23 ms·

Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform running on Python 3

552 points by federicoponzi 9y ago

eltoozero 9y ago
I was able to get Home Assistant spun up via Hass.io on an RPi2 very rapidly, switched to RPi3 for improved UI performance though. OTA updates have been seamless, but the out-of-box still requires some conf file editing, which may be a turn off for some. It did automatically discover AppleTV, Roku, and Hue (easy pairing). For integrating "homebrew" sensors I was able to roll MySensors[0] platform with parts lying around in drawers to get house-wide temperature monitoring with a few lines of yaml. Looking forward to further refinements to the platform!! [0]: https://www.mysensors.org https://www.mysensors.org
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
thearn4 9y ago
Looks interesting, can this function as a ZWave controller hub when used on system with a ZWave USB stick?
- gbrayut 9y ago
  Yep! I run a network with a dozen or so zwave devices on hassio on an RPi3. See https://home-assistant.io/hassio/zwave/ https://home-assistant.io/hassio/zwave/ for details.
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  Yes, I have a few z wave devices that are controlled and monitored by my Synology Nas ruining hass with among other things a zwave transceiver
- SEJeff 9y ago
  It sure can! Many of our users (I say our somewhat sarcastically as I'm only an occasional contributor) use this USB zwave stick successfully: https://aeotec.com/z-wave-usb-stick https://aeotec.com/z-wave-usb-stick See this documentation for more info please: https://home-assistant.io/docs/z-wave/ https://home-assistant.io/docs/z-wave/ And this for the specific controllers officially supported: https://home-assistant.io/docs/z-wave/controllers/ https://home-assistant.io/docs/z-wave/controllers/ If you're a new user, hass.io is going to be the most approachable way to get hass up and running while making it easy to install all of the add-ons and configure things securely + upgrade easily. The docs for zwave on hass.io are pretty straightforward as well https://home-assistant.io/hassio/zwave/ https://home-assistant.io/hassio/zwave/ And if you want to learn more about what hass.io does ontop of normal home assistant, please visit this page: https://home-assistant.io/hassio/ https://home-assistant.io/hassio/ I hope this helps answer your question.
lima 9y ago
How does it compare to OpenHAB 2, other than the language (OpenHAB is written in Java)? I'm currently running OpenHAB and it's rock solid (I have one with >2 years uptime on a BananaPI). If I want to extend it, I usually write Python scripts that either use OpenHAB HTTP API or send MQTT messages, so I've not yet felt the need to write Java code. While I'm proficient with Java, I'd have to set up a development environment. But the OpenHAB scripting language - while very powerful - has a very steep learning curve. It's hard to work with if you don't use it all the time and you end up having to google everything single thing you want to do. The Home Assistant community appears to be more active (about 2x) and the barrier for entry is much lower.
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  I'm a software developer for one of those biG tech companies programming in Java and c++ all day, and I found openhab largely inscrutable without putting a large amount of time in. In contrast, I had the relatively simple time setting up hass and got to my desired level of automation in about 1hr. So, it was an easy choice for me. I also really like home assistants philosphy on library code- there is basically no device or tech specific code in Hass, their rule is to only use third party libraries with a wrapper around them. This greatly reduced the scope of the task for developing the internals of a home automation system Finally, there is now a system in place in has where you can pretty easily write straight python code for scripts, instead of using a yaml config
- JshWright 9y ago
  > The Home Assistant community appears to be more active (about 2x) and the barrier for entry is much lower. I would go so far as to say Home Assistant is literally the best open source community out there today. Very active, lots of folks happy to help users with issues, and lots of devs happy to help newer devs through the PR process.
  - ghroos 9y ago
    Having contributed to a number of projects via github, this is not true at all. I have had prs closed within minutes with curt replies. That is not how you “help newer devs through a PR process.” In another case this happened for a very clear bug. I’m cool with making amendments but maintainers do not seem open to that often, feeling more content to close things because they see the fix as a “hack”. Compared to other projects HASS is one of the worst I have dealt with, sorry to say.
IgorPartola 9y ago
I originally tried to use OpenHab and was turned off it because it required me to define all my stuff manually instead of discovering it automatically. Does HA do the same thing?
- gbrayut 9y ago
