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> In an ideal world, Hub owners would be free to point their devices at a different central server, run by a third-party competitor or a trusted friend, or even

> In an ideal world, Hub owners would be free to point their devices at a different central server, run by a third-party competitor or a trusted friend, or even run such a server on their own. They would likewise be free to collaborate on improved software that would unlock the potential of the Hub hardware or purchase such software from a competitor to Nest. This ideal world exists, and it is glorious. I somewhat recently set up a Raspberry Pi 2 with https://home-assistant.io https://home-assistant.io and a cheap z-wave USB stick. The interface is through a webpage (not an app), and I access it remotely using a OpenVPN server on my router. It's interfacing with door sensors, motion sensors, wall switches, cameras, my stereo, HUE lights, etc. It can email me or send me SMS for notifications. When I wake up and walk past a motion sensor, the lights come on in a dim scene. When I come home and open the door, the lights turn on. I have tons of rules and it's super fun. Totally self-hosted, and the main server is completely open-source (written in Python3). I haven't set it up with a thermostat but lots of other people have.

balloob 11y ago
Author here. Thanks for the shout out. As AcidBurnNSA said, Home Assistant is free, fully open-source and fully community driven - no company involved. We have over 240 components and platforms to include a wide range of products and services: https://home-assistant.io/components/ https://home-assistant.io/components/ If you're attending OpenIoT Summit in San Diego, I'll be speaking tomorrow about Home Assistant 1:35pm - 2:25pm in Harbor Ballroom F: http://openiotelc2016.sched.org/event/6DBd/automating-your-home-with-home-assistant-pythons-answer-to-the-internet-of-things-paulus-schoutsen-appfolio http://openiotelc2016.sched.org/event/6DBd/automating-your-h...
- el_benhameen 11y ago
  Man, I work about a block from there and would've registered in a heartbeat had I known about the conference. The talk sounds fantastic. Any idea if they sell day-of tickets? I don't see them anywhere but figured I may as well ask.
  - balloob 11y ago
    I don't know if they sell day tickets. All videos will be recorded so you should be able to watch it online. I'm planning to give a similar talk soon at a Python SD user group meeting to practice for my PyCon 2016 talk. You can find my sliders for tomorrow here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1P2WsmwGSSni4gAriY5IA0-m-FUGO1kno3gIkRYz20Kw/edit#slide=id.p https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1P2WsmwGSSni4gAriY5IA...
    - studentrob 11y ago
      That's so cool! Something about the slides not being released yet made me want to read them more. It's Wikileaks of legitimate content =) Good luck with your work, it looks really useful and interesting. I feel this is what we all dreamed up in the early internet years while watching Star Trek. Digital controls for everything, and not being beholden to others for the way in which we manage the controls. I'm also interested in electricity monitors but I think that's a separate thing.
    - RickS 11y ago
      from both the slides and the demo UI, you've got a much stronger design sense than the average open source project. Lucky users!
  - fapjacks 11y ago
    Damnit. I also would love to attend, had I known about it in advance enough to take the coaster in.
- plexicle 11y ago
  Site looks great. Loving that it's Polymer.
- nanoojaboo 11y ago
  going to try!
- shams93 11y ago
  Even if this is complex for the average homeowner theres an opportunity to start your own business setting this up for no tech savy homeowners in your locale.
zongitsrinzler 11y ago
I don't think you can compare anything Raspberry Pi with a polished consumer product. The ideal world does not exist for those who already spent $300 on the hub.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  In IoT, Raspberry Pi and a "polished consumer products" are two different categories. The latter usually looks pretty and comes in nice packaging, but it has little in terms of usefulness, adds some user-hostile features (like vendor's cloud dependance) and its actual hardware could be replicated by a hobbyist at 1/10 of the price with said Raspberry Pi and a short visit to Aliexpress. Sadly, companies learn that spending money on sales&marketing has better ROI than spending it on making an actually useful product. And it seems to me that startups are bigger offenders than established companies here.
  - gh02t 11y ago
    Yeah, when I first started playing with smart home stuff I looked at commercial hardware and saw that a lot of it requires a subscription on top of steep up front costs. So I broke out my oscilloscope and soldering iron and made my own for a tiny fraction of the cost and have had great fun doing it. It used to be really hard to do this because wireless communication with hobbyist microcontrollers was either tedious or expensive (the old Arduino wifi shields were like $30-40). The RasPi and ESP8266 have really made things more accessible; you can build a central hub for $50 with a good wifi antenna and then something like a temp/light/humidity sensor is about $10. Or control lights with the $5 Sonoff switch from Itead (basically an ESP+relay on a well designed PCB, that is hobbyist friendly and lets you put your own firmware on it if you like). Or great free controller tools like Home Assistant and data management like InfluxDB and Grafana. It's a great time to be an electronics hobbyist. The rise of IoT and smart home applications have produced a surge of new and interesting products for hobbyists that didn't exist before, I'm guessing as a side effect of dissatisfaction with the state of commercial products.
    - Chris2048 11y ago
robocaptain 11y ago
Oh man. Thank you so much for posting this - it looks really well developed and surprisingly mature. (Or maybe I shouldn't be surprised?) Anyways, I'm sure my wife will ha^H^H love you for giving me another "fun" home project. :)
- gh02t 11y ago
  I've also been using HA for a while, mostly with custom made devices over MQTT. Can honestly say that it is quite impressive and is remarkably reliable (important when it's controlling your lights or thermostat). My only knock is that there isn't a whole lot of flexibility in customizing the frontend, but the tradeoff is that configuration is more straightforward. baloob is also very helpful on the issues page and seems to really love the project, so kudos to him.
  - ChrisArgyle 11y ago
    Also great is the wow factor when you show off the mobile interface. Material design is a big time crowd pleaser.
- acidburnNSA 11y ago
  No prob. I'm in the same boat. My wife rolls her eyes so hard when I show friends everything.
  - robocaptain 11y ago
    Rolls her eyes - but secretly impressed, am I right??
vvvv 11y ago
I'm so going to set this up in my new flat. Could you please recommend starting guides / reading materials? Thanks
- coco1989 11y ago
  https://home-assistant.io/getting-started/configuration/ https://home-assistant.io/getting-started/configuration/ https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=configuring+home+assistant https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=configuring+hom...
  - acidburnNSA 11y ago
    Good links. Also https://home-assistant.io/cookbook/ https://home-assistant.io/cookbook/ has lots of examples which will prove invaluable for setting up various rules.
uptown 11y ago
Curious which router you're using. Time for an upgrade, and am open to advice.
- acidburnNSA 11y ago
  I'm using a Buffalo WZR-600DHP and it's been keeping up pretty well. If you want to go all out, I sent my mom a Nighthawk (Netgear AC1900) because I wanted extra processing power, and therefore extra bandwidth, for remote ham radio operations stuff. It also works well.
ChrisArgyle 11y ago
Home Assistant user here, too. After my house got robbed it was either $1000-$2000 for commercial, cloud-locked systems or Home Assistant with $200 worth of X10 devices and IP cameras. The commercial options couldn't automatically arm when I went to work. Nor could they use Pushover. Nor did they accept pull requests :)
tamana 11y ago
This is great , but less techie consumers need turnkey solutions, from names they trust. Is there a value-added reseller ecosystem on too of rPi platform? With an open-standards coalition?

