[HN Gopher] My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story
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My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story
Author : jroovers
Score : 241 points
Date : 2022-02-15 17:36 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (jorisroovers.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jorisroovers.com)
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| Nice! If I understand correctly this is fully local and doesn't
| depend on cloud stuff? After a few failures I don't want anything
| that relies on somebody's buggy cloud systems.
| nomel wrote:
| It's all local unless you want to pay for the cloud service,
| which just gives you safe remote access to your local home
| assistant instance, and gives some services like a nice (cloud
| based) text to speech engine.
|
| Neither are required. You can happily open up DMZ and use
| whatever TTS engine, yourself.
| boring_twenties wrote:
| Do you have any suggestions for a local TTS engine to use
| with HA?
|
| I have HA up and running but have only used its web interface
| so far.
| nomel wrote:
| No, but I was looking at ha-rhvoice before I went with Nabu
| Casa (to support the devs). The readily available local TTS
| voices will, obviously, not sound as good.
| anderspitman wrote:
| The most-requested feature for boringproxy has been WebSockets
| support (which landed in master just this week), from what I can
| tell primarily because Home Assistant needs it. I hadn't realized
| how popular HA is. Their forum is very active:
|
| https://community.home-assistant.io/
| coreyp_1 wrote:
| I want SO BADLY to convert my switches to smart switches, but it
| feels impossible to find what i need. Good luck searching on
| Amazon, too. Search for Zigbee, and it will return page after
| page of zwave, proprietary, and other listings. It's impossible
| to wade through. I've tried and given up multiple times.
|
| This is what i need that is evidently so difficult to find: 1.
| Zigbee 2. 3-way 3. Dimmable 4. Beige (almond?) Color
|
| Any ideas?
| pydry wrote:
| I found the same thing. I was searching for air quality/CO2
| monitors. It seemed that decent ones werent with zigbee.
| benley wrote:
| I'd recommend checking out some of the "smart relay" devices
| that let you reuse your existing light switches.
|
| e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Compatible-SmartThings-Philips-
| ZBBrid... - this one says "2 way" but I'm pretty sure you can
| wire it up with two physical lightswitches to get the 3-way
| behavior that you're after. The wiring diagram on the amazon
| product page suggests as much.
|
| I've personally used this Aeotec z-wave variant and it has
| worked well for me:
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XC4CH98
| 0ld wrote:
| try searching zigbee2mqtt supported devices:
| https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/#s=switch
| nathan_f77 wrote:
| I highly recommend buying some Zigbee switch modules [1] and
| wiring them up behind your regular light switches. They convert
| any light switch into a smart switch that can be controlled
| through your Zigbee network. (This can be dangerous, but just
| make sure you turn off the power first, wear gloves, and learn
| all about line, neutral, ground. Get a good multimeter and
| triple check everything.)
|
| [1]
| https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002164359835.html?spm=a2...
| mdoms wrote:
| I simply flick a switch to turn on lights. Opening shades is no
| problem for me, a physically fit human.
| disqard wrote:
| A non-technology solution? In this forum? How dare you, good
| sir?
|
| Seriously, I've been going as back-to-basics with my newer
| purchases as possible -- I recently purchased a used sewing
| machine that has gears made of metal, has no LCD/screen or
| computer firmware, and only relies on electricity to run its
| motor.
| nouveaux wrote:
| How often do you adjust the color temperature and lumens of
| your light bulbs to optimize for circadian rhythm? I can see
| why you're so physically fit if you're going around to all your
| light switches and making these adjustments all the time ;).
| mdoms wrote:
| I don't care to.
| jaywalk wrote:
| How do you flick that switch when you're on vacation and want
| your home to appear occupied?
| yurishimo wrote:
| You joke, but we both know that automatic lamp timers have
| existed for decades. I like home automation stuff as much as
| the next person but this is a disingenuous argument.
| boring_twenties wrote:
| I went from those to a basic HomeAssistant setup, and
| really enjoy the fact that my light timers can be "30
| minutes before sunset" instead of a fixed time that needs
| to be adjusted throughout the year.
|
| On the other hand, the fact that everything stops working
| if wifi goes down is a real bummer. I can't for the life of
| me understand why these "smart" plugs don't just use
| powerline ethernet. I guess I should just be thankful that
| their API could be reverse engineered.
| jaywalk wrote:
| You should be using Z-wave instead of Wi-Fi for anything
| that you can, but in reality how often does your actual
| Wi-Fi network go down? HA runs locally, so it's not like
| you need Internet access. Unless your smart plugs are
| actually controlled over the Internet, in which case you
| should throw them away immediately and buy something
| better.
| jaywalk wrote:
| With an automatic lamp timer, you lose the ability to
| (easily) control the lamp manually. Also, what about all of
| the lights that _aren 't lamps_?
|
| If all you've got are lamps and you're willing to be a
| slave to the timer, then by all means just use the timer.
| But once it gets just a little bit more complicated, the
| timer isn't so great.
|
| I've got an "evening" scene that turns on 10 or so
| different lights. I will trigger it manually when I'm home
| and feel it's time, or if my system is in vacation mode it
| will trigger based on the sunset time. I don't have to
| worry about accidentally having left a switch off or
| anything like that. You cannot even begin the replicate
| this with an automatic lamp timer.
| luma wrote:
| You could read a newspaper to get the news or send a postcard
| to share your opinions with others, yet here you are on the
| internet.
|
| Technology marches on, you get to chose if you want to engage
| with it, but I don't think suggesting that people looking to
| leverage new technology are somehow less physically fit or
| lazier than you is the right answer.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Home Assistant seems to be hostile to Linux distributions. It's
| still difficult to package.
|
| Maybe they might want to have their own OS only. Maybe charge
| money for it in future.
| luma wrote:
| The primary distribution method for Home Assistant is via a
| docker container, which should run just fine on most Linux
| platforms. There is a Home Assistant OS which is free to use
| and mostly exists as a lightweight docker host. It is the
| preferred installation method and is simple to deploy and keep
| updated.
| turtlebits wrote:
| Not sure if I'm just getting older, but the less
| things/complications in my home, the more peace of mind I have.
| Been watching the youtube LTT channel on his smart home and I
| feel all the things going on would drive me crazy.
|
| This doesn't apply only to tech, but even for my next house
| (Looking into passive homes, least possible HVAC footprint,
| floorplan for minimal plumbing/electrical).
| iamjackg wrote:
| For me, a lot of that came down to making sure every automation
| I add is usable with the least amount of mental effort. For the
| longest time I didn't automate much at all and often questioned
| whether I needed all this or not, then we had a baby.
|
| Now we have a button in his nursery that will dim the lights,
| start playing white noise on a Google Home speaker, mark the
| start of a new nap on our Babybuddy instance, then turn off the
| lights after 30 seconds. When I press it again, it turns off
| the noise and stops the sleep tracking. If we didn't have Home
| Assistant we'd have to do all these things manually multiple
| times a day. Instead it just takes a single button press.
|
| It's a small example, but things like this will keep popping
| up, and I'm looking forward to making them easier.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| Heh, our kids have an Alexa and a couple smart plugs for
| lamps in their rooms.
|
| They set their own bed/wake routines which was really great
| because we kinda got the buy in from them on how they want to
| do it and it's the same every time. They like to come by ever
| now and then and update the routine, add a step or piece of
| information. It's fun to do with them and it's nice to have
| them do their own thing but also not need an adult for
| everything thing.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| There's no law of nature that says you need to track your
| kids sleep and upload it to a could service.