  HA has a bunch of things it will discover... See https://home-assistant.io/components/discovery/ https://home-assistant.io/components/discovery/ and the list of manually configured components in the top tab.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
an_account 9y ago
Has the automation scripting improved recently? Last time I looked into this there was an uninvuative (for a newbie) config file that required a server restart to see changes. Not exactly the easiest way to learn as it was a very slow feedback loop.
- balloob 9y ago
  Automations can now be created via the user interface: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3isVVpmiq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3isVVpmiq4 (Automations have been able to be reloaded without restarting for a while now by calling the automation/reload service) [edit: added word "service" at the end]
  - an_account 9y ago
    Thanks for the reply! I'll check it out again.
balloob 9y ago
Founder of Home Assistant here. If anyone has any questions, let me know! Besides being able to install it as a Python package on Python 3, you can also install it using our Hass.io OS. Based on ResinOS and powered by Docker, it offers over the air updates and management of your device via the user interface: https://home-assistant.io/hassio/ https://home-assistant.io/hassio/
- nubela 9y ago
  Founder? Is this for-profit? If so, how you gonna make money? Edit: glad to see the project on Github is APACHE licensed. Any drawbacks from using the software compiled str8 from Github as opposed to downloading the binary blob from the website?
  - SEJeff 9y ago
    No, and it is encouraged for those who are capable of it. Send pull requests if you think anything can be improved please!
  - balloob 9y ago
    It is not for-profit. We will soon start a program for people to support the project. The published version of Home Assistant is 100% what is on GitHub. Home automation is able to gather very private details of your house. It knows when you're home, what TV shows you watch, when you go to sleep. We keep all this data locally in your house, without the cloud. We want to make sure that anyone can check and influence the code that is distributed. No data should leave your house without your permission.
    - Dowwie 9y ago
      Hey Baloob. I watched you talk at PyCon. How have your experiences been since you switched to asyncio?
      - balloob 9y ago
        asyncio is amazing. It has been way faster and more predictable. Home Assistant has a lot of small tasks running all the time with the occasional task taking a long time (ie. trying to reach a device which has been turned off). The number of tasks running simultaneously used to be limited by the size of the thread worker pool, which is no longer the case. A request taking a long time is now just a coroutine pending result in our event loop. We still offer the old API on top of asyncio, so we have been able to incrementally transition. By now the core and important components are all fully asyncio. Most integrations are not.
oulipo 9y ago
I'm a co-founder of Snips https://snips.ai https://snips.ai, we are building a 100% on-device Voice AI platform which protects your privacy as it does not rely on sending voice on servers like Google and Apple do You can use the platform for free (we will also open-source over time), it can run on Raspberry 3 and we added an integration with the amazing Home Assistant: https://home-assistant.io/components/snips https://home-assistant.io/components/snips
- googlryas 9y ago
  Can you recommend a far field microphone for use with your project? Or really one as good as or better than those in the echo dot would be amazing, because that is what my baseline is right now.
  - oulipo 9y ago
    We are using a ReSpeaker, and we made a blog post to benchmark some microphones at https://medium.com/snips-ai/benchmarking-microphone-arrays-respeaker-conexant-microsemi-acuedge-matrix-creator-minidsp-950de8876fda https://medium.com/snips-ai/benchmarking-microphone-arrays-r...
- halflings 9y ago
  > which protects your privacy as it does not rely on sending voice on servers like Google and Apple do And on your website: > The First On-Device Voice Platform Android already has on-device voice recognition. Just try getting in airplane mode and saying "OK Google, play music" or something that does not require being online.
  - detaro 9y ago
    Can apps/services hook into that?
  - Drdrdrq 9y ago
    Sure, but the Google platform is still in the cloud.
  - 9y ago
kuschku 9y ago
Assuming I have a few lights controllable via GPIO on the Raspberry pi (with custom circuitry to power the lights), what’d be the easiest way to integrate them with Hass? (btw, hass means 'hate' in German)
- SEJeff 9y ago
  Feel free to call it Home Assistant instead of hass :) One of the primary deployment platforms is the Raspberry Pi, so it is very well supported. I believe this would do exactly what you want: https://home-assistant.io/components/switch.rpi_gpio/ https://home-assistant.io/components/switch.rpi_gpio/
