[HN Gopher] Home Assistant - open-source home automation
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Home Assistant - open-source home automation
Author : gjvc
Score : 516 points
Date : 2021-09-15 21:52 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.home-assistant.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.home-assistant.io)
| jvilalta wrote:
| Works great with z-Wave devices on a raspberry pi. I've got a few
| 433mhz sensors as well, integrated with all rtl-sdr. Also other
| raspberry pi devices taking to it via mqtt. Fun stuff.
| function_seven wrote:
| I bought an RTL-SDR dongle years ago thinking I was going to do
| all sorts of awesome things with it. After my initial screwing
| around with it, it landed in a drawer for a few years.
|
| Well a couple of months ago I found this[1] and hacked together
| my own daemon to read my power meter and publish the result via
| MQTT. I then wrote a couple of sensors in Home Assistant to
| estimate my upcoming electric bill and the instantaneous power
| draw of my house.
|
| It's been rock solid so far. I've been surprised how much
| energy I use while sleeping in the middle of the night
| (something like 350W)
|
| [1] https://hackaday.com/2017/12/21/read-home-power-meters-
| with-...
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| How does rtl-sdr compare to say esphome and those cheap 433mhz
| receivers/transmitters? I remember playing around with those a
| long time ago, with arduinos and without esphome, with some
| outlets before wifi outlets became really common.
| solarkraft wrote:
| HASS looked nice initially with all its polish, but I gave up on
| it when I couldn't figure out how to interface with MQTT from the
| web interface and it generally just didn't seem to have many
| features.
|
| I'm going to try OpenHAB next, as I've seen relatively complex
| setups with it.
| Kosirich wrote:
| I'm looking into 2-3 wireless cameras and some movement trigger
| sensor for home security. Besides security, we are getting a dog
| and I want to see what she is doing when we are away. If anyone
| has good ideas, links to equipment they used, or just want to
| share their experience with HASS in regards to home security, it
| will be appreciated. Link to some good project is also great :)
| (I only played with is and connected few sensors I made with
| ESP32s)
| holoduke wrote:
| I have a large mix of devices in my house. From WiFi to Zwave to
| ZigBee. I have about 100 lights, garage doors, various sensors
| and switches. My configuration in HA is insane. Extremely large,
| with a lot of custom configs. I would say: unmaintainable. It
| works almost flawlessly for about 3 years.
| [deleted]
| waynesonfire wrote:
| anyone creating an insolated network for IoT devices around the
| house? I'd be interesting in how this can be achieved.
| herewulf wrote:
| Yes. VLANs.
| stragies wrote:
| Which is only the first half of the story for many
| installations.
|
| If something at your place uses SSDP/MDNS/UPNP/etc to
| communicate/find_each_other, you'll then have to start doing
| multicast bridging/rewriting and other hacks. And for those,
| there is no one-recipe-fits-all.
| franga2000 wrote:
| That's only if you want non-IoT devices (like your phone)
| to communicate with IoT devices directly, right? If you use
| a bridge like HA you can simply have it be in both VLANs
| and control everything through it.
| stragies wrote:
| Well, where do you draw the line? Is e.g. the SmartTV an
| IOT-device, or not?
|
| If you want the TV to reach the Internet for some things
| (e.g. Netflix, Youtube, WhatEv), but also isolate it from
| your other devices, block ads, yet be able to use the
| UPNP-mediaservers in your network, and want to use the
| phone to control it for the things HomeAssistant cannot
| yet do, then you'll run into some difficulties. They can
| be worked around, but will need intimate knowledge of
| protocols and such.
|
| Also some of these issues can be worked around by e.g.
| using HomeAssistant also as UPNP-MediaController, which I
| haven't gotten around to set up yet.
|
| But "true", some categories of smart devices can be
| nicely sequestered into isolated VLANs.
| ulzeraj wrote:
| You can create zeroconf records on standard DNS servers.
|
| A few years ago one of my clients which ran a school wanted
| to give airprint access to his guest network so that
| parents could print documents into the school office
| printers.
|
| Creating those records is a bit of a PITA and you need to
| find out how to replicate SRV and TXT values but it works.
|
| Here is a good source for this type of configuration:
|
| http://www.dns-sd.org/ServerStaticSetup.html
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Funny, I'm finally throwing in the towel and going back to HASS
| after trying to go all node-red. I loathe the GUI experience in
| both, and node-red updates weren't as painless as I read online
| (better than HASS, but now I'm monitoring a litany of NPM
| packages).
|
| HASS seems like the least bad OSS solution for home automation--
| it has a lot of inertia but I'm not a fan of the group (company?)
| making big decisions for the project. I really wish they hadn't
| dictated the end of YAML/declarative configurations.
| tlrobinson wrote:
| Doesn't node-red complement HASS? I use Home Assistant for
| simple things and bridge to node-red for more complex
| automations.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| It can, a lot of users pushed people to use node-red in place
| of HASS automations prior to the automation update earlier
| this year and app daemon. "In theory", node-red can do
| everything HASS can (possibly missing some integrations, see
| inertia comment above), but in reality it's quite a bit more
| complex, especially when you don't have HASS handling all the
| stateful things.
|
| I think the consensus now is to just use HASS, node-red isn't
| necessary?
| tlrobinson wrote:
| Cool, I haven't kept up to date, I'll have to check out the
| latest version.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Best of luck with your upgrades =D
| tout wrote:
| I've found openHAB to be quite stable. Setup is pretty
| heavyweight but I've just had it chugging along happily
| managing BLE, Z-Wave, a few cameras, etc.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Ditto. Even across upgrades it's had very, very few issues -
| and I'm using it for both a bevy of normal home automation
| stuff, and to manage isolated power and water microgrids for
| several homesteads - routing power, switching dump loads on
| and off, balancing battery banks, monitoring tank levels,
| running pumps, alerting on low flow states (time to change a
| filter), and all the rest. It's mission critical for us, and
| hasn't let us down in the two years it's been running the
| show.
| StapleHorse wrote:
| I like Openhab. I hope the userbase and the community keeps
| growing.
| ornornor wrote:
| I didn't love nodered. It just didn't click with my programmer
| mind.
|
| Instead, I found appdaemon along with HASS. This allows me to
| write all my automations as python code rather than dragging
| and dropping boxes around. And it's easier for me to use vs
| HASS yaml files.
| bouke wrote:
| Your post resonates with me, but I dread the yaml
| configuration. I find it very hard to discover available
| settings and every module seems to have a slightly different
| file layout. I'm not a fan of needing the GUI for configuration
| either.
|
| The constant work to keep things updated is a hassle, requiring
| python upgrades unavailable in the raspbian distro meaning slow
| compiles from source (which somehow fails on 3.9 and requires
| dropping to 3.8).
|
| I would be very happy with something that just works, without
| constantly needing fiddling and handholding.
| aequitas wrote:
| > I really wish they hadn't dictated the end of
| YAML/declarative configurations.
|
| Agree here. I wouldn't mind replacing YAML itself with some
| kind of other configuration language or stable configuration
| API as long as I'm able to use a IaC/declarative approach to
| create a immutable/disposable HA instance. But they seem to be
| going more and more toward GUI only configurations. Meaning if
| the application state is broken, you can only rely on
| (outdated) backups or doing everything manually through the GUI
| again.
|
| This, together with the core team's hostile attitude towards
| alternative installation methods and other OSS projects like
| NixOS[0] has really turned me sour against what used to be a
| great and fun open source project to contribute to.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277
| snapetom wrote:
| I gave up on all open source home automation solutions. Home
| Assistant is the "least bad" but that's not saying much at all.
|
| I pony upped for a Hubitat earlier this year, and although the
| GUI is fugly, it just works and I don't have to keep
| babysitting it constantly like I did with Home Assistant.
| Gatsky wrote:
| Not my experience at all, HA has been unfailingly solid.