| oxguy3 wrote:
| It looks like it's self-hosted:
| https://github.com/babybuddy/babybuddy
| huhtenberg wrote:
| I feel that the vast majority home automation tech got the
| whole thing backwards.
|
| They start with "we can do this" and then "let's see what we
| can bolt it on".
|
| Instead, they should've started with small things like being
| able to toggle every _existing_ switch from your phone. Let
| lazy people be lazy efficiently. Now _that_ has a mass appeal
| and would 've led to a better adoption. Once this is in place,
| then you can build on it - dimmers, hues, scheduled and
| presence lighting/heating, etc. Once this is done, accepted and
| integrated in everyday life, move to more advanced gadgetry.
| detaro wrote:
| "Traditional" home automation tech does exactly that angle.
| Turns out "upgrade every existing switch" does not have the
| mass-appeal over a lot cheaper "replace one thing, do a bunch
| of things with thing" offerings. Most people need to have the
| latter before they get the appetite to invest in the former.
| As annoying as they are, "smart" plugs/bulbs are a lot easier
| and cheaper to deploy in many cases.
|
| It's an interesting balance IMHO. If you can control
| everything you can build a lot on top, but even just being
| able to control a few things might already provide you a lot
| of benefit.
| nouveaux wrote:
| "toggle every existing switch from your phone"
|
| Home automation is not intuitive. It turns out that toggling
| every existing switch from your phone is not an ideal goal.
| Pulling out your phone to use your home automation gets
| annoying fast.
|
| The best home automation is a system that works without
| intervention. A good analogy is a digital thermostat vs a
| traditional analog one. A digital thermostat has the ability
| to change temperature targets depending on time of day and
| day of the week.
|
| The best type of switches are the ones that work without
| intervention. The most common is the sunset porch lights and
| the sunrise alarm clocks. Other good ones are humidity
| sensors that trigger bathroom fans, TV/stereo/console that
| turns on when you pick up your game controller, floor lights
| that trigger only at night when it senses movement, lights
| that change color temperature and lumens depending on time of
| day, etc.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| > _Pulling out your phone to use your home automation gets
| annoying fast._
|
| What I meant, if it wasn't clear, is to have this as an
| _option_. In addition to what 's already in place.
| Tyr42 wrote:
| Speaking of that last thing, what's the best way to
| implement different brightnesses based on time in HA's
| yaml? I could do a bunch of ifs in each automation but
| there might be a better way?
| function_seven wrote:
| I use https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting/ in
| my config.
| nouveaux wrote:
| +1 to adaptive lighting.
|
| Also if you need a wake up/sunrise light:
|
| https://community.home-assistant.io/t/wake-up-light-
| alarm-wi...
| alistairSH wrote:
| I mostly agree. I have a few smart switches for main lighting
| (5 switches of 20+) with basic automations (turn off at bed
| time, turn on front step and foyer when I get close to home
| after dark, turn all on if motion sensor trips while I'm not
| home).
|
| Every time I think about expanding this, I remember what a PITA
| it was to setup the basic stuff. And I don't bother. I'll walk
| my lazy ass to the switch instead.
|
| Doesn't help that Smartthings is a dumpster fire of shitty UX
| that glitches regularly. Anything "better" like HomeAssistant
| is the rough equivalent of using Linux desktop in the late
| 90s/early 00s.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Misquoted from the Internet: Tech enthusiasts have voice-
| controlled smart home hubs; sysadmins have a printer and a gun
| next to it to shoot the printer if it starts acting up.
| enobrev wrote:
| I generally agree with this, although I'm also a fan of home
| automation. I want all my switches to continue to work (they
| do), no internet connection between me and my automated
| devices, no complicated "scenes", and I don't want to mess
| around with some UI every day. Setup, sure, but that's it.
|
| So in the end I have lights that turn on in any room we're in
| and turn themselves off some time after we've left. My porch
| light adjusts itself according to time of day, and my laundry
| tells me when it's done, which is huge for us since it's in the
| basement.
|
| I keep it simple (one JS file controls the whole house), but
| it's still a life improvement.
|
| My toddler recently knocked over my poorly placed server which
| damaged the zwave dongle. Replacing it took a couple hours, but
| the week spent without the automations was noticable.
|
| There's something about every room lighting up as I walk
| through the house that makes it feel more welcoming. A bit
| warmer.
|
| Also, my son loves to turn off the dining room light and then
| try to run through the dining room as fast as he can without
| setting off the motion sensor. It turns on every time, but it's
| a joy to watch.
| nouveaux wrote:
| How do you do motion detection and presence in your setup?
| How do you make sure the lights doesn't turn off if you're
| just sitting in the room?
| enobrev wrote:
| Long timers.
|
| I'd love to have some sort of presence detection that will
| work with multiple people (including a child) without
| embedding a chip into our necks, but haven't found anything
| that seems reliable, yet. Room assistant sounds pretty
| cool, but I haven't had the time to play with it - and I'm
| not "installing" bluetooth on my toddler.
|
| Early on I had 5-15 minute timers in most rooms, but my
| wife and I have ended up sitting in a dark bathroom, or
| worse cooking in a dark kitchen - flailing our arms to get
| the lights back on far too many times.
|
| So, I made the timers in most rooms 30 minutes (20 in the
| bathroom, 5 in closets). That worked well everywhere but
| the kitchen; I added a second motion sensor there, and it
| pretty much always gets it right now.
|
| Once in a while the light will shut off in the living room
| when we're still and zoned out on our phones or a movie,
| but that's rare enough that it's not a big deal. Also we
| get to laugh at ourselves for being perfectly still for an
| entire half hour.
|
| --- Edit ---
|
| I imagine presence detection is significantly easier with
| one occupant, and I've daydreamed about setting up a "one-
| person-home" mode that just turns on the light in whatever
| room last detected someone and off everywhere else. But
| honestly everything works so well as-is, that I don't think
| it's really worth the effort.
| lm28469 wrote:
| I can't imagine the state of these houses one or two
| generations down the line.
|
| I witnessed "smart" houses when my parents' blinders died in
| "down" position and had no manual override... or when the
| electricity was down and they couldn't start their wood stove
| because it needs electricity to work...
|
| I think some people are just so drawn to tech that they end up
| in these kind of rabbit holes. It reminds me of my nerd friends
| in uni who spent weeks configuring their linux distro from
| scratch just to start over a few months later, they were
| showing me their new shiny shells, how the trackpad finally
| worked with X and Y drivers, how their tiling window manager
| was better than macos'.
|
| I don't think the end goal for them is to have a useable thing,
| it's more about tinkering and probably some form of attention
| seeking.
| nouveaux wrote:
| >I witnessed "smart" houses when my parents' blinders died in
| "down" position and had no manual override... or when the
| electricity was down and they couldn't start their wood stove
| because it needs electricity to work...
|
| Are you saying you have a stove that doesn't have an
| electronic starter? Are you on a digital or analog
| thermostat? Does your home heater work without electricity?
|
| New technology will always have an early adoption phase.
| Smart blinds suck now but there is no reason why they cant be
| as reliable as an automatic garage door. It's a motor with RF
| control. It's not a complex thing.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _Are you saying you have a stove that doesn 't have an
| electronic starter? Are you on a digital or analog
| thermostat? Does your home heater work without
| electricity?_
|
| Historically and mostly today, a _wood_ stove is a cast
| iron container you fill with wood mostly to heat a house.
| There have been innovations in shape, airflow etc to make
| them more efficient but they generally haven 't used an
| electric lighter.
|
| Electric-light gas stoves normally don't _need_ electricity
| to function - in a outage you can light them with a match
| or sparker.
