on an older Raspberry Pi with low power consumption.
https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/writing-your-own-smarthome-manager.html