| robalfonso wrote:
| See, I just went to ha. My hubitat experience was bad. For
| two years I had crashes, failed devices and failed
| automations. The last lockup I had I said enough. At least
| with HA I could get under the hood and deal with an issue.
| Hubitat gui is awful and the rule system is tedious but
| powerful. It was just way too unreliable for me.
| justapassenger wrote:
| Same boat here. I really really really wanted to love home
| assistant. But it's been constant battle to keep it running
| over 3 years of me using it. I'm fighting to keep systems up
| for money at work, and at home I just want something that
| works.
|
| If only one day Hubitat makes usable dashboards (I know there
| are third party ones, but it means either some cloud solution
| that will die one day, or some hacky custom stuff I'll need
| to fight with) then it'll be perfect home automation solution
| for techies IMO.
| ornornor wrote:
| I'm running HASS with the HASSOS VM image and it's pretty
| solid. I've never tried running a custom install of HASS on a
| Linux system I installed separately but I can't imagine that
| being much fun.
|
| HASSOS is pretty much an appliance at that point. I can't
| remember the last time I had to ssh into it. Upgrades,
| backups, etc are all done via the web UI or the iOS app with
| a couple of clicks.
| varjag wrote:
| I (tried) using it since 2017, and there's been a ton of
| breaking changes since. Basically a major redesign of
| everything. The overall trend is a move from
| programmability to (in my experience fragile) UI centric.
| Even worse is when you have some more obscure components
| that just quietly get dropped.
| snapetom wrote:
| > there's been a ton of breaking changes since. Basically
| a major redesign of everything
|
| That's exactly why I stopped using it. I used it for five
| years and witnessed tons of features introduced then
| dropped and re-architectures for no other reason than the
| devs got bored with something. One example is dropping
| support for Python 3.7 earlier this year when 3.7's not
| EOL for another two years. Maintainability is of little
| concern for this project.
| a254613e wrote:
| Agreed. Been using home assistant for years, and right now it's
| probably in the weirdest state as far as configuration/yaml/gui
| goes. And often times you need to go and edit "read-only" huge
| json file that contains every single integration instead of
| individual integration yaml files like it was before.
|
| Nabu Casa (for profit company behind home assistant) made some
| of the decisions that were questionable at best.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > I really wish they hadn't dictated the end of
| YAML/declarative configurations.
|
| Can you elaborate a bit here? I might be on an older version
| but afaict it's still configured via yml configs.
| teamspirit wrote:
| The devs decided to essentially eliminate yaml config files
| in favor of GUI configs. The reasoning being less braking
| changes (no need to individually update your yaml files when
| an update requires it) and easier adoption for new, less
| technical users.
|
| I don't know about op, but I very much prefer config files.
| Using tools like sed or grep to make changes is much faster
| than mouse clicks - but I understand the devs point of view.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I'm not a big fan of that either. I like my workflow of
| using git to version control integrations, dashboards,
| scripts, etc. Not sure how I would do that with dynamic
| configs.
| michaeltlewis wrote:
| Blog clarifying this, and addressing such concerns, here:
|
| https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/04/14/the-future-
| of-...
| barbazoo wrote:
| > the .storage folder contains all Home Assistant managed
| configuration files in JSON format, which in those cases,
| can be stored and versioned in a git repository
|
| Sounds like I can still do what I need. The only
| difference being, those configuration files can also be
| changed via UI which is fine. Thanks for the link.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Been using HA for over a year now to run my Z-Wave+ network of
| sensors and switches. It has a rather steep learning curve but
| should be usable by most software folks. I feel like some of the
| terminology could be changed to make it more familiar and
| understandable, but after a few weeks you'll get the hang of it.
|
| One warning though: If you're running it off an SD card or other
| small, solid-state device, your first priority should be turning
| down the amount of logging. Without reducing log spewage, expect
| your SD card to die within the first few months of use.
|
| I can't complain too much, it's free software and I don't have
| the resources to contribute much right now, but there are some
| sharp edges you need to watch out for.
| c0wb0yc0d3r wrote:
| Anyone have an idea as to why you wouldn't be able to get the PoE
| version with their nice looking case? Too big, too hot?
| roland35 wrote:
| I believe things like Home Assistant are the future of IoT. There
| are always going to be thousands of random devices and sensors -
| many of which may become obsolete or unsupported by their
| manufacturer. A centralized intelligent and well-maintained hub
| which can communicate with many different things really helps
| keep everything glued together and working long term.
| 35mm wrote:
| Can anyone recommend what the best way is for me to set up a
| simple temperature sensor connected to Home Assistant on a
| Raspberry Pi?
| Semaphor wrote:
| Best is hard to say. Depends on what you want. I have 4
| Temperature sensors (2 Aqara temp & humidity sensors, and 2 Hue
| motions sensors that have temperature sensing included)
| connected via Zigbee (using Deconz) to my HA on the PI. No
| issues at all.
| 35mm wrote:
| Sounds like a great solution. What are you using in terms of
| hardware to get Zigbee on your Pi?
| Semaphor wrote:
| The Conbee II (USB Stick)
| reid wrote:
| The UniFi Protect integration is awesome. Turn on outdoor lights
| on motion, disable loud doorbell ding when the dog is sleeping,
| change privacy zones, send critical notifications to bypass
| silent mode on iOS devices when a person is detected while
| away... really amazing stuff.
|
| The HomeKit Controller integration is also neat. All kinds of
| HomeKit compatible devices can just work with Home Assistant.
| Honeywell Lyric is the best example: PIR sensors with local push
| for lighting automation or special alerts when gates open to
| prevent the dog from escaping the backyard.
|
| Edit: More useful things!
|
| I have my washer and dryer in a garage. Can't hear the machines
| inside. The Z-Wave light switches around my house have status
| LEDs, so one LED is dedicated to the washer and dryer status
| based on power draw from the outlet. Works really well. The same
| status LEDs are shared for all light switches around the house,
| so it's a good ambient notification.
|
| The Mac app can provide webcam or mic status as a sensor, which
| turns on a key light when I join video calls and turns on an LED
| on the light switch outside my office to signal when I'm on a
| call.
|
| I also get a push notification on my computer and a LED light on
| the light switches when the Roomba is full. It fills up a few
| times during its typical run while I'm working.
|
| I also have the door status (open/closed/locked) from the Lyric
| as LEDs on the light switches. Very easy to tell if something is
| unlocked or open at a glance while walking around the house.
| paisawalla wrote:
| Amazing write up! Can you provide a link to the switches you
| use?
|
| Also, how does HA know when the dog is asleep?
| function_seven wrote:
| > _Also, how does HA know when the dog is asleep?_
|
| I have the same question! Until OP answers, I'm going to
| guess some accelerometer collar that reports when little
| motion has occurred in 3 minutes?
| reid wrote:
| Haha, just a time based schedule and nothing that fancy.
|
| But if anyone out there has made an API client for the Fi
| collar... let me know!
| reid wrote:
| I use the HomeSeer HS-WD200+ which has programmable LEDs over
| Z-Wave: https://shop.homeseer.com/products/z-wave-dimmer-
| switch-arch...
|
| HomeSeer is coming out with a new model soon so that model is
| discontinued. But the new one looks better since it doesn't
| need a neutral wire!
|
| My dog has really consistent daytime nap times. So I can
| disable the doorbell chime during those times to prevent the
| barking during a delivery. :)
| jkestner wrote:
| Honest question: do you live with other people? I'd ask
| matthew-wegner as well but I can infer that he doesn't.
| teekert wrote:
| Hue turns on my bathroom lights, HA then switches on the fan
| via a tasmota flashed Sonoff. Everybody loves that. How does
| this relate to your remark? I read between the lines that you
| are making poor automation decisions, you need to rethink
| those. Not HA.
| jkestner wrote:
| So you don't have to read between the lines, I don't have
| any home automation. Doesn't solve any problems for me, at
| least nothing that doesn't create new ones.