balloob 11y ago

Author here. Thanks for the shout out. As AcidBurnNSA said, Home Assistant is free, fully open-source and fully community driven - no company involved. We have over 240 components and platforms to include a wide range of products and services: https://home-assistant.io/components/ https://home-assistant.io/components/ If you're attending OpenIoT Summit in San Diego, I'll be speaking tomorrow about Home Assistant 1:35pm - 2:25pm in Harbor Ballroom F: http://openiotelc2016.sched.org/event/6DBd/automating-your-home-with-home-assistant-pythons-answer-to-the-internet-of-things-paulus-schoutsen-appfolio http://openiotelc2016.sched.org/event/6DBd/automating-your-h...

el_benhameen 11y ago
Man, I work about a block from there and would've registered in a heartbeat had I known about the conference. The talk sounds fantastic. Any idea if they sell day-of tickets? I don't see them anywhere but figured I may as well ask.
- balloob 11y ago
  I don't know if they sell day tickets. All videos will be recorded so you should be able to watch it online. I'm planning to give a similar talk soon at a Python SD user group meeting to practice for my PyCon 2016 talk. You can find my sliders for tomorrow here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1P2WsmwGSSni4gAriY5IA0-m-FUGO1kno3gIkRYz20Kw/edit#slide=id.p https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1P2WsmwGSSni4gAriY5IA...
  - studentrob 11y ago
    That's so cool! Something about the slides not being released yet made me want to read them more. It's Wikileaks of legitimate content =) Good luck with your work, it looks really useful and interesting. I feel this is what we all dreamed up in the early internet years while watching Star Trek. Digital controls for everything, and not being beholden to others for the way in which we manage the controls. I'm also interested in electricity monitors but I think that's a separate thing.
  - RickS 11y ago
    from both the slides and the demo UI, you've got a much stronger design sense than the average open source project. Lucky users!
- fapjacks 11y ago
  Damnit. I also would love to attend, had I known about it in advance enough to take the coaster in.
plexicle 11y ago
Site looks great. Loving that it's Polymer.
nanoojaboo 11y ago
going to try!
shams93 11y ago
Even if this is complex for the average homeowner theres an opportunity to start your own business setting this up for no tech savy homeowners in your locale.