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Hm, I can’t do multiple pins with PWM with that, can I? Because I currently have for each LED strip 3 pins with R G B using PWM.
    - JshWright 9y ago
      You would likely be better off using some other solution for your light control, and then talking to that over HTTP/MQTT. I use a version of this: https://www.stavros.io/posts/wifi-enabled-rgb-led-strip-controller/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/wifi-enabled-rgb-led-strip-cont... It integrates nicely with HA via MQTT.
      - kuschku 9y ago
        Yeah, I’m trying to switch to an arduino-based solution, but I just really want to avoid WiFi. And building custom protocols isn’t that optimal either.
        icebraining 9y ago
        There are MQTT libraries for Arduino that work with the Ethernet shield.
SEJeff 9y ago
Here is a really nice post from one of the home assistant contributors on visualizing the home using home assistant and some other goodies: http://www.vmwareinfo.com/2017/07/visualizing-smart-home-using-home.html http://www.vmwareinfo.com/2017/07/visualizing-smart-home-usi...
jo909 9y ago
Reasonable satisfied user here. I love python and even contributed support for one particular device to a component library. But my plan for the next free weekend is to look into Node-RED and a fully MQTT based system. I feel like that's the way to mix and match different frontends, automations, components etc.
balloob 9y ago
For people interested in the tech stack: Backend is Python 3 with asyncio. Source: https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant - License: Apache 2 Frontend is a PWA powered by Polymer 2 Source: https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant-polymer https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant-polymer - License: Apache 2 - Demo: https://home-assistant.io/demo/ https://home-assistant.io/demo/
exar0815 9y ago
One of the best things of HA is the Emulated Hue Bridge. It allows you the mapping of any kind of Hardware on the corresponding Hue Device. It basically translates e.g. MQTT to Hue. This nicely allowed it to me to integrate my custom built devices in my Home Automation and control them with Amazons Echo Dot.
Animats 9y ago
This thing seems to be mostly an interface for other home automation devices. In the demo, it doesn't directly control anything important. It's not like there are motor control relays connected to the Raspberry Pi's GPIO ports. A big question is how this fails. It needs to fail into some safe condition. Raspberry Pi machines have a full Linux and no stall timer, so they can end up crashed or hung. If this thing turns devices on and is relied on to turn them off, that's a problem.
- JshWright 9y ago
  Home Assistant supports sensors and switches using GPIO pins (if you're running on a Pi, obviously) https://home-assistant.io/components/rpi_gpio/ https://home-assistant.io/components/rpi_gpio/ Home Assistant is indeed an "aggregator" for a lot of different home automation devices. Personally, I find it very useful to have my Nest, my ZWave devices, various ESP8266 "things" (garage door controller, temp/humidity sensors, my doorbell, etc), along with my Chromecasts, and the home/away status of my wife and I all rolled into one state machine (plus a lot of "general" information... the time, sunrise/sunset timing, current weather in my area, traffic conditions, etc). Having all that information in one place means those various components can be controlled intelligently, based on all the available information, rather than just the small island each of them would be on their own. A Pi is totally optional, BTW. You can run HA on pretty much anything that runs Python3.
  - LrnByTeach 9y ago
    Wonderful , this summarized the capabilities of this HAss > A Pi is totally optional, BTW. You can run HA on pretty much anything that runs Python3. > Home Assistant supports sensors and switches using GPIO pins (if you're running on a Pi, obviously) > Home Assistant is indeed an "aggregator" for a lot of different home automation devices. > Having all that information in one place means those various components can be controlled intelligently, based on all the available information, rather than just the small island each of them would be on their own.
dankohn1 9y ago
You might be interested in this analysis (that I co-authored) showing Home Assistant as one of the 20 highest velocity open source projects: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/06/05/30-highest-velocity-open-source-projects/ https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/06/05/30-highest-velocity-open...
a254613e 9y ago
I really really wanted to set this up and have it working, but configuring devices and actions with it is so unnecessarily complicated that I ended up writing my own scripts to do whatever I wanted rather than writing templating code inside YAML config files (literally) to do certain things.
johnjuuljensen 9y ago