| reid wrote:
| I live with my wife. It's important to do smart home things
| which work well for everyone in your space!
|
| I don't do a lot of fixed unchanging automation. I do a lot
| more ambient status and voice assistant integration.
|
| It actually was really nice when my lady moved in after our
| wedding because my HomeKit things were able to work right
| away with her Google Home she was used to. :)
|
| The webcam hall status light was to know when either of us
| are in a meeting. We are both working from home so it's like
| a free/busy signal.
| jon-wood wrote:
| Reading between the lines here, I guess the real question is
| "does this stuff work when not everyone is technically
| inclined".
|
| When I first started working in home automation my boss at
| the time had a saying "if you have to press a button, it's
| not home automation". That single phrase is the core of
| making automation work with non-technical users. The house
| should always do the least surprising thing by default, for
| example turning on lights when you enter a room, but only if
| it's dark. Light switches should turn the lights on and off,
| rather than disable the light automation (looking at you
| Hue).
|
| If you can configure things to that extent, then yeah, it
| works beautifully. If everyone has to faff around with a
| mobile app to be able to see where their aiming on a 4am
| toilet run it'll be hated with a passion.
| dagw wrote:
| The huge stumbling block I ran into when I proposed looking
| into home automation with my wife was that we had very
| different ideas of what the "right" thing to do in any
| given situation was. The combination of lights she wants to
| have on when in a room are very different from the ones I
| want to have on, for example. So unless there was face
| recognition so the room knew who was there, it would never
| automatically do the right thing.
|
| Also anything that involved having to use an app to do
| anything was a very hard No.
| teekert wrote:
| Having 1 button to switch an entire room filled with many
| light sources between your wife's and your preference is
| also automation, and exactly at the right level. HA is
| not going to solve disagreements between people ;). In
| this case the alternative would be changing many lights
| manually, right? I mean the face recognition sounds like
| huge overkill and a pita to get perfect.
|
| I have a Hue Tap, which has 4 buttons to program, we set:
| 1: Normal on, 2: Cosy on, 3: Cooking on (bright in the
| kitchen) and 4: All off. Near the couch I have an extra
| Hue switch to dim the couch area even more if desired.
| That works well for us. Atm this doesn't involve HA but
| it would if I had any other brands of lights and I would
| also want other aspects changed (like room temp, i.e.
| "cosy on" could also raise the thermostat by 1 degree,
| because it's couch time) with the same Hue Tap buttons.
| HA is great at having different brands of home automation
| stuff talk to each other, so you can pick the best of all
| worlds.
|
| I just got a smart thermostat, so my "All-off" Hue Tap
| button may just as well set the thermostat to "eco", of
| course only at night because otherwise it may just mean
| the sun being bright enough was the reason I turned all
| lights off. Or, maybe when I set my thermostat to "away",
| HA can signal the rest of the house that the lights and
| the coffee machine can now be turned off, if any were
| still left on, I'd do that with a 10 min delay or so
| because I may still be running around the house to get
| stuff. HA is perfect for this type of logic.
|
| Using a phone for anything is a big No for both of us as
| well. Home automation for us means having single buttons
| that do many things at once. We set timers for our garden
| lighting (dawn=off and sunset=on). And we use some motion
| sensors. In the bathroom for example, the Hue motion
| sensor switches the light on, and then HA turns on the
| fan, through a Sonoff flashed with Tasmota. At night the
| light also switches on but less bright, everybody loves
| this automation (more than the previous manual solution),
| and it's completely in line with Home Assistant's vision
| for Home Automation: [0]. It's easy to over-do Home
| Automation, the people you live with are good indicators
| for when you do so ;)
|
| [0]: https://www.home-
| assistant.io/blog/2016/01/19/perfect-home-a...
| daredoes wrote:
| I have [GE Z-Wave light
| switches](https://www.amazon.com/GE-Repeater-Extender-
| SmartThings-1429...) installed in the wall. They have the
| expected "press up" and "press down" which go to my
| "passive" and "off" room modes accordingly.
|
| They also have "press up 2x" "press up 3x" "hold up"
| "hold up released", and the same for the down direction.
|
| My GF and I use these to switch the room between modes
| that we want. My main modes are "passive" "gaming"
| "movie" "meeting" "off" and "party".
|
| The modes are a state machine written in both node-red,
| using a global state variable that is saved to disk, and
| homeassistant using a select template variable. They stay
| in sync through a node-red flow, so changing the mode
| from either has the exact same result.
| zulfazli wrote:
| My wife prefers bright lights while I prefer them dim. My
| solution was to have the dim lights switch on when motion
| is detected and it is dark. My wife would then use the
| wall switch for the bright lights. This works great for
| the kitchen and bath.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Light switches should turn the lights on and off, rather
| than disable the light automation (looking at you Hue).
|
| Why are you looking at them? The Hue lights wired properly
| do exactly what you describe. You wire them in so they are
| constantly fed with electricity and send smart signals with
| a wall mounted control panel. They sell you this control
| panel. It looks like a switch.
|
| Heck if you are retrofitting a building you you can use
| their wall switch module to adapt any traditional wall
| switch to become a smart switch.
|
| They have the spunk to also work with half-assed
| installations. You can define in what state the bulb should
| be after the power is restored to them. Of course if you go
| this route they can't be turned on when the power to the
| bulb is off. What would you expect them to do? Should they
| pack an RTG in their bulbs to have the option to illuminate
| when the power is off? Should they throw a tantrum and tell
| you off for installing the lights wrong? Of course they
| don't do either of those. They just keep on trucking the
| best they can.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Could they remember if they were off or on? And return to
| that state? Could they interrogate the switch to see what
| state they are 'supposed' to be in when power is
| restored? All of those would be acceptable I think.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Could they remember if they were off or on?
|
| Yes. That is an option. Not a default option because when
| most people flick a switch ON they expect light. If by
| default the light would not come on, they would receive a
| lot of returns. But you can totally set that if option if
| that is your preference.
|
| > Could they interrogate the switch to see what state
| they are 'supposed' to be in when power is restored?
|
| What type of switch? The dumb one they know is on. If you
| have a smart switch they could. But if you have a smart
| switch why would you not wire the bulbs to be always
| powered? (always as in when the circuit breaker is ON,
| not literally always :) )
| matthew-wegner wrote:
| Bolting on to this comment with some other neat things, as a
| fellow HASS enthusiast:
|
| * Every single light in my house moves from dim/orange ->
| bright/bluer -> very dim/orange throughout the day (basically
| like an whole-home f.lux or Night Shift). Sadly still third
| party, but it's easy to use: Circadian Lighting component will
| find it
|
| * I have "night" modes in all my rooms. This is usually a
| single bulb in lowest-brightness full red. You can barely see
| it during the day, but at night it makes bathroom trips a non-
| blinding affair
|
| * I have 6+ speaker zones, on Raspberry Pis mostly. Snapcast
| runs the audio stream, but turning on/off a room mutes the
| speakers in it (walking into a room turns on the lights via
| motion detectors and music continues to follow, which is neat)
|
| * I pipe a lot of text-to-speech messages. Some rooms won't
| play them if the room is off (outer stuff like my garage), but
| others always do (so I hear them). This is more custom now, and
| I even duck the playing music stream for the TTS portion. It
| can take in text, so I do things like have my automation say a
| bunch of things every morning (my age in days, some web-scraped
| snippets, etc)
|
| * $10 power sensor is enough to know when your washer is
| finished. Power for awhile -> running state, no power after
| awhile in running state -> finished. This goes right into the
| text to speech system
|
| * Every room has a 10-button remote (the very, very cheap zap
| remote kind). Most of the layout is the same--room on, room
| off, start music (or skip track if playing), stop music, full-
| bright lights, night lights. This still leaves a few for
| custom-to-the-room buttons, which I use
|
| * Contact sensors on all openings to the house. I let me cats
| into the backyard during the day. Cat access via any
| configuration is still open, and sun is below X degrees? Text
| to speech
|
| * Most of my logic is Node-RED (another comment here about
| that), which gives me a lot of flexibility. I have a global
| "house" mode, which I can set to guests or party to suppress
| most of my assumptions that I'm home alone
|
| * Example of one of those: My setup knows if I'm using one of
| my two desk computers. If I am, and house is in "home" (alone)
| mode, I turn off all the other rooms in the house
|
| I could go on--I went pretty deep when I first set up Home
| Assistant, but that was years ago now. Every now and then I do
| a major update or add functionality to smooth over something
| that's been bugging me
|
| Once you hit some tipping point of soooo many things available
| as sensors or services in HASS, adding completely new
| functionality is a very incremental change
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Bolting on
|
| My favourite is the automatic switch on for the espresso
| machine at 6am each day. It changed everything.