|
| There have been gas heaters that don't require electricity
| but not central gas heaters, this true.
|
| Eastern California, where I currently live, has experienced
| a half-dozen days-long electrical outages in the last year
| alone. A the time two months, when I spent four days
| snowed-in, with it 45-40 degrees inside my apartment, is
| notable. What does or doesn't work without electricity is
| an important question.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| There are also pellet stoves (not generally considered a
| wood stove) the burn compressed sawdust and have an
| electric auger, blower and igniter
| nouveaux wrote:
| "Historically and mostly today, a wood stove is a cast
| iron container you fill with wood mostly to heat a house.
| There have been innovations in shape, airflow etc to make
| them more efficient but they generally haven't used an
| electric lighter.
|
| Electric-light gas stoves normally don't need electricity
| to function - in a outage you can light them with a match
| or sparker."
|
| Does your parent's wood stove work work without
| electricity? As in, can you light it with a match or
| sparker?
|
| "Eastern California, where I currently live, has
| experienced a half-dozen days-long electrical outages in
| the last year alone. A the time two months, when I spent
| four days snowed-in, with it 45-40 degrees inside my
| apartment, is notable. What does or doesn't work without
| electricity is an important question."
|
| Yea this totally sucks and you make a good point. You
| parents' blinds needs a manual backup, just like how
| automatic garage door systems have a manual override. One
| of the things I try to focus on is to have my home still
| function if the server is down. My light switches all
| work without a server or the internet, but my sunrise
| lights will not. I think that's a good compromise.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _Does your parent 's wood stove work work without
| electricity? As in, can you light it with a match or
| sparker?_
|
| My parents didn't have a wood stove but the last house I
| lived had one and it lit only by a match. The Gp's
| description is literally the only time I have even heard
| of a wood stove didn't require hand lighting, that's
| normally how they work.
|
| (Your tense seems to indicate you're confusing me with
| the original commenter you replied to FYI - who's parents
| did have an unusual wood stove apparently requiring
| electricity. It doesn't offend me but I thought I'd note
| it in case there was some confusion to clear up).
| pydry wrote:
| This is what all tech is like. I remember when having a
| smartphone with apps was a quirky novelty that maintenance
| that only nerds could be bothered with.
|
| Also while I dont give a damn about lightbulbs I would really
| like more sophisticated control over heating.
| ryanianian wrote:
| Sufficiently advanced home automation is indistinguishable from
| a haunting.
|
| Lighting controlled by home-assistant is endlessly frustrating.
| Especially if zwave. The networks are slow, the devices are
| awkward to configure, and when things go wrong debugging is
| difficult. Sometimes it takes my lights a good 60 seconds to
| respond during which time I'll try a few different button
| dances which all then get lifo queued... End result is light
| automation that works 95% of the time with the 5% remainder
| being enough to sour the whole experience.
|
| This isn't home-assistant's "fault," it's the zwave product
| space being a convoluted mess that HA tries to paper over.
| Other integrations are better but each integration is a
| separate plugin thing so quality depends on who wrote the
| plugin.
|
| My house got a 10% premium due to the home-assistant setup
| according to the realtor. Lights and music and blinds all
| easily controlled from an iPad mounted to a thing in the hall.
| I left all the equipment including the raspberry pi that ran
| HA, but I took the SD card for privacy reasons. 99% certainty
| that they don't even know what Z-wave is let alone how to
| rebuild the network... I'm sure that if I buy a "smart house"
| in the future it will be beyond my abilities.
| luma wrote:
| You have a serious problem with your ZWave network if it is
| performing as you describe. I have just over 70 devices live
| right now and have none of these problems.
|
| Monitor your logs and see if some node out there is screaming
| or otherwise taking up a lot of bandwidth, as your experience
| is not at all typical of how ZWave should work.
| nathan_f77 wrote:
| I had a similar problem with my Zigbee network when I first
| started, but I was able to dig in and fix all of the issues.
| I changed the Zigbee channel and moved everything away from
| my WiFi router. @NathanCu was really helpful [1] on the Home
| Assistant community forums.
|
| [1] https://community.home-assistant.io/t/zigbee-problems-
| how-to...
| jaywalk wrote:
| I don't know what your Z-wave setup looks like, but all I've
| got are GE smart switches and GE smart outlets, controlled
| with Home Assistant using an Aeotec Z-stick. It works
| flawlessly with zero noticeable delay, 100% of the time.
|
| It sounds like you've either got some bad interference or bad
| devices.
| asveikau wrote:
| I've had a lot of issues with battery powered z-wave
| devices not waking up.
|
| Also, IIRC there is a bug in the zwave-js github issue
| tracker about the 700 series Z-sticks dropping commands.
| Sometimes I need to reboot for outgoing packets to reach
| devices from the Z-stick.
| jamiepenney wrote:
| I have this bug too. It happened with the old zwave
| plugin as well, my Aeotec stick just stops delivering
| packets if it gets bumped and I have to restart the whole
| system.
| asveikau wrote:
| One of the recommendations I read on some github issues
| was to put the z-stick on a USB extension cable to rule
| out interference from other ports. I was skeptical of
| this but it did seem to improve my experience.
|
| I still get the issue that makes it need to reboot every
| now and then however.
| oldsj wrote:
| Same setup here. Love using z-wave as a standard and then
| bridging everything over to Homekit for siri / phone
| control center access
| ryanianian wrote:
| So much of one's experience depends on the z-wave hardware
| and it's not obvious at all which brands or products will
| be more reliable or better than others. My network is a
| hodge-podge of different switches and outlets, but mesh
| networking means it's easy to poison the network with a bad
| implementation. And then good luck finding the offending
| hardware.
| luma wrote:
| Up until this past year, every single ZWave radio was
| made by the same company. They are now allegedly
| certifying third parties but I haven't yet seen anyone
| announce that they've achieved that certification. It's
| possible to build a crappy ZWave device, but the radio
| and network side should be solid, even on crappy devices.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| I get the geeky joy of monitoring and possibly automatically
| controlling things, but the added benefit feels marginal at
| best for a home. It's less than marginal unless you go big into
| the automation.
|
| The other thing that jades me to automation is that in my
| experience with technology, you either get a easy to use, but
| limited, remotely brickable, subscriptionware, or you have to
| roll your own, and end up debugging your bathtub. Neither is
| very appealing.
| amphitheatre wrote:
| I struggle with this too. Whilst there is a lot of
| opportunities for learning and fun when setting these systems
| up, you soon forget how things intermingle and monitoring,
| upgrading, or debugging things becomes a chore.
|
| Systems like this balloon in complexity with all of the
| different server hardware, IoT standards, subnets, cables, etc.
| For the average user, things that aren't easy or set-and-forget
| are probably too much. That sense of overwhelm is my personal
| experience, at least.
| fuzzieozzie wrote:
| I imagine readers here would want local control for home
| automation. Take a look at www.hubitat.com
| afavour wrote:
| I really want hubitat to succeed but to me it feels like it's
| in a tricky place: less open/customisable than HA but not user-
| friendly enough to be used by total beginners. Hopefully they
| get the second half of that sorted out and can carve out a
| niche.
| JshWright wrote:
| The setup described in the article is local as well.
| detaro wrote:
| The article describes a fully local setup, with much more open
| components...
| dmatos wrote:
| Home Assistant is also quite useful in a Company Office / Small
| Business. There's daily "added value" on repetitive tasks and
| simple automations that provide immediate productivity gains.
|
| It's also a great platform to implement weird "physical
| workflows" that aren't common in household scenarios.