I've experimented with both Home Assistant, Domoticz and OpenHab. They're all pretty good in different ways, but in the end in decided to roll my own. They all have built-in scripting, but it's pretty common to send events to mqtt and use some external tools for scripting. In ended up using node-red, because it looked interesting and was really easy to get going. After a while it seemed like the only reason for using any of those 3 systems was the device support, and since I was just using z-wave, for which there is a nice node-red library, I decided to do it all on my own. It only took a couple of week nights before I had most of the things I needed. It did feel kinda silly to do drag and drop programming, and I did en up using the function node a whole lot, but in the end I stuck with it because it allowed me to show the family what it does and how it works.
z3t4 9y ago
If you want to build everything yourself you can get stuff for very cheap eg a pir sensor for 1$ and it will be a good learning experience. If you think it's fun you can even start selling stuff, there's a huge market with huge margins.
Animats 9y ago
The Android client is on F-Droid. Nice. People who don't use Google services can download it easily.
- fest 9y ago
  I have been using the web interface on Android without installing anything. Home Assistant leverages web app manifest (essentially, creates an icon in apps list/homescreen which opens the web interface in a full-screen web browser).
- JshWright 9y ago
  That's not an official app (Home Assistant works well in a mobile browser, just add it to your home screen).
cordite 9y ago
Is there anything out there for setting up a DMX controlled light strip to something smart?
- snw 9y ago
  https://github.com/bluemaex/homebridge-dmxuniverse https://github.com/bluemaex/homebridge-dmxuniverse
cardmagic 9y ago
Is anyone else here completely confused at how much hype there is around automated light management systems? I don’t get it. Is it really that hard to turn on and off lights manually that people really need all this stuff? What am I not getting?
- kabes 9y ago
  Lots of time I'm lying in bed, almost falling asleep and suddenly realizing I left the kitchen light on. In fact, I'm not sure I did. But it doesn't allow me to sleep, so now I need to wake up, check the kitchen for a light that might not even be on. At that moment I'd be willing to pay a lot for a button on my phone to turn off all the lights.
  - cardmagic 9y ago
    I have a Roomba and if I don't close my bathroom door at night, it always gets stuck in the bathroom when it goes off in the morning. So every night, I make sure the bathroom door is closed before I go to bed. I would not pay anything for an app that closed my bathroom door. I just make sure I check at night. It still doesn't make sense to me. Roomba makes sense to me. Sweeping is hard and takes a significant amount of time. Flipping a switch is not hard and takes no time at all.
    - trumpeta 9y ago
      One use I like is having the lamp come on gradually about 20 minutes before my alarm in the morning.
      - cardmagic 9y ago
        That's cool, I like that one, except the sun does that for me in my case. But if I needed to wake up earlier than the sun, I could see that being useful.
      - gulperxcx 9y ago
        That is a pretty cool use case
dberg 9y ago
I had a lot of challenges running home-assistant. Wouldnt find devices properly, issues with devices falling out of the zwave network. Would constantly have to "re-sync". I went and spent the money on HomeSeer and it has been so much better. Tons of great plugins that just work like MQ for the garage, IFTTT, etc. Has schedules, adhoc scripting integeration so you can run your own shell scripts on events, multi-event groups, a decent UI, logging and strong device support. Its strangely written in VB but from a device support standpoint has been extremely solid and finding any device i throw at it quite easily.
strin 9y ago
The home IoT world is broken - I got lots of devices (Sonos, Hue, Alexa, Roku, ...) and they don't play well with each other. Shoutout for data and API integration layer for Home IoT.
- zild3d 9y ago
  Haven't used it but I've heard openHAB is an option to speak to the various devices (alexa and hue directly supported, sonos and roku supported through IFTTT) http://docs.openhab.org/addons/io.html http://docs.openhab.org/addons/io.html
korijn 9y ago
Is it right that home automation is really just light automation? Or did I miss something?
rb666 9y ago
I love Home Assistant, by far my favorite automation platform. I couldn't recommend it more. At home we use it to automatically dim the lights based on the luminance outside, send us messages when laundry is done, activate and deactivate our alarm system based on who is home, turn the radio on in the morning when we enter the living room, turn off all lights in the house when we go to bed, etc. etc. !
vippat 9y ago
I have used this for a while now and say it's the best choice I've made, Still a WIP but really really good
wakkaflokka 9y ago
I love Home Assistant. I do wish that the auto-discovery feature was working in Windows 10.
autorun 9y ago
How would you maintain all those APIs ?