| athenot wrote:
| That is a good one. Many years ago, I did this with a dumb
| timer on the outlet.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| I'm getting imposter syndrome from reading these two posts.
| Just how much time did you guys spend on this?
| matthew-wegner wrote:
| I have the same answer as reid, basically!
|
| I don't even know offhand how old my installation is, but
| it's been a couple of years for sure. Two things really
| help with longevity:
|
| * Local-only devices. My only cloud-integrated thing is a
| Nest thermostat, and only because I already had it before
| my HASS adventures. Lights/sensors/etc is all offline, so
| it can't break from some company giving up on a product
| line
|
| * Home Assistant itself is quite stable as software! I do
| keep my install up to date here and there, but not
| religiously. Once every year or so, a minor deprecation
| thing might finally drop off completely and need a quick
| configuration update, but very rarely. (I'm pretty deep
| into a "homelab" style setup too; my HASS install is a
| linux VM, I have a separate storage layer, etc)
|
| So early on, it was probably a few hours of work a week,
| but these days I can go several months without even
| thinking about it or changing anything.
|
| Quick note on audio: I use Spotify out of sheer laziness. I
| think they've lightened up since I did my initial setup--or
| just stabilized API maybe, but years ago it was common for
| libspotify-type client integrations to break and need an
| update.
|
| So now my audio stream is routed out of the linux VM itself
| at the system level. Unless Spotify is willing to drop the
| linux client completely, they can't break my use case. And
| if I ever switch back to my own local file collection, I
| just need something that can play audio on linux to do it.
| I could even have a line-in wire hanging off that hardware
| to play any audio source broadcast to my Snapcast network
| too.
| reid wrote:
| It's a few hours a month here and there over several years.
| I started with a few smart bulbs while renting and I have
| evolved the system as I moved to a new home and installed
| more things to solve a problem. I didn't do all of this in
| a weekend!
|
| What's nice is the Home Assistant automations tend to stay
| working without major overhaul far longer than stuff I used
| in the past, such as SmartThings which I no longer use.
| Always better to use your own small server and code for
| things like this. IOT platforms and services change way too
| much and it's a lot more work to maintain than local HA.
| tremon wrote:
| _the Home Assistant automations tend to stay working
| without major overhaul far longer than stuff I used in
| the past_
|
| This is a major selling point, and also why I haven't
| bought into any cloud-based home automation system
| (unlikely I ever could get past the surveillance aspect
| anyway). These systems are supposed to last as long as
| your home does, you don't want to replace/overhaul the
| system every few years because the supplier wants to earn
| more money from you.
| pxtail wrote:
| It's all pretty impressive until I start to imagine myself
| renting an apartment or house like this or being a guest in
| house like this. Then it fills me with dread and starts to
| send shivers down my spine. Every damn single activity
| monitored, human being like NPC in Sims game - wth,bed
| occupancy sensors?
| matthew-wegner wrote:
| I think that's a fair response! It's worth clarifying a
| few things. In general, I think people tend to have that
| reaction because there's a growing assumption that
| "technology" = "the cloud"--i.e. a Google or Alexa kind
| of smart speaker that is very clearly vacuuming all kinds
| of data:
|
| - Home Assistant runs locally, in my house. None of this
| data is uploaded anywhere outside of my control
|
| - I live alone. And really, the vast majority of my
| automation really uses/needs that assumption (computer
| activity turning off other rooms, etc)
|
| - I don't have any interior-facing cameras, because yeah
| --even with those also purely-local, it's very odd to
| know they're there. Years ago, when I did leave the house
| every day for work, I had a living room camera to keep an
| eye on my cats. I completely de-powered its PoE port
| based on whether my automation knew I was home or not--it
| was only on if I was gone. There are a couple of ways to
| do person tracking, but I just used my phone and Home
| Assistant's app
|
| - I do have a global override for a "guest" mode, mostly
| so lights don't inexplicably turn off. That mode turns on
| automatically when my girlfriend uses her keypad to
| unlock my door
|
| That said, I do occasionally browse the wider HASS forums
| and communities. I don't have kids, but I see people use
| some automation pretty effectively for things like chore
| management/reminders. People do stuff like put cheap
| tablets somewhere central with status updates of who is
| supposed to take out the trash, reminders if any
| perimeter doors are open, etc
| crooked-v wrote:
| > walking into a room turns on the lights via motion
| detectors
|
| Do you know if there's anything good in this space yet for
| detecting presence (not just entry)? There are some spots in
| my home where I only want the lights on while I'm there, and
| I haven't found anything yet that can reliably detect that
| somebody's actually left a space other than Hiome
| (https://www.hiome.com), and that doesn't work for something
| not delineated by a doorway.
| noyesno wrote:
| Could a CO2 sensor do the trick?
| dukoid wrote:
| Can you recommend one for USB or ZigBee that works with
| HA?
| tpxl wrote:
| If you're willing to tinker, a camera that compares the
| current image with a "baseline" image and says it's
| occupied if there's enough change. You'd have to have an IR
| or NIR camera to work at night, and take special care
| around things like doors/drawers/curtains that move.
| jon-wood wrote:
| Room occupancy is something I've been playing with for
| several years, and I'm yet to find a really good solution
| to it. Having said that Hass has a Bayesian filter
| component which can give you a probability of occupancy
| based on a bunch of weighted inputs, for example if a
| motion sensor triggered in the last minute the room is
| probably occupied, likewise if the TV in the living room is
| playing video.
|
| I keep toying with the idea of a bunch of BLE beacons in
| every room and then using signal strength triangulation in
| a mobile app to determine which room someone is in but that
| falls over the moment someone leaves their phone in a room.
| curryst wrote:
| That honestly seems like a nice feature. No more trying
| to call yourself when you lose your phone, it's in
| whichever room has the lights on.
| moepstar wrote:
| There's a project called "room-assistant", however you'd
| need to have multiple Raspberry Pis running it in various
| locations...
|
| https://www.room-assistant.io/
| matthew-wegner wrote:
| It's a good question! I'm super curious about that myself.
|
| I do have a bed occupancy sensor, in the form of a SparkFun
| OpenScale under the legs. There was a Raspberry Pi in the
| room for speakers already, so it's just on that.
|
| It needs some fancy calibration to deal with temperature
| changes, but I just constantly tare it when my desktop
| computer is active (and I'm home alone I'm certainly not on
| the bed). That's been super responsive and great. Bed
| transitioning from empty->occupied when bedroom is in night
| mode turns off all the other rooms again.
|
| In general, I've found that it's a lot easier to track
| actions than presence. So computer activity, or a door
| opening.
|
| I did just flash some ESP32s with this, which is a way to
| report bluetooth signal for a single device across a
| network of listeners. They can report direct to HASS via
| MQTT, but it also has its own persistent python thing to
| more carefully triangulate. No idea if it'll work reliably
| or fast enough to really be useful: https://espresense.com/
| tpxl wrote:
| Man I'd love to live in your house for a couple of days to
| see what it's like.