| casenjo wrote:
| I really enjoyed reading this, thanks for posting. I've been
| struggling to find a more sustainable solution on my end for all
| the sensors and buttons I have set up. Anecdotally I feel their
| battery life tends to be shorter based on whether they're in busy
| locations or not. I've ordered the CR2477 and CR2450 batteries
| they use in bigger quantities but I'd much rather be able to
| recharge them instead. Have you ever found devices of this type
| that allow them to be recharged?
| tylergetsay wrote:
| I have been using ZWave motion sensors that have USB input so
| no battery required, for buttons I have replaced a lot of wall
| switches with Tasmota switches that are programmed for
| single/double/hold click actions on multiple buttons. This can
| be great on multi gang switches where I have one button control
| the relays in all three switches, leaving two buttons open.
| andylynch wrote:
| Have a look online for LIR2450s. They are rechargeable button
| cells.
| vladgur wrote:
| I dont think its clear from the blog, but HomeAssistant Blue
| and/or Yellow are nice, but not required to get going with HA. If
| you get your hands on RPI 3 or 4, an SSD card and a supported
| Zigbee/ZWave card, you should be good to go. Installation is well
| documented.
|
| But overall customization is in fact a major time sink regardless
| of hardware you use
| nomel wrote:
| > But overall customization is in fact a major time sink
|
| I think that depends on what you're trying to accomplish, since
| "customization" doesn't really have a limit. If it's just
| exposing your smart devices so you can access them with your
| iPhone, it's easy. If it's having your lights turn to 5%
| brightness if you enter the kitchen at 3am, to get some milk,
| but then slowly ramp up the brightness to 15% when you linger
| around to make pancakes, then sure. You'll need to write an
| automation for that.
|
| Having my HomePod remind me that my car charger isn't plugged
| in at 8:30pm required an automation that involved selecting
| things from some dropdown boxes.
| sanguy wrote:
| Home Assistant is great, but it will face huge hurdles as the
| founder tries to cash in on the popularity. It's already
| underway.
|
| 1) Nabu Casa was founded with a claim that "it will all be
| transparent and reported" as to income, etc, etc.
|
| 2) Then the "private" components happened only for Nabu Casa -
| like the cloud connection stuff.
|
| 3) A few years later when pointed out nothing was transparent yet
| the response was "We will not share this information."
|
| 3) Nabu Casa then started to hire up the more active community
| developers and set off on their own closed vision.
|
| 4) NC has bought up many of the associated pieces - the companion
| apps, the ESP32 stuff, etc, etc.
|
| 5) NC has hired many of the community developers and now quite
| some secrecy around the roadmaps and decisions.
|
| 6) You dare not question decisions or you get thrown off the
| forums and Discord channels for life. Many cases of this
| happening. They have a community manager who is particularly
| sensitive over any perceived negative comment and prone to going
| off to which the founder needs to step in and smooth the
| emotions. Not sure why they've not fired him after strike 4 or 5.
|
| The end result is that Home Assistant is far less open than it
| was. It is going the same path pFsense did under the ownership of
| Netgate.
|
| The challenge is many people invested into it and when it
| implodes it won't be pretty. I am hopeful someone forks it with a
| better community engagement model.
|
| (I've been a user since the start, and a contributor in the early
| days. Left the community due to my work being monetized by NC
| without my consent.)
| anderspitman wrote:
| Nabu Casa seems like a great model to bring self-hosting to the
| masses.
| smashah wrote:
| I'm looking forward to the founders and the core maintainers
| being able to make a healthy living off of home assistant with
| the least amount of pointless overhead :)
| eisa01 wrote:
| Any prospect of a an alternative commercial provider to NC for
| the cloud stuff?
|
| Other open source software (E.g. LibreOffice) has several shops
| that help businesses with support and integration/bug fixes
| luma wrote:
| There are three major cloud components. Alexa and Google
| integrations both have open options that are documented by NC
| and you are welcome to use them. There's a lot of setup as
| you need to deal with a semi-complex config on AWS or GCP
| which can be challenging if you're new to those environments,
| but they work as well as the paid NC option.
|
| The remote access proxy service doesn't really have an open
| equivalent but there are tons of other supported solutions
| out there for secure remote access to your Home Assistant
| install. Here is one example add-on to provide Wireguard
| support, developed and supported by an NC employee:
| https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-wireguard
|
| In short, the paid cloud services provide an easier path to
| solutions you can deploy for yourself if you wish. You can
| still use equivalent services that you host yourself under
| your own AWS/GCP account. Those services cost NC money to
| host, so asking for money isn't too far out there. Of course,
| that money is more than what the cloud parts cost, and what
| we all get in return is a team of skilled developers working
| full time on the project and releasing everything for free.
| zsarnett wrote:
| Wow, that is a bunch of assumptions incorrectly presented as
| the truth! The Open Home conference in December is laying it
| out pretty good and shows why and how most of the above is
| actually miles off: https://www.home-assistant.io/state-of-the-
| open-home/
| madjam002 wrote:
| I mean it's still all open source, so what if they want to
| monetise some hardware and cloud connectivity? Worst that will
| happen is they will drive more and more into paid plans, a fork
| may or may not happen and there will be a community split, but
| for my place personally I don't see much of a risk there when
| most of my stuff just uses the MQTT integration.
|
| Hopefully with money coming in they can improve the core
| itself, because at the moment the real value of Home Assistant
| is the huge community around it and 3rd party integrations.
| gedy wrote:
| I know the HA founder and think you're mischaracterizing him
| and his motivations. What you call "Cashing in" is attempting
| to focus full time on a really terrific project. He's certainly
| not rich off this and could have instead gone for a
| commercial/closed source vs the open project it is now.
| robbiet480 wrote:
| Hello, I'm the original creator of the Home Assistant iOS
| Companion App. Just wanted to clear up that Nabu Casa took over
| the iOS and Android apps purely because of requirements by
| Apple and Google around a corporation being the only entity
| that can have a development team. At no time did Nabu Casa pay
| any money to me or anyone else to acquire the apps. They were
| transferred to Nabu Casa purely for convenience, since Home
| Assistant Inc doesn't exist.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Do I understand correctly that you just gave the iOS app out
| of your hands, for Nabu Casa to maintain? Or is it solely a
| legal structure?
|
| I find it interesting if it were the former, I personally
| would have considered monetizing it myself, but then again,
| it's probably not a coincidence I haven't founded any
| opensource projects as impactful as Home Assistant. :)
| robbiet480 wrote:
| Nabu Casa doesn't maintain it, the community does. I
| personally haven't worked on it in a while now because I've
| been consumed with my new company but it is still being
| very actively developed. I still have full access to the
| source code and developer account and such and am a
| resource to whoever needs my input as time permits.
| sneak wrote:
| If the community maintains it, why hasn't the community
| removed the phone-home surveillance in the iOS client?
|
| This is something I only see in packages maintained by a
| central authority that wants to consume the data from the
| community, at the expense of end user privacy.
| zacwest wrote:
| I'm the maintainer of the iOS/macOS app these days. I'm
| not paid by Nabu Casa and I do it in my free time (if
| anything, Nabu Casa has avoided doing things which may
| inadvertently monetize my work to not my benefit, which I
| appreciate).
|
| There's no analytics nor reporting in the app. I've been
| slowly removing[0] things that talk to servers other than
| your Home Assistant server, but your private
| information's never left the device. Right now the app
| will talk to 2 additional sources, both of which you can
| disable in the Privacy settings:
|
| 1. alerts.home-assistant.io, which will alert for
| security issues but is strictly a JSON file it loads [1]
|
| 2. Firebase Cloud Messaging, for push notifications
| (since we can't talk to APNS directly in HA)
|
| FCM is a dependency I'm actively trying to kill off in
| favor of an implementation that is both end-to-end
| encrypted and talks directly to Apple's Push Notification
| Service. Apple would not allow a solution where HA talks
| directly to APNS as they do not want that many active
| connections, and it would require disclosing private keys
| for the App Store account.