552 points by federicoponzi 9y ago

I was able to get Home Assistant spun up via Hass.io on an RPi2 very rapidly, switched to RPi3 for improved UI performance though. OTA updates have been seamless, but the out-of-box still requires some conf file editing, which may be a turn off for some. It did automatically discover AppleTV, Roku, and Hue (easy pairing). For integrating "homebrew" sensors I was able to roll MySensors[0] platform with parts lying around in drawers to get house-wide temperature monitoring with a few lines of yaml. Looking forward to further refinements to the platform!! [0]: https://www.mysensors.org https://www.mysensors.org

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

thearn4 9y ago

Looks interesting, can this function as a ZWave controller hub when used on system with a ZWave USB stick?

gbrayut 9y ago
Yep! I run a network with a dozen or so zwave devices on hassio on an RPi3. See https://home-assistant.io/hassio/zwave/ https://home-assistant.io/hassio/zwave/ for details.
oh_sigh 9y ago
Yes, I have a few z wave devices that are controlled and monitored by my Synology Nas ruining hass with among other things a zwave transceiver
SEJeff 9y ago
It sure can! Many of our users (I say our somewhat sarcastically as I'm only an occasional contributor) use this USB zwave stick successfully: https://aeotec.com/z-wave-usb-stick https://aeotec.com/z-wave-usb-stick See this documentation for more info please: https://home-assistant.io/docs/z-wave/ https://home-assistant.io/docs/z-wave/ And this for the specific controllers officially supported: https://home-assistant.io/docs/z-wave/controllers/ https://home-assistant.io/docs/z-wave/controllers/ If you're a new user, hass.io is going to be the most approachable way to get hass up and running while making it easy to install all of the add-ons and configure things securely + upgrade easily. The docs for zwave on hass.io are pretty straightforward as well https://home-assistant.io/hassio/zwave/ https://home-assistant.io/hassio/zwave/ And if you want to learn more about what hass.io does ontop of normal home assistant, please visit this page: https://home-assistant.io/hassio/ https://home-assistant.io/hassio/ I hope this helps answer your question.

lima 9y ago

How does it compare to OpenHAB 2, other than the language (OpenHAB is written in Java)? I'm currently running OpenHAB and it's rock solid (I have one with >2 years uptime on a BananaPI). If I want to extend it, I usually write Python scripts that either use OpenHAB HTTP API or send MQTT messages, so I've not yet felt the need to write Java code. While I'm proficient with Java, I'd have to set up a development environment. But the OpenHAB scripting language - while very powerful - has a very steep learning curve. It's hard to work with if you don't use it all the time and you end up having to google everything single thing you want to do. The Home Assistant community appears to be more active (about 2x) and the barrier for entry is much lower.

oh_sigh 9y ago
I'm a software developer for one of those biG tech companies programming in Java and c++ all day, and I found openhab largely inscrutable without putting a large amount of time in. In contrast, I had the relatively simple time setting up hass and got to my desired level of automation in about 1hr. So, it was an easy choice for me. I also really like home assistants philosphy on library code- there is basically no device or tech specific code in Hass, their rule is to only use third party libraries with a wrapper around them. This greatly reduced the scope of the task for developing the internals of a home automation system Finally, there is now a system in place in has where you can pretty easily write straight python code for scripts, instead of using a yaml config
JshWright 9y ago
> The Home Assistant community appears to be more active (about 2x) and the barrier for entry is much lower. I would go so far as to say Home Assistant is literally the best open source community out there today. Very active, lots of folks happy to help users with issues, and lots of devs happy to help newer devs through the PR process.
- ghroos 9y ago
  Having contributed to a number of projects via github, this is not true at all. I have had prs closed within minutes with curt replies. That is not how you “help newer devs through a PR process.” In another case this happened for a very clear bug. I’m cool with making amendments but maintainers do not seem open to that often, feeling more content to close things because they see the fix as a “hack”. Compared to other projects HASS is one of the worst I have dealt with, sorry to say.

IgorPartola 9y ago

I originally tried to use OpenHab and was turned off it because it required me to define all my stuff manually instead of discovering it automatically. Does HA do the same thing?

gbrayut 9y ago
HA has a bunch of things it will discover... See https://home-assistant.io/components/discovery/ https://home-assistant.io/components/discovery/ and the list of manually configured components in the top tab.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

an_account 9y ago

Has the automation scripting improved recently? Last time I looked into this there was an uninvuative (for a newbie) config file that required a server restart to see changes. Not exactly the easiest way to learn as it was a very slow feedback loop.