zongitsrinzler 11y ago

I don't think you can compare anything Raspberry Pi with a polished consumer product. The ideal world does not exist for those who already spent $300 on the hub.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
In IoT, Raspberry Pi and a "polished consumer products" are two different categories. The latter usually looks pretty and comes in nice packaging, but it has little in terms of usefulness, adds some user-hostile features (like vendor's cloud dependance) and its actual hardware could be replicated by a hobbyist at 1/10 of the price with said Raspberry Pi and a short visit to Aliexpress. Sadly, companies learn that spending money on sales&marketing has better ROI than spending it on making an actually useful product. And it seems to me that startups are bigger offenders than established companies here.
- gh02t 11y ago
  Yeah, when I first started playing with smart home stuff I looked at commercial hardware and saw that a lot of it requires a subscription on top of steep up front costs. So I broke out my oscilloscope and soldering iron and made my own for a tiny fraction of the cost and have had great fun doing it. It used to be really hard to do this because wireless communication with hobbyist microcontrollers was either tedious or expensive (the old Arduino wifi shields were like $30-40). The RasPi and ESP8266 have really made things more accessible; you can build a central hub for $50 with a good wifi antenna and then something like a temp/light/humidity sensor is about $10. Or control lights with the $5 Sonoff switch from Itead (basically an ESP+relay on a well designed PCB, that is hobbyist friendly and lets you put your own firmware on it if you like). Or great free controller tools like Home Assistant and data management like InfluxDB and Grafana. It's a great time to be an electronics hobbyist. The rise of IoT and smart home applications have produced a surge of new and interesting products for hobbyists that didn't exist before, I'm guessing as a side effect of dissatisfaction with the state of commercial products.
  - Chris2048 11y ago

robocaptain 11y ago

Oh man. Thank you so much for posting this - it looks really well developed and surprisingly mature. (Or maybe I shouldn't be surprised?) Anyways, I'm sure my wife will ha^H^H love you for giving me another "fun" home project. :)

gh02t 11y ago
I've also been using HA for a while, mostly with custom made devices over MQTT. Can honestly say that it is quite impressive and is remarkably reliable (important when it's controlling your lights or thermostat). My only knock is that there isn't a whole lot of flexibility in customizing the frontend, but the tradeoff is that configuration is more straightforward. baloob is also very helpful on the issues page and seems to really love the project, so kudos to him.
- ChrisArgyle 11y ago
  Also great is the wow factor when you show off the mobile interface. Material design is a big time crowd pleaser.
acidburnNSA 11y ago
No prob. I'm in the same boat. My wife rolls her eyes so hard when I show friends everything.
- robocaptain 11y ago
  Rolls her eyes - but secretly impressed, am I right??

vvvv 11y ago

I'm so going to set this up in my new flat. Could you please recommend starting guides / reading materials? Thanks

coco1989 11y ago
https://home-assistant.io/getting-started/configuration/ https://home-assistant.io/getting-started/configuration/ https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=configuring+home+assistant https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=configuring+hom...
- acidburnNSA 11y ago
  Good links. Also https://home-assistant.io/cookbook/ https://home-assistant.io/cookbook/ has lots of examples which will prove invaluable for setting up various rules.

uptown 11y ago

Curious which router you're using. Time for an upgrade, and am open to advice.

acidburnNSA 11y ago
I'm using a Buffalo WZR-600DHP and it's been keeping up pretty well. If you want to go all out, I sent my mom a Nighthawk (Netgear AC1900) because I wanted extra processing power, and therefore extra bandwidth, for remote ham radio operations stuff. It also works well.

ChrisArgyle 11y ago

Home Assistant user here, too. After my house got robbed it was either $1000-$2000 for commercial, cloud-locked systems or Home Assistant with $200 worth of X10 devices and IP cameras. The commercial options couldn't automatically arm when I went to work. Nor could they use Pushover. Nor did they accept pull requests :)

tamana 11y ago

This is great , but less techie consumers need turnkey solutions, from names they trust. Is there a value-added reseller ecosystem on too of rPi platform? With an open-standards coalition?