|
| Unless Robbie wanted to give me his personal Apple ID
| password, moving the app to the Nabu Casa App Store
| account was the only way for me to do anything with the
| app.
|
| [0] https://github.com/home-assistant/iOS/pull/2010 [1]
| https://github.com/home-
| assistant/iOS/blob/861a40a50aa201ff4...
| madjam002 wrote:
| That's freakin awesome, it's so refreshing to see this,
| especially when Home Assistant is likely to be installed
| on non-techie's phones and you want to just set it and
| forget it.
|
| Thank-you for all of your work on the Home Assistant iOS
| app, it's one of the best parts of the ecosystem imo.
| [deleted]
| buro9 wrote:
| When you sell a house like this... what do you leave behind and
| what do you take?
|
| This has increasingly been on my mind. I've no desire to sell
| soon, but there's a Nest doorbell that is wired in, so it stays.
| A Nest thermostat, which I could remove but when I got the boiler
| I chose to not have the control panel extra with timer as I knew
| I had Nest. Then the lighting, the motion sensors... should I
| take the few thousand GBP worth of Hue bulbs? That feels like a
| yes, just put in the cheapest bulbs.
|
| And so it begins... some things stay, some things go, and the
| tooling is the hardest. This person has touch screen control
| panels and Home Assistant. Even if you left it behind, you'd need
| to transfer the knowledge around it too. But remove it, and the
| house goes beyond dumb in many ways.
| giobox wrote:
| There is almost no way you can handover _any_ HomeAssistant
| installation during a home sale, not unless you want the buyer
| to be calling you for help with technical issues /gremlins
| _months_ after the sale closes. Every single Home Assistant
| installation is effectively a custom install - there can be
| almost zero commonality between two different setups really.
| Things break because you don 't update them; they break because
| you do update them. It's a small but constant stream of
| maintenance tasks once your HA installation reaches a certain
| degree of complexity and new owner is likely not going to be
| interested in that at all?
|
| For me and my own HA install, I accept I will have to revert
| everything to how it was when I bought the home, which is
| itself a really tragic statement on the state of home
| automation in 2022. I get satisfaction from running it, but it
| does require running. It is not an "appliance", and there are
| still no real building codes/standards for ensuring these
| things stay compatible for years to come.
|
| Similarly, if the seller tried to convince me to take a house
| with his own home made HomeAssistant setup, I would likely
| request it be removed completely before I closed the sale,
| regardless of any perceived quality of the work. If nothing
| else, I couldn't trust they hadn't left their own remote access
| ability somewhere in the stack and I don't have time to audit
| what might be years of quite hacky integration work.
|
| There is an old saying, "Never sell a car to a friend". Home
| assistant is like that, but you should never sell it to anyone,
| regardless of how good you think you've got it running today.
| colordrops wrote:
| > you'd need to transfer the knowledge around it too.
|
| My experience with house shopping in LA is that you've got no
| leverage to question why some panel is missing or some
| disconnected wires are sticking out of the wall.
| TYPE_FASTER wrote:
| We left the hardwired stuff, a couple Nest thermostats and the
| garage door openers (obviously) that were connected via wifi,
| and unplugged and brought with us the Phillips Hue hub. I
| forget if I took the time to take the Hue bulb out of the
| ceiling fan.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Things like light switches (zwave, wifi) could probably remain.
| New owner would just pair them to their own hub/controller.
|
| Hubs probably go with previous owner. Turn-over too complicated
| - just unplug it and take it.
|
| Something like a Nest (or anything else with direct cloud
| integration) is a bit more complicated. You'd either have to
| unpair it from your account or replace it with a dumb
| thermostat.
| andrewstuart2 wrote:
| I believe there are laws (the legal term being "fixture," for
| things permanently attached to a home) about what can be taken
| unless it's explicitly included in a contract. The sale
| contract will probably say that fixtures are included, and if
| you are not selling certain things, those will need to be
| specified. And from some brief reading, you may need to be
| careful earlier in the process as well to avoid false
| advertisement in the listings.
| gregmac wrote:
| 10 years ago I sold a house that had only a couple smart
| switches, and I took them out before we listed and replaced
| them with regular switches.
|
| A few months ago I sold a house a house with lots of Insteon
| stuff, and I left almost all of it in place. Partly it was
| because we sold quickly and I didn't have time, and partly
| because it was 9+ year old gear anyway. Insteon has the benefit
| that the keypad scenes and switch-to-switch links work without
| a hub. I took my hubs (ISY99 and HomeAssistant) which means no
| automations or timers.
|
| I would have left the ISY99 if the new buyers had asked, but I
| didn't want to provide tech support of any sort for it. The
| downside of this type of gear compared to (the orders-of-
| magnitude more expensive) commercial stuff is you really have
| to know quite a bit about it to manage it. For the most part
| there's really not any local trades people you can call for
| service, and frankly, it's not worth the headache as a seller
| to even try to explain any of this.
|
| In my new (current) house I'm in the process of installing
| Zwave switches. I think they're pretty hub-dependent, which is
| definitely a downside compared to Insteon for resale. I am
| really not sure what I'll do when I move, but hopefully it will
| be several years before that's an issue. I am fairly certain
| though that HomeAssistant (both software and ecosystem) won't
| be at the point where I could just leave it for the new owners
| and not cause more trouble for myself than it's worth.
| jon-wood wrote:
| ZWave is designed to work without a hub once devices are
| programmed, but you do need to go the extra mile to make that
| work - as an example you can configure a ZWave switch to send
| a message directly to the lights it should be controlling,
| rather than going via the hub (although the hub can also be
| notified). If you're curious the keyword you're looking for
| is Association.
| stevenpetryk wrote:
| Kinda related but I've always imagined selling a house and
| leaving behind a "readme" with the latest state of things. I
| know inspections cover many things, but it'd be nice to have
| something from the previous owner talking about how specific
| things work.
| constGard wrote:
| One of the most frustrating aspects of this is all the stuff
| that's buried in the backyard. I've had to painstakingly
| survey the property to find all of buried electrical and
| water pipes and I fully intend to pass the map on to the next
| owner.
| nathan_f77 wrote:
| I had a very similar setup in my previous apartment. I used a
| lot of battery-powered Zigbee devices for motion sensors,
| contact sensors, etc. and attached them using 3M command
| strips. I also wired up some Zigbee switch modules behind the
| light switches, so I could control all of the lights in our
| house. (This was way nicer and cheaper than using Hue bulbs
| everywhere.) I also had curtain motors, and a SwitchBot Hub to
| control air conditioners, etc.
|
| Everything was pretty easy to remove and take with me to our
| next house.