| throwoutway wrote:
| "$10 power sensor "
|
| Which sensor do you recommend. I am searching but some are
| low amps
| matthew-wegner wrote:
| My washer is pretty low power consumption. I forget what
| exactly I set the threshold to, but when I did I was
| watching its output history. It spends a lot of time under
| 100w, and only irregularly spikes higher.
|
| It is possible to watch much higher-power systems with
| power clamps--the same magnetic sensor kind you can put on
| your entire house power feed. I have one on my 220v dryer
| for completeness, although I never even bothered to rig up
| automation. There's no real penalty for ignored dry clothes
| like there is for ignored wet clothes--I guess it'd be
| useful for people with roommates, though.
|
| Specifics devices will depend on zigbee vs z-wave vs wifi.
| If I were starting totally fresh, I'd go all zigbee.
| bombcar wrote:
| If I were starting _totally_ fresh, I 'd be paying
| careful attention to the smart panel setups
| https://www.leviton.com/en/products/residential/load-
| centers and what they can do, above and beyond individual
| outlets.
| reid wrote:
| I use two TP-Link HS110 outlet plugs for power consumption
| monitoring for my washer and dryer.
|
| My dryer is gas so I don't need anything special. Would
| maybe check out the smart Leviton load center mentioned in
| this thread for new construction.
| reid wrote:
| For whole home power, I use a Rainforest Automation EMU-2.
|
| It's connected as a USB serial device to integrate into HA.
| The HA forums have a custom component for it.
|
| This can be useful for monitoring the entire home power. No
| load center clamps needed, it communicates with my power
| meter over Zigbee.
| throwoutway wrote:
| "The Z-Wave light switches around my house have status LEDs, so
| one LED is dedicated to the washer and dryer status based on
| power draw from the outlet."
|
| Could you elaborate on how this works? Which Z-Wave light
| switches measure the power draw?
| mleo wrote:
| Typically, there is zwave plug measuring the power draw and
| sending data to hub. Based on the data, an event is triggered
| to change an LED on a light switch. HomeSeer has zwave
| switches with LEDs used for dimmer feedback than can be
| programmed to show a color. I use the LEDs on one switch to
| match the state of two exterior door locks. Green/unlocked
| and Red/locked. I use another LED on the switch to match
| state of the Litter Robot, automatic cat litter box. Blinks
| red when full and needs to be emptied.
| reid wrote:
| Yup, exactly this! I send custom documented Z-Wave commands
| to switch the wall switch dimmers LEDs into "status mode"
| and can then control each one with a custom color and
| blink.
|
| I just send the same commands to all the dimmers so they
| all show the same thing.
| matthew-wegner wrote:
| Not OP, but I would guess they don't directly.
|
| If it's possible to set those status LEDs arbitrarily, you
| could use another power-sensing outlet's data, so a different
| device entirely.
|
| This is the magic of Home Assistant in general--it's really
| just a big bag of sensors (temperature/power/times/etc) and a
| bag of services (turn on, set to X, change color). You can
| have sensors from anything trigger a service on anything
| else.
| zrail wrote:
| How do you disable the doorbell chime?
| reid wrote:
| I have a UniFi Protect G4 Doorbell, so it's as easy as
| calling the service unifiprotect.set_doorbell_chime_duration
| and setting the duration to 0.
|
| I still get phone and other notifications when the button is
| pushed! Just no indoor bell.
| zrail wrote:
| Whoa! That's awesome. I didn't know that that existed.
| djanogo wrote:
| I currently use HA OS for my automation and have bad experience
| with it and would immediately jump ship if there is any other
| alternative. I have my lights, thermostats and MOST importantly
| my pool pump automated with it. Home automation is meant to
| control devices VERY VERY reliably. The previous pool automation
| system lasted outdoors for over 30 years, I don't trust HA to
| last even 3 week without code issues or reboots. Most of the UI
| decisions don't seem well thought out.
|
| LONG RANT
|
| 1. Too many moving pieces to get Z-Wave working, they deprecated
| native Z-Wave support and now use 2 or 3 different JS open source
| projects whose reliability is still in-flux! (running on node!,
| NPM is part of your home automation)
|
| 2. Z-Wave network randomly goes down, if you enable logging to
| debug the issue it will only show top 20 or 30 lines, no
| indication on how to access rest of the log data. After you
| google for it, you have install addons for SSH and go through
| bunch of steps to enable it and then google where the logs are
| getting stored. WHY the heck are logs not downloadable in UI?
|
| 3. Forced updates, yes the system will auto update after certain
| days and restart itself. No way to disable it, the dev for OS
| actively refuses providing option to disable auto updates. They
| push updates VERY frequently, multiple times every month, I guess
| my home automation is that dev's russian roulette? Screw your
| pool pump if it runs too long or doesn't run or burns itself
| because update messed up automation task.
|
| 4.iOS app makes your system cloud dependent!. I don't think the
| dev who writes iOS app uses HA himself. The app in your own home,
| on your own Wifi requires the local computer named connection to
| have valid SSL certs, it can't save signature of self signed or
| cloudflare or letsenrypt cert and verify that for future
| connections. You have to override your router DNS resolution and
| use public domain name. App has option for internal/external
| URL's but uses WiFi name to decide which to use, which requires
| iOS location permission!. BRUH, why don't you try local URL
| connection in parallel and if it connects, use it?, Why is there
| no option to ignore local URL cert verification and make app not
| internet/cloud dependent?
|
| 5. Number of "ideas" to name stuff, "Blue Prints" - Auomation
| template, "Scripts" - Automation without trigger, "Automation",
| "Devices" - DuckDNS and File Editor are devices, "Entities",
| "Helpers" - Variables for use in automation, "Scenes" - Goodluck,
| "Addons", "Integrations"
|
| 6. Significantly less reliable than Samsung Smart Home, which ran
| for 5 years and rebooted less than dozen times (and Samsung
| notified me about update reboot through email ahead of time). If
| you can't beat Samsung's software reliability that says
| something.
|
| 7. The left navigation screen is cluttered with irrelevant(for
| me) hard-coded links. (Energy - for solar panels because
| everybody got them?, Map - Why?, Media Browser - Why would I want
| my automation server to deal with video streams - is it reliable
| home automation or storage for movie files?),
|
| 8. Log book and History, why aren't these same thing with
| different visual options?, it's like 2 people developed them
| without talking to each other and both had git permission to hard
| code those links in left nav.
|
| 9. History defaults to 3 hours, if you change it and leave that
| screen it will go back to 3 hours again. Good luck debugging any
| issue which spans more than 3 hours.
|
| 10. iOS app starts auto-tracking iOS device properties without
| asking if user wants them, these properties flood your logbook
| and history, can't disable or delete these easily. Dozen of these
| properties start showing up in every screen and drop down.
| meteo-jeff wrote:
| Hi balloob! I was showing my non-commercial weather API project
| [0] to HN 2 days ago. Another HN member was already pointing out
| your project.
|
| If you are interested, we could have a look at integrating
| weather data without the need of your users to sign up for API
| plans with their personal data.
|
| [0] https://open-meteo.com
| nickvanw wrote:
| Home Assistant really hits the right spot on the "enthusiast" vs
| "product" spectrum for me - it's flexible and configurable, but
| also easy enough to set up that I basically spent almost no time
| actually making it work.
|
| I've got it hooked up to a Z-Wave Hub so that I can control
| mechanized blinds with HomeKit (where no native integration
| exists), all the way over to Volvo On Call to report where my car
| is, how much gas is in the tank, and what the odometer reports.
| It's got a great community, and isn't too difficult to extend
| that it's not worth mucking around in the guts when I really want
| something to work.
| MrDunham wrote:
| I just started switching to Home Assistant and LOVE it. Rather
| shocked to see this is just now being posted to HN to be honest.
|
| Up until the switch I've had a patchwork system consisting of
| Alexa, Smart Life (app), Smart Things, and a lot of digital duct
| tape.