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| you wouldn't be required to perform KT.
|
| in Texas anything attached stays so even lightbulbs but you can
| also exclude anything explicitly.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| Sure, but you might just throw in cheap bulbs before you show
| it. Depends if you move out first.
|
| If I ever sold this place, I would move out most of my ha and
| automation stuff first.
|
| Even a generic hot cold thermostat is pretty cheap and easy
| to put in.
|
| Would probably leave recessed touch screens though.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I believe one of the hosts on the Coder Radio podcast moved
| into a home with some home automation stuff (light, heating
| and locks), but wasn't informed about the configuration or
| how to operate it. He described it as moving into a haunted
| house.
| merryMellody wrote:
| This sounds incredibly fascinating. Do you have a link to
| the specific episode or a title?
| xxpor wrote:
| This does prevent doing some cool stuff, but I have a rule that
| everything still has to work without HA. Obviously automation
| won't, but at the end of the day, the light switches are still
| light switches. The sensors will simply just not send their
| stuff anywhere.
| JoBrad wrote:
| I've experimented around with HA and some other options for my
| home. We bought our home just a few years ago, and not likely
| to move soon, but I thought about perhaps registering an email
| for the house, and using that for accounts that I wouldn't
| consider taking with me. Selling the house would consist of
| clearing out most (perhaps all) email from the inbox, clearing
| the trash, changing the password for the email account and then
| handing it over to the new owner. Then they just have to go
| through the 'forgot password' routine to create new passwords
| for accounts linked to it. Anything I plan to take with me
| would need to be disassociated from that account first, of
| course.
|
| This is just a thought at this point, frankly, so there are
| obviously some gaps that need to be worked out.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| I feel like the declarations for what comes with the home are
| going to start to get longer. The big ticket items used to just
| be fridge/stove/etc. but I wonder if people will start making
| sure they declare (or explicitly exclude) other things when
| selling a house.
|
| I moved in to a house with a Nest and it wasn't too difficult
| to set up again after doing the hard reset. Would've been much
| more awkward if I moved and there was just no thermostat...
| gnopgnip wrote:
| You negotiate it between the buyer and seller. You can take
| everything, or leave everything if you agree.
|
| Otherwise the default if not excluded in most contracts in the
| US would be to leave nearly all of it. Kind of like keys, even
| if something is not permanently affixed to the home it is
| "annexed" and transferred with the home when it is part of the
| customized home automation system. So the thermostat is part of
| the real estate even though it is wireless. The motion sensors
| and door bell are both annexed, and fixtures as they are
| attached with a wire. The lightbulbs are one thing that is
| probably not annexed or a fixture, it is a grey area, but
| potentially are addressed specifically in the contract like
| curtains.
| bmurphy1976 wrote:
| I've been wiring up my house for the past couple years. All of
| our light/dimmer/fan switches are Lutron Caseta and work
| without a hub. You can add the hub for additional automation
| and functionality, but you don't need it. Without the hub, the
| switch controls the device and it just works.
|
| When we leave my plan is to leave the Caseta system in place.
| Some of the devices are wireless and some switches have
| batteries (CR2032). We did this so we could put switches in
| locations you would normally have switches in a modern home
| without having to tear out the walls and rewire an 80 year old
| home. Ripping the system out is not an option, and I'm ok with
| that.
|
| Everything else is going with me. All the z-wave outlets,
| bulbs, timers, sensors, etc. will still be useful in a new
| home. I've saved all my old outlets so it will be an easy swap
| switching the new back to the old.
|
| The only thing I'm unsure about is the Wyze camera/security
| system I am currently building out. My expectation is that by
| the time I even think of selling my home it will be obsolete so
| I'll probably just leave it for the new owners to worry about.
| lkramer wrote:
| It also seems like it would severely lower the value for any
| buyer who is not interested in all that stuff?
| tlsalmin wrote:
| This is why I opted for Shelly on my house build. The dimmers
| keep dimming and everything works regularly without a
| hub/HA/Wifi. Leaving the modules inside the light switches. No
| need for special bulbs and having switches with springs allows
| any light to be dimmed as long as the fixture/bulb supports it.
| buro9 wrote:
| There's room for a future product to discover everything
| within a house. Find all the Shelly devices, figure out which
| bulbs are Hue, discover any small sensors left behind, etc.
| egeek wrote:
| It'll be easy to find the Shellys. Just look for light
| switches that don't cause the light to turn on or off, or
| lights that turn on randomly. We put a Shelly 2 on every
| light switch in our new build 2 years ago (about 30
| Shellys) and over 50% of them have already failed.
|
| Usually its either the relay refusing to switch on or off.
| Or its able to switch on and off via the app, but not via a
| light switch that it was happily doing the day before. Or
| it disappears off the WiFi and refuses to connect no matter
| how many resets / power cycles are done.
|
| After replacing 10 or so of them, I decided it was easier
| to rip them all out.
| stavros wrote:
| Personally I'd prefer if Zigbee just took over everything,
| then everything would be interoperable and we would avoid
| being in yet another dystopian hellscape.
| bradstewart wrote:
| I just did this, and it's... fun. Particularly account
| transfers--most devices that are tied to internet accounts
| (like Nest) don't allow you to transfer them to other accounts.
|
| So hard-resetting them is often the only option, which is often
| a time consuming process in itself (I'm looking at you Insteon)
| and throws away the configuration.
|
| I didn't even attempt to leave the HomeAssistant-based stuff in
| place.
| scarby2 wrote:
| So for stuff that's not trivial to remove just set up new
| accounts i.e. 123ExampleRd@gmail.com, tie everything to that
| e-mail and then just hand over the passwords when you move.
| Preferably do this when you move in, It also solves the issue
| of providers with no means to share accounts or devices that
| tie to google/other auth, this way you share the password
| with everyone who lives with you without giving out any
| personal credentials.
|
| Not to mention the convenience of having the ability to have
| e-mails sent to whoever happens to be resident at that
| property and keep a history that can be transferred. I.e.
| maintenance invoices, remodel invoices, appliance receipts.
| Then when you sell the house the new owner will get all that
| info.
| bradstewart wrote:
| Yea, that's definitely what I _should_ have done. But it
| did not cross my mind when I originally set everything up.
| Next time!
| CrossWired wrote:
| I just sold, all switches were GE ZWave paddle switches, new
| house is old wouldnt work, left them all.
|
| Both doors were Z-wave enabled locks, left both of them as I
| bought updated ones for the new house
|
| Left 2 IP Cams (with manual and details) that were not smart to
| take down, and planned on switching at the new house.
|
| I took all the Ubiquiti wifi gear, all the home automation hubs
| and anything I could EASILY reuse.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I didn't have a "full" setup, just a Nest and a few rooms on
| Hue; I ended up leaving it all behind-- the realtor actually
| had the Nest right on the listing like it was a major selling
| point, and our new place had an older boiler anyway, so it
| wasn't clear it would be a good fit.
|
| It was fairly easy to just factory reset everything and walk
| away, but yeah if there was an actual PC/RPi and a user-managed
| software stack in the picture, I could picture it being a real
| headache to sort out.
| llamataboot wrote:
| I have slowly gone all in on Home Assistant over the past 5 years
| and I think it is an amazing community, and amazing open-source
| success story, and fantastic software.
|
| I will say that programming your house yourself can be fun (you
| can literally do anything) but you also have to then keep up with
| all the technical debt and changes over time. I still don't think
| it's a great choice for non technically minded folks that would
| find that level of tinkering and fixing overwhelming - but I must
| say that Home Assistant is moving positively in that direction by
| really focusing on UX - and having a giant community keeping
| integrations updated, even unofficial reverse-engineered ones, is
| great.
| everyone wrote:
| All this smarthome stuff like an enormous amount of work. What
| are any actual concrete benefits over doing things the dumb way?
|
| I can't think of anything significant, certainly nothing to
| justify the cost (not just money, also time, embodied energy
| etc).
|
| Though I have 0 experience with this stuff, so I am asking a
| genuine question.
| nouveaux wrote:
| Without knowing your home, it's hard to say. I think the
| biggest benefit right now is sun rise alarm lights and
| circadian rhythm lights. This should have a noticeable benefit
| for everyone. The hardest part is figuring out what to do with
| your physical light switches.
|
| At the end of the day though, the ones that benefit the most
| from home automation are enthusiasts who enjoy tinkering. If
| that's not you, get some hue lights and light switches, and
| call it a day.
| markvdb wrote:
| We use a traditional system at our first home, but at the
| family holiday home in the remote countryside, smart home stuff
| makes a lot of sense:
|
| - burglary alarm
|
| - smoke alarm
|
| - no guests? all lights off
|
| - minimal heat in winter to prevent freezing pipes
|
| - preheat home and boiler before arrival
|
| - ...
| thebean11 wrote:
| Whoa, I didn't realize automatic radiator valves existed. Always
| feel guilty about using a space heater because the radiator gets
| way to hot.
| mrweasel wrote:
| The valves/thermostats in the article is actually kinda big.
| More modern ones are not much larger than the regular
| thermostats. It might be a question about which models can be
| integrated into Home Assistant.
| OJFord wrote:
| You can also get them that look exactly like a regular one,
| just with a mains cable coming out too - add any HA-supported
| relay (or interface to a relay). I've been meaning to do that
| for some time; I'd prefer that to integrated temperature
| sensing & controls on every radiator personally.
| vetinari wrote:
| > It might be a question about which models can be integrated
| into Home Assistant.
|
| There are also multiple ways (zha vs zigbee2mqtt); and the
| given valve may support one, but not the other.
| pixelbreaker wrote:
| no thanks. I like switches and using my body. This kind of tech
| as progress is a fallacy.
| mrspuratic wrote:
| I like using switches and my body too. I mostly like the latter
| at the beach though, so last year when we had to drive 70km
| back from the coast because the kid next door thought it would
| be fun to bounce a football off a window, I caved. Replaced the
| old school hard-wired 110dB neighbourhood-bothering alarm (home
| insurance policy requirements suck) with one I can
| set/unset/silence/check via internet or SMS.
|
| Since then I've added a handful of sensors, switches and pass-
| through sockets. Very much cheaper than upgrading the entire
| heating system, long term fuel efficiency gains aside. I don't
| need to plan/remember to turn off things or change thermostats,
| I just need to set the alarm "away" and that's done.
|
| I have 3 rules: everything has to work with the same app, I do
| not talk to my house, and everything has to work acceptably if
| there's an outage. If it's not helping with security or
| tangible energy savings I probably don't want it.
| Kiro wrote:
| Good for you. I personally wish I could control everything with
| my mind.
| nmcfarl wrote:
| I'm not sure. I love my house, but the lights are insane with a
| switch under every overhead light, and using smart switches to
| control them has been so very useful. Generally I control all
| the lights in a room with 1 smart switch so I don't have to
| walk across the room to turn on all the lights in the room
|
| My bedroom came with 3 switches in 2 panels across the room
| from each other, the kids room 2 in 2 locations, bathroom 4 in
| 1, kitchen 4 in 3, living room 6 in 2, dinning room 2 in 2.
|
| Detailed example: It takes 4 light switches in 3 locations to
| turn on my kitchen lights:
|
| * 1 panel - 3 sides of the kitchen ceiling lights switch,
| kitchen recessed lights switch
|
| * separate panel 4 feet away on the other side of a counter -
| breakfast bar (4th side) ceiling light switch.
|
| * final panel 10 feet to the right, down the breakfast bar
| counter to turn on the recessed breakfast bar lights.
|
| Is it too much to ask that you circumnavigate the kitchen every
| morning to turn on the lights to make coffee? No, the previous
| owners did it every day for 20 some odd years. But do I want to
| do it? No.
|
| And I certainly think it's progress that I can choose not to.
| grvdrm wrote:
| I'm right there with you. I own a relatively new house (8
| years old) and it has SO many switches associated with
| various lights. Easy to use the switches as they exist, sure.
| But some simple automations make it easy to flip things
| on/off without walking all over the house to find the right
| switch.
|
| Also, some of us have roommates that don't obey the rules. My
| 3-year old DOES NOT turn on the lights when she walks
| downstairs on her own in the morning. Perfect opportunity for
| a simple Z-Wave motion senor + switch automation,.
|
| Otherwise, I agree with the general sentiment to keep it
| simple. I use Z-Wave switches for lights, a Z-Wave lock for
| one of my doors, and run HA on a RPi4. Haven't spent an
| insane amount of time building custom scripts because I want
| to do other things. And those switches still work without HA
| too.
|
| (totally see the benefits of Shelly, but hard to stuff in
| some electrical boxes like those in my house)
| Havoc wrote:
| You can sidestep the cloud stuff if you've got a static IP and
| wireguard.
| vladgur wrote:
| I have so far failed at setting up wireguard in my home, much
| less making it work with HASS.
|
| Can you share some pointers?
| tristanperry wrote:
| Great article, thanks for posting. I've been on a smart home
| journey myself, but I'm still currently relying on Alexa for most
| integration and a Hue Bridge. It works well for the 30-40 devices
| I currently have.
|
| I totally agree that Home Assistant is probably the way forward
| for many power users, but it doesn't quite feel beginner-friendly
| enough yet (although the HA devs do seem to be making some great
| improvements in this area).
|
| I'm still undecided on Matter and Thread. Both are naturally
| great technologies, but I can't see Google/Nest opening up to
| Amazon/Ring and vice versa. Not in any meaningful way, at least.
| My hunch is that Matter will help smaller smart home companies,
| but not make much difference for the pre-existing 'walled
| gardens' that the market has. I hope that I'm wrong though.
|
| (Disclaimer: I blog and do YouTube videos as Smart Home Point,
| but I mainly cover consumer friendly products - and hence I
| haven't delved into Home Assistant too much)
| mmerickel wrote:
| The promise of thread versus reality I feel will be a big
| problem - I'd love to be wrong though. I'm on the outside of
| things (haven't used thread, only read about it... use zigbee a
| lot though). But the way I understand it is that once you join
| a device to a particular bridge you will still need to use that
| bridge's ecosystem to communicate - even though the device has
| its own IP address. For example, when a thread device joins to
| homekit and establishes an encrypted handshake, it's not like
| I'll be able to use that device's IP address to talk to it.
| It's not going to trust me - only homekit. But at least it'll
| be able to talk to any homekit bridge on the network and avoid
| a SPOF if I unplug one of my homepod minis.
| 0ld wrote:
| HA is nice, and I've been running it on RPi for a few years,
| mainly to make my air purifiers work in the way I want, plus some
| light switches and a motion detector
|
| The only annoying thing are random breaking changes which make me
| overhaul my configs a couple of times per year
| summari wrote:
| empiricus wrote:
| I use Home Assistant in my new house, and it kind of works. But
| the amount of effort needed to control a cheap wifi on/off plug
| did not impress me positively. It is basically one bit of
| information, but it goes through who knows how many layers of
| software and configurations. Took me a couple of hours to make it
| work..
|
| I also use the standard thermostat component, which is basic
| beyond belief. The kind of control that is implemented in the
| cheapest hw thermostat you can buy. I mean, this is pure
| software, with 20 more lines of code you could implement a pid
| controller or smth. I looked into developing my own component,
| but the documentation for HA development also seems lacking at a
| quick look.
| alex3305 wrote:
| I am using Home Assistant for my home automation for about 4
| years now, before just lurking. For me Home Assistant is about
| quantity, not quality. Look at the massive amount of
| Integrations, currently sitting at almost 2000 [1]. Which is
| really impressive, but not even half of them are apparently
| used [2]?