|
| Having both 1) a central "command center" and 2) Zigbee/Z-Wave
| capabilities (requires a dongle) suddenly opens up so much more
| opportunities than WiFi components alone. EG I've attached door
| sensors to my garage doors to trigger lights and notify my
| dumbass when I leave the garage open at night.
|
| Plus, I'm no longer locked into one brand's ecosystem and can
| keep my patchwork hardware setup.
|
| Big fan here, strongly recommended.
|
| Note: I have no association with any smart home brand/equipment
| nor home assistant... though I'd consider being associated with
| HA.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| > Rather shocked to see this is just now being posted to HN to
| be honest.
|
| Home Assistant frontpages on HN probably every other month,
| fear not, lol.
| stragies wrote:
| I also use HomeAssistant, and am quite happy with it, but i wish,
| they would start including the
| [`remote_homeassistant`](https://github.com/custom-
| components/remote_homeassistant) addon.
|
| It solves the Usecase, where not all BT(LE) devices in the house
| are reachable from the main HA, and you need remote "pickups" for
| their signals, and then want to integrate them back into the
| "master instance". It also solves a bunch of other problems, like
| integrating some sensors of the HA of your holiday home into the
| HA of your main home.
|
| The author describes the rationale better here:
| https://github.com/home-assistant/architecture/issues/246
|
| For some reason, NabuCasa doesn't want to integrate it. Maybe
| they see it as competing with an own upcoming (cloud?) solution
| of their own?
| splitbrain wrote:
| Instead of running full blown secondary HA instances for that,
| simply use ESPhome on a ESP32. I used that method to pick up
| the signals of a couple of bluetooth hygrometers in the cellar:
| https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2021-08/16-humidity_control_...
| stragies wrote:
| But I already have devices running linux-SBCs with "free"
| bluetooth in most rooms. Why should I need to add ESP32s just
| for that?
|
| And what about the second-home-case I also mentioned?
|
| Also, I use remote_homeassistant also for e.g HDMI-CEC-
| control of devices in other rooms/places, which ESPHome
| cannot do.
|
| (I agree though, ESPhome@ESP32 is a viable solution for some
| subset of situations)
| vxxzy wrote:
| With the HomeKit and UniFi integration I can finally say "Hey
| Siri, turn off the Xbox internet"
|
| I do have to say, the amount of integrations are quite
| remarkable. I've been running Homeassistant for about two years
| now. It can only see it getting even better.
| balloob wrote:
| Founder Home Assistant here.
|
| Home Assistant is turning 8 years this week. To celebrate we have
| launched crowdfunding campaign for Home Assistant Amber, a device
| for both beginners and home automation enthusiasts and the
| easiest way to get started with Home Assistant.
|
| For more info see https://www.crowdsupply.com/nabu-casa/home-
| assistant-amber
| oaiey wrote:
| Product request: make it simple to create devices. Doing custom
| entities in the config, i miss those.
| maartenh wrote:
| I worked around this by creating a button that runs a git
| commit & push, and an iframe that points to a local running
| flask app that renders a <pre><code>{{ shell("git
| status")}}</pre><code>. Not as nice as fully declarative
| YAML, as this also captures the data files, but at least I
| have point in time restore.
| dkarp wrote:
| Just trying to see the benefit of the Home Assistant Amber over
| a Raspberry Pi 4 2GB.
|
| It looks like you get:
|
| * Zigbee module ($45 for rp4 https://phoscon.de/en/raspbee2)
|
| * PoE module ($20 if desired for rp4
| https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14882)
|
| * M.2 Slot (but no SD card slot)
|
| * battery powered RTC
|
| * A case
|
| It's priced at $149 with all that, whereas rp4 2GB w. zigbee
| and PoE would be $45 + $45 + $20 = $110, so price seems
| reasonable if you need all those things as you're getting the
| rtc, m.2 and case all in a nice package.
|
| My use would probably only need the Zigbee module and I can 3D
| print a case, so I'd go with the rp4 especially as I have a
| bunch lying around anyway! But Seems like a really nice package
| if you need all those things, and especially PoE is nice to
| have built in.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Just trying to see the benefit of the Home Assistant Amber
| over a Raspberry Pi 4 2GB._
|
| I'm guessing largely the "for beginners" part in the
| description. That and people who lack time or for other
| reasons want something working out-of-the-box?
| Wheaties466 wrote:
| Right now, I have an issue with a third party add on where if
| I upgrade the host OS it doesn't pass USB devices the same
| way to the guest container. Its stuff like this where I don't
| want to designate the time to figure it out. Where an out of
| the box solution would more than likely alleviate that and
| have more people working on a solution for everyone.
| dkarp wrote:
| Yea good point, although since it's a raspberry pi compute
| module anyway I wonder how different support will be.
|
| The Zigbee module is the main place that support will be
| better
| cryo wrote:
| Note the Zigbee / RaspBee II in your link contains a battery
| powered RTC already.
| dkarp wrote:
| Good spot! That settles it for me then
| jsight wrote:
| The main thing that I notice is the lack of wifi and 2GB of
| RAM. I think it'd be easy for that to get tight with some of
| the big add-ons and I'd think the consumer space is exactly
| where you'd want wifi.
|
| Otherwise, it looks like a pretty decent package, though.
| InsomniacL wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| I feel like you're missing an opportunity by launching this as
| a DIY type device. That market segment can already cater for
| themselves with a Raspberry pi etc..
|
| You've made big leaps with the Config Flow system, I feel like
| the time is right to launch a fully polished device. Cater for
| the people who don't want to ever see the PCB, they're tech
| savy but want a pretty device to sit on the mantle piece with a
| GUI that just works.
| croon wrote:
| Sorry if this is a stupid question, but is there a reason for
| not having z-wave support on Amber? It wasn't mentioned in the
| picture and no ctrl+f "wave" hits on the page.
|
| I'm very excited about this device. I've been using Smartthings
| and then IKEAs gateway, but haven't been happy with their
| performance and features.
| jon-wood wrote:
| The same is true of Blue, the current iteration of the
| hardware, and I believe its because people who are into home
| automation enough to buy a dedicated Home Assistant box
| probably already have a bunch of hardware and opinions on
| whether they like Z-Wave, Zigbee, HomeKit, 433mhz radios, or
| pulses fired down their power lines. Its much easier to
| provide some hardware which can support any of those via USB
| and GPIOs.
|
| Also, Z-Wave licensing is an absolute nightmare, and
| significantly expensive.
| croon wrote:
| That makes sense, thanks for the thorough response.
| teekert wrote:
| I just want to say: Thank you.
|
| Whenever I buy smart-home stuff I first check if it is
| supported by HA. (So no more Kasa, and Nest was a huge
| compromise, I'm thinking there is a place for HA to make a
| [OpenTherm] Thermostat, like you made the P1 smartreader
| ["SlimmeLezer", reads energy and gas usage in the
| Netherlands]). The new Energy dashboard is extremely cool and
| useful and it's making a difference.
|
| I love what you are doing and it's making Home Automation/IoT a
| better place. It is how Home Automation should be, with privacy
| and local control as founding principles. Keep it up.
|
| Edit: Amber looks great! M.2 nice! I thought you were all about
| Odroid internally, so I'm a bit surprised it has a Pi compute
| module, I like that though. What drove that decision? Maybe you
| can go on the Self-Hosted podcast [0] again and talk about
| Amber, I enjoyed the previous interview [1] :)
|
| [0]: https://selfhosted.show/
|
| [1]: https://selfhosted.show/45
| CrazyPyroLinux wrote:
| SelfHosted and all the other shows at jupiterbroadcasting.com
| are fantastic! (Especially Coder Radio.) If anyone here
| somehow hasn't heard of them yet, congrats you're one of
| today's 10K. :)
| teekert wrote:
| Coder Radio never really sticks with me, I'm a big fan of
| Linux Unplugged (LUP) though. I also enjoy Linux Action
| News (LAN).
| edelans wrote:
| I second this. I tried other platforms (jeedom, domotics)
| before stumbling into HA a few years ago, and my Home
| Assistant experience was so much smoother than the others. I
| never looked back. Most of the things just worked. When it
| did not, the community was super helpful and welcoming in the
| forums, even with the noobs, this is a big differentiator.
| Thank you.
| goodpoint wrote:
| I don't use Home Assistant because it's not being packaged by
| Linux distributions.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Then submit a PR to you local repository maintainers! The
| rest of us thank you for your service.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Various people tried but the project is not friendly
| towards packaging efforts.
| kop316 wrote:
| I would encourage you to look here for context:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277
| goodpoint wrote:
| Whoa, that was really bad. I'll stay far from HA.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| It probably deserves its own distribution at this point. HA
| comprises multiple containers and container management so it
| would probably be an invasive install to your host OS.
| zrail wrote:
| It already has its own distribution.
|
| https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system
| ingenium wrote:
| They release pretty frequent updates (monthly), with features
| added in most of them. It honestly doesn't really make sense
| to package it with the distro. Home Assistant 1 year ago was
| missing a lot of nice features in the present version. Plus
| fixes for integrations that stopped working reliably due to
| API changes (Ecobee comes to mind), etc.
|
| The best/easiest way to run it is to use Docker. They have a
| script that will set it up for you. After that, the container
| can basically self update and self manage. Any addons that
| you want to use are installed as separate docker containers
| that talk to the main home assistant container. It's super
| seamless and easy.
|
| In my case, I just setup a barebones Debian VM and ran their
| setup script. It took care of all the Docker stuff and got it
| up and running.
| kristianpaul wrote:
| This is very interesting. I host hass my self and probably will
| get one. Have you considered bundling it with hardware to also
| measure and control home devices?
| JGM_io wrote:
| Why not collab with the pine64.org peeps?
|
| They have a great amount of hardware already available and lots
| of knowledge to accelerate and cheapen your roadmap.... If you
| are willing to share the design of course.
| kop316 wrote:
| If I could ask, is there a reason that your development team is
| hostile to others packaging Home Assistant:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277
|
| To the point that they will threaten to relicense their own
| software:
| https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326#issuecomment-86...
|
| And when they ask about it: https://community.home-
| assistant.io/t/consider-to-avoid-addi...
|
| It gets delisted.
|
| As the author of FOSS tools, I have worked to make sure things
| I have developed get packaged and used, and I have even spent a
| fair amount of time helping others to port it to their systems,
| even if it does nothing to help my use case. Frankly, seeing
| tsuch a hostile stance towards redistribution makes me wary of
| using it.
| arcbyte wrote:
| I just wasted half an hour reading through the threads.
|
| The gist is that NixOS has some weird dependency management
| that overrides Home Assistant's in a way that makes HA on
| NixOS a unique experience. And NixOS is not done repackaging
| HA, so it is in an unfinished state that only advanced users
| should attempt. ThIS will inevitably confuse users. Those
| users will then go to HA for support and will be unable to
| get it. HA doesn't want to support that and was pretty clear
| about it. Then this Jorg person got all up in arms and threw
| a hiss fit all over the internet and everybody got tense.
| kop316 wrote:
| NixOS offers reproducible builds, which is why their
| package manager is the way it is. pip doesn't seem to offer
| very good support for that: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkg
| s/pull/126326#issuecomment-86... (I don't use pip so I
| don't know enough to comment on it)
|
| The NixOS also offered several ways to prevent just
| "go[ing] to HA for support and will be unable to get it":
|
| https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326#issuecomment-8
| 6...
|
| https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326#issuecomment-8
| 6...
|
| Also, if you look, the HA dev has the same complaint about
| Fedora:
|
| https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326#issuecomment-8
| 6...
|
| So it is not just NixOS's "weird dependency management".
|
| The threat to relicense the software came after the NixOS
| devs offering several ways to prevent more burden, and
| after the HA dev discovered Fedora packages it too:
|
| https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326#issuecomment-8
| 6... (Feel free to scroll up from here to find the other
| two linked comments)
| 3np wrote:
| Thanks for posting and your service!
|
| Any chance declarative configuration (tank or any other format)
| will be getting a second chance? Like many here it's the one
| way of working with HASS that feels/felt _nice_.
| maweki wrote:
| Yeah, I started out orchestrating Home Assistant via Ansible
| throughout many devices in my home.
|
| Now I feel that it would take me days to recreate the
| configurations that I needed to make with the UI.
|
| Deprecating yaml is bad for configuration versioning.
| alex3305 wrote:
| Nice to see HA getting some love on HN. A colleague recommended
| it to me about 3 years ago as an alternative to Domoticz. I've
| migrated back than and haven't looked back since. I consider
| myself a real Home Assistant enthousiast. I've contributed some
| small amounts to the project, created and maintain my own add-ons
| and love to share my configuration with others.
|
| Although most of the things currently just work, especially with
| the (migrated) UI integrations. Some things still feel very
| unfinished, like blueprints. Which was a terrific idea, but
| maintaining and keeping those up to date is an absolute nightmare
| and you will have to that yourself [1]. Same with battery powered
| devices. When they work, it's all great, but having to watch
| their battery level is just a hassle. You can create your own
| automation to do that for you, but it seems unnecessary.
|
| For me the community also sometimes feels very hostile. For
| instance, you can have a Portainer add-on, but installing other
| Docker images makes your system 'unsupported'. Same with some
| blacklisted images [2], which break Home Assistant Supervisor. Or
| when the maintainer of one of the add-ons completely ignores a
| breaking issue after a day [3].
|
| 1. https://community.home-assistant.io/t/reload-automations-
| aut...
|
| 2. https://github.com/home-
| assistant/supervisor/blob/main/super...
|
| 3. https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-adguard-
| home/issues/1...
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| If you want to do anything more than just run Home Assistant
| with the system it's on, I recommend ditching their whole OS
| and Supervisor, and just running HA Core in a virtualenv.
|
| The developers have shown that they're very opinionated about
| how their software should be used, and they're hostile to
| everything that falls outside of that. That makes their OS
| totally unusable as a general-purpose solution. Besides, it's
| an OS that doesn't get regular security updates, so that alone
| should disqualify it from serious use.
| Gatsky wrote:
| Well their approach allows them to deliver software that
| works without being inundated by issues related to someone's
| peculiar set up. I don't think 'hostile' is a very fair
| assessment.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| I totally understand that they don't want to support
| peculiar setups, and I get why non-standard setups are
| labeled as unsupported. But actively asking for your
| software to not be packaged, even under another name, and
| threatening to change the license to prevent that [0], is a
| whole other ballgame, and I _do_ consider that hostile.
| Hopefully this was just an extreme outlier, but the desire
| to not have people use it in ways the developers don 't
| like, even if they aren't being bothered with it, seeps
| through in a lot of their work.
|
| Of course it's their right to steer their project and
| decide what you can and cannot do with their software, but
| it does make Home Assistant significantly less attractive
| for lots of people that don't agree with all their choices
| (and judging by the mixed feedback in this thread, that's
| not a negligible group).
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277
| kop316 wrote:
| FWIW, I am in the same camp as you. They seem oddly
| hostile to FOSS development (as shown in your comment and
| the top comment you replied to), and as such, I hesitate
| to use it for that reason.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| I also found the user/support community hostile.
| michaelmior wrote:
| One of my favorite uses of Home Assistant so far has been to
| allow to be a bridge for voice control for cheap Bluetooth
| lights. I'm running it off a Raspberry Pi and wrote my own code
| to control the lights based on a reverse engineered description
| of the protocol I found online. HA makes it easy to connect to
| Google Assistant and Alexa as well.
|
| It's also great being able to set whatever rules for automation I
| want. Far more powerful than IFTTT or any routines with Google
| Assistant or Alexa.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Yep. Like many here I appreciate the idea of Home Assistant, but
| the abstraction on top of abstraction is a little disappointing,
| and seems like _too much_ for someone who 's pretty comfortable
| shell scripting..
|
| ..so yes, thats kind of what I'm fishing for. Is anyone aware of
| something a little more shell-oriented?