|
| Another example of this was when Blueprints were introduced
| [3]. I really, really love the idea of having templated
| automations, and I even introduced them into my setup. But
| sharing Blueprints is clunky, not mentioning updating
| Blueprints, which is borderline impossible from UI. Or at
| least, I haven't figured it out yet.
|
| I still wouldn't recommend Home Assistant to a non-technical
| person, as some aspects are really hard to work out. Even if
| you're *Ops person.
|
| 1. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/ 2.
| https://analytics.home-assistant.io/#integrations 3.
| https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/12/13/release-202012...
| nouveaux wrote:
| Home Assistant is the Linux Desktop of consumer applications.
| Tons of power under the hood and it is not designed with the
| end user in mind. Home Assistant has accomplished something
| literally no one else has, including Google, Amazon and Apple.
| Home Assistant has the best integration across the most number
| of devices. It is also extremely reliable and you can run it
| without the cloud.
|
| If you want easy to install, I would suggest using Alexa with
| Alexa compatible devices. Amazon has really made Home
| Automation easy.
|
| I agree that Home Assistant documentation is really bad. If you
| are technical and want to stick it out with Home Assistant,
| there are Python bridges you can use to write your own custom
| code.
| criddell wrote:
| When your power goes out for a few minutes, what state does
| everything go into when it resumes?
| jaywalk wrote:
| For things like smart bulbs, that's usually set on the device
| itself. For a smart switch, it's usually just going to be off.
|
| However, with HA you could easily create an automation to set
| everything how you want it when the power comes back on. It
| could even be conditional based on the time of day or whatever
| else you want to consider.
| idatum wrote:
| Good article that gets into the details of leveraging Home
| Assistant (HA) to glue together various types of sensors and
| switches, etc.
|
| I think categorizing HA users into 2 groups of either technical
| or non-technical is too coarse. You have to add another dimension
| that captures how much a user is willing to automate their home
| (making it "smart").
|
| I'm technical, but my goal is to make things as seamless as
| possible. For example, my Z-Wave wall switches are the type that
| allow the original switch to override what the remote command
| sent. These in-wall Z-Wave switches are embedded in the switch
| box and the existing switch is then low voltage.
|
| The same for my thermostat. Any household member can override
| locally. I detect the change and make sure I hold that new value
| over any automations that run that day.
|
| In the end, my HA setup is pretty minimal with no HA add-ons and
| a few integrations, such as Z-WaveJS2MQTT and MQTT being the most
| used. This way I rarely hit any issues upgrading HA.
| 01100011 wrote:
| As a SWE I was initially skeptical about using software to
| control more aspects of my environment but I finally gave in and
| gave HA a shot. It took some work but I managed to cobble
| together a system using a RPI and ZWave which seemed to work
| reliably. I slowly added more features like HVAC and controlling
| my aquarium top-off pump. Everything worked reliably until I went
| on vacation and the switch controlling the aquarium top-off pump
| inexplicably fell off the network. I watched the water level
| slowly drop from 400 miles away over my webcam feed with no way
| to fix it. Moral of the story is beware of automation and always
| consider your failure cases. Building up these sorts of systems
| is fun and rewarding initially but can become a time sink and a
| liability if you're not careful.
| reacharavindh wrote:
| May be my day job of handling servers and services at scale makes
| me say this...
|
| I'd like my home, appliances and equipment to be dumb and simple.
| A basic level of automation by making all power switches
| controllable from a central private endpoint would be nice, but
| hooking that up to a non self-hosted service is a big No for me.
|
| I'm about to buy a home. It will be fun to find that simplicity
| in automation for myself.
| nomel wrote:
| > making all power switches controllable from a central private
| endpoint would be nice
|
| This is what Zigbee and Z-Wave are for, and I would say one one
| of the main points of using home assistant: to keep it all
| local. The Nabu Casa stuff just allows you to access your
| _required local_ home assistant setup (RPi, VM, whatever)
| without having to mess with DMZ to allow direct connections.
| Self hosted in the whole point of it all.
|
| If you buy smart devices that require cloud connections, then
| home assistant can also work with many of those, but it ends up
| being a much worse experience when turning your lightbulb on
| requires sending an http request halfway around the world and
| back.
| crooked-v wrote:
| I'd personally recommend the Lutron Caseta line. They use a
| proprietary RF system so if you want full automation or phone-
| based control you need their hub, but even without one you can
| just use them as normal switches, pair switches and remotes,
| pair switches with motion sensors, etc just as built-in
| behavior.
|
| They've also covered basic usability issues that a lot of other
| smart switches overlook, like having a hard disconnect on every
| switch, so you don't need to go to the breaker box just to
| change a lightbulb.
| FanaHOVA wrote:
| I tried to build a company around this in ~2014, we built our own
| boards and everything, and had a fork with HASS that had more
| defaults based on our hardware. Too bad it didn't quite work out
| as a business.
|
| The 3D designs for the hardware cases are still on GitHub:
| https://github.com/Smart-Torvy/3D-Objects
| gh02t wrote:
| Ubiquiti also briefly employed the founder of Home Assistant in
| 2018 and paid him specifically to work on it. People speculated
| that they were considering releasing some sort of product built
| on HA, but it never materialized.
|
| It's maybe for the better from a user/community POV, but I'm
| surprised there hasn't been more commercial interest. HA in its
| current form is still probably a bit too technical for mass
| market, but I would think a company could easily spruce it up a
| bit and instantly have a fairly strong software ecosystem and a
| lot of good will as long as they handled it right.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > On caveat is that I have started running into some reliability
| issues (occasional device unavailability) once I exceeded 50 or
| so devices. This seems to be common for Zigbee networks,
|
| It's patently ridiculous that you could add a lightbulb to your
| network and be unable to get in your front door the next day
| because now you have too many devices.
|
| Even more so when you consider that the standard is twenty years
| old and should be extremely mature.
|
| This is the problem with all this home automation stuff...all of
| them, Zigbee, Zwave, wifi - seem to crap out as soon as you have
| a decent number of devices. WiFi seems the least robust for high
| device count, but why haven't Zwave and Zigbee figured out how to
| get their systems to work for a large number of devices, a
| decade-ish into things?
|
| Security is also something of a joke for both zigbee and z-wave.
|
| > I'm excited about the upcoming Matter and Thread standards
| which are likely to replace/augment Zigbee (and Z-wave) as true
| interoperable home automation connectivity standards.
|
| Interoperable, but you'll be forced by vendors to use _someone
| 's_ online services. There is no way Matter and Thread will be
| designed in such a way that you will have freedom from paying
| _somebody_ every month _and_ give data that will eventually make
| its way to marketers.
|
| Edit: the author's upstairs window automation devices are
| ludicrously dangerous from a fire safety standpoint as there
| appears to be no easy way to open them if the device breaks or
| loses power. Folks, do not remove manual control from windows.
| It's not just dangerous, it's likely illegal. Windows and doors
| MUST be operable, easily, by one hand.
| secabeen wrote:
| > It's patently ridiculous that you could add a lightbulb to
| your network and be unable to get in your front door the next
| day because now you have too many devices.
|
| I am not aware of any keypad zigbee or z-wave door lock that
| depends on that network to unlock in standard config. Yes, you
| could set it up that way, to unlock based on presence
| detection, etc, but that's on you. The standard setup is a
| local code list on the lock, with updates and status reported
| to home automation to enable integration. Most locks also have
| a standard key backup as well, so you're doubly protected.
| vetinari wrote:
| Similarly with radiator valves; they operate locally. You
| program them with a mode (normal/off/away) and schedule
| (given temp at given time) upfront, and then they maintain
| the required temperature.
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