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| You can try pyscript (https://github.com/custom-
| components/pyscript), which allows you to write automations in
| plain Python.
| jonwest wrote:
| Node red is probably closer to what you're looking for, though
| it's JavaScript and not shell, it'll give you a lot more
| flexibility.
| ornornor wrote:
| Some say nodered, I personally didn't like it.
|
| Appdaemon however is exactly what I wanted. It can do anything
| python can and there is no drag and drop UI, you write actual
| code to make things happen.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| Is appdaemon standalone or does it require HomeAssistant?
| ornornor wrote:
| I'm not sure if you can run it without HASS. I run it with,
| and I think it would be much harder without.
| JustinAiken wrote:
| I used to use this quite heavily, but about a year ago the move
| away from YAML made it too hard to keep a declarative config that
| can be checked into source control...
|
| Ended up giving up and just have a dumb home now.
| nijave wrote:
| HA also has a pretty great community. I've done a couple small
| changes and have had very positive experiences
| rcarmo wrote:
| I've been trying HA yearly (as my home set up is essentially
| HomeKit/homebridge with Node-RED bolted on to expose unsupported
| devices) and it always strikes me as very declarative and finicky
| to configure, requiring either maintaining a bunch of YAML files
| or clicking through screen after screen of longish forms.
|
| I wonder if there are any plans to make the UX feel simpler and
| less crowded...
| teekert wrote:
| I think that is priority 1 for them, after starting as a yaml
| first system, you can now even add automation using natural
| language (never used that though). It will get less complicated
| for sure. As for the "crowded", I think that's up to you.
| edcastro wrote:
| It already is. With the latest changes, almost everything can
| be done through the UI, hardly ever I touch YAML files.
| gregable wrote:
| Ive just gotten started, but what I like so far is based on
| node-red but only using HA triggers, functions, and HA call
| service nodes.
|
| Essentially I use the trigger blocks to schedule my function
| calls. The function then ignores the inputs entirely and just
| inspects the variables from home assistant that it cares about,
| it then sends this output to any devices I want to toggle.
|
| This way, I'm just writing code. This works naturally for me,
| since it's my day job. But I can use node-red for visually
| organizing input output tuples, and the debugging data that it
| shows as things activate.
|
| I also add one manual trigger and one debug output node on each
| end of the function so I can just run it manually if desired.
|
| So far it's pretty goos, but I'm missing stuff like writing
| tests, which means I test my functions by turning on/off
| devices or something which isn't ideal.
| maweki wrote:
| My main problem with Home assistant is the automation language.
| It could be very powerful, but isn't.
|
| I feel that if there was a way to introduce temporary state and
| force an expression as the value of a switch it could be great. I
| would love for something ASP/Datalog based.
|
| Having a light that's just on if some expression is True and off
| if the expression is false is more difficult than it should be.
| The automations are not goal-based. But maybe in a decade the
| next project will do it that way.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| You can try pyscript (https://github.com/custom-
| components/pyscript), which allows you to write automations in
| plain Python.
| maweki wrote:
| That's not AI/Logic programming though. Ideally I'd write a
| boolean formula and the system tries to make it true by
| adjusting the values it can adjust.
|
| Say I want something like the light should be off it is dark
| and the window is open (bugs), but if the window is closed
| and it is dark, the light should be on.
| dark & window.open -> !light dark & !window.open ->
| light
|
| Obviously, it can't close the window. But it can turn the
| light to make the formulas true.
|
| If this were answer-set-based, the system could find multiple
| ways to make the formulas true (that's why I say goal-based)
| and act in a truly intelligent manner.
|
| Edit: if it could close the window, it had a second way to
| make the formulas true. That would be nice as well, that the
| window closes when I turn on the light.
|
| Edit 2: note that at daytime the formulas are always true,
| such that I can adjust the light and window as I like.
|
| Edit 3: We could also rewrite this as dark
| -> (window.open != light)
|
| And it is great that we could reason about our rules in that
| manner.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| That's an interesting idea, and I agree it would make a
| great addition to HA. From an outside standpoint it doesn't
| even seem to be that hard to implement, all the pieces are
| already there, "just" needs some glue.
| aequitas wrote:
| > And it is great that we could reason about our rules in
| that manner.
|
| That's what I've been missing as well. Node-RED comes
| close, but is event based.
|
| I've been thinking of implementing this kind of system. It
| has similar principles to functional languages or a
| reactive system like Mgmt[0]. But I foresee a few issues
| that would render potential simple formulae into complex
| ones. Things like keeping state on event based inputs
| (push-type wall switches), time based decisions and outputs
| that don't provide feedback on their current state.
|
| If I ever find the time to get practical with the idea and
| work out these issues I might put it into a Show HN.
|
| [0] https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt
| moritonal wrote:
| At the risk of sounding like a broken-record, Node-Red is a
| very easy but flexible visual-scripting engine and has a good
| integration with Home Assistant. It could be a solution for the
| places where HA is lacking.
|
| https://community.home-assistant.io/t/home-assistant-communi...
| colordrops wrote:
| Yes, I added some simple automation scripts to calculate
| bandwidth being used on my router from snmp data and it eats up
| 100% CPU. The calculations are super simple and shouldn't take
| almost any CPU.
| jayelbe wrote:
| This is dead easy to do in Home Assistant if you use a jinja-
| based template as the automation trigger. Any template that
| will evaluate to true will trigger the automation. Templates
| are re-evaluated every time the state of the object changes or
| (if you use a time function, or don't reference any objects)
| every minute.
|
| Here's a simple example that would send a notification if I
| left my kitchen LEDs on 200 brightness or more for longer than
| two hours. alias: Kitchen description: ''
| trigger: - platform: template value_template: '
| {{ state_attr('light.kitchen_led', 'brightness')|int >= 200 and
| as_timestamp(states.light.kitchen_led.last_updated) + 3600 <
| as_timestamp(now()) }} ' condition: [] action:
| - service: notify.my_phone data: title:
| Kitchen lights still on message: The kitchen LEDs
| have been on very bright for more than 2 hours. mode:
| single
| maweki wrote:
| That's absolutely not what I meant. The trigger condition is
| not the problem. The action is. It is not goal-based. I can't
| give a target value (as template) and the system tries to
| bring the entity to that state.
|
| I have to have another check (or two automations) to trigger
| the off/on-action. Home assistant basically has no idea how
| to bring entities to a desired state.
| edelans wrote:
| Have you considered AppDaemon ?
| https://github.com/AppDaemon/appdaemon
| melenaos wrote:
| Are there alternatives to homeassistant? I liked the idea until i
| figured out that i cannot easily create a new integration with my
| custom adruino automation.
|
| The forums didnt had any example and the discord/irc channels
| couldn't help.
| afavour wrote:
| I am very grateful for Home Assistant but I'm in a weird spot
| with my setup now. I'm running an old version (honestly can't
| remember which) in a Docker container and when I tried to upgrade
| all my integrations stopped working. So I downgraded again and
| have been sat there ever since. Every now and then it stops
| responding and I restart the container.
|
| There's a tricky balance between a dumb appliance that doesn't do
| what you want and a smart one that requires too much babysitting,
| and for me HA is _just_ too far towards the latter. Not enough
| that I'm going to replace it tomorrow but I've been looking at
| Hubitat lately:
|
| https://hubitat.com/
|
| More and more I'm liking the idea of a box that runs itself more
| than HA does.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| Every HA I setup and invested time in cratered beyond repair
| within a few months. I gave up due to the Discord experience.
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