balloob 9y ago
Automations can now be created via the user interface: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3isVVpmiq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3isVVpmiq4 (Automations have been able to be reloaded without restarting for a while now by calling the automation/reload service) [edit: added word "service" at the end]
- an_account 9y ago
  Thanks for the reply! I'll check it out again.

balloob 9y ago

Founder of Home Assistant here. If anyone has any questions, let me know! Besides being able to install it as a Python package on Python 3, you can also install it using our Hass.io OS. Based on ResinOS and powered by Docker, it offers over the air updates and management of your device via the user interface: https://home-assistant.io/hassio/ https://home-assistant.io/hassio/

nubela 9y ago
Founder? Is this for-profit? If so, how you gonna make money? Edit: glad to see the project on Github is APACHE licensed. Any drawbacks from using the software compiled str8 from Github as opposed to downloading the binary blob from the website?
- SEJeff 9y ago
  No, and it is encouraged for those who are capable of it. Send pull requests if you think anything can be improved please!
- balloob 9y ago
  It is not for-profit. We will soon start a program for people to support the project. The published version of Home Assistant is 100% what is on GitHub. Home automation is able to gather very private details of your house. It knows when you're home, what TV shows you watch, when you go to sleep. We keep all this data locally in your house, without the cloud. We want to make sure that anyone can check and influence the code that is distributed. No data should leave your house without your permission.
  - Dowwie 9y ago
    Hey Baloob. I watched you talk at PyCon. How have your experiences been since you switched to asyncio?
    - balloob 9y ago
      asyncio is amazing. It has been way faster and more predictable. Home Assistant has a lot of small tasks running all the time with the occasional task taking a long time (ie. trying to reach a device which has been turned off). The number of tasks running simultaneously used to be limited by the size of the thread worker pool, which is no longer the case. A request taking a long time is now just a coroutine pending result in our event loop. We still offer the old API on top of asyncio, so we have been able to incrementally transition. By now the core and important components are all fully asyncio. Most integrations are not.

oulipo 9y ago

I'm a co-founder of Snips https://snips.ai https://snips.ai, we are building a 100% on-device Voice AI platform which protects your privacy as it does not rely on sending voice on servers like Google and Apple do You can use the platform for free (we will also open-source over time), it can run on Raspberry 3 and we added an integration with the amazing Home Assistant: https://home-assistant.io/components/snips https://home-assistant.io/components/snips

googlryas 9y ago
Can you recommend a far field microphone for use with your project? Or really one as good as or better than those in the echo dot would be amazing, because that is what my baseline is right now.
- oulipo 9y ago
  We are using a ReSpeaker, and we made a blog post to benchmark some microphones at https://medium.com/snips-ai/benchmarking-microphone-arrays-respeaker-conexant-microsemi-acuedge-matrix-creator-minidsp-950de8876fda https://medium.com/snips-ai/benchmarking-microphone-arrays-r...
halflings 9y ago
> which protects your privacy as it does not rely on sending voice on servers like Google and Apple do And on your website: > The First On-Device Voice Platform Android already has on-device voice recognition. Just try getting in airplane mode and saying "OK Google, play music" or something that does not require being online.
- detaro 9y ago
  Can apps/services hook into that?
- Drdrdrq 9y ago
  Sure, but the Google platform is still in the cloud.
- 9y ago

kuschku 9y ago

Assuming I have a few lights controllable via GPIO on the Raspberry pi (with custom circuitry to power the lights), what’d be the easiest way to integrate them with Hass? (btw, hass means 'hate' in German)

SEJeff 9y ago
Feel free to call it Home Assistant instead of hass :) One of the primary deployment platforms is the Raspberry Pi, so it is very well supported. I believe this would do exactly what you want: https://home-assistant.io/components/switch.rpi_gpio/ https://home-assistant.io/components/switch.rpi_gpio/
- kuschku 9y ago
  Hm, I can’t do multiple pins with PWM with that, can I? Because I currently have for each LED strip 3 pins with R G B using PWM.
  - JshWright 9y ago
    You would likely be better off using some other solution for your light control, and then talking to that over HTTP/MQTT. I use a version of this: https://www.stavros.io/posts/wifi-enabled-rgb-led-strip-controller/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/wifi-enabled-rgb-led-strip-cont... It integrates nicely with HA via MQTT.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      Yeah, I’m trying to switch to an arduino-based solution, but I just really want to avoid WiFi. And building custom protocols isn’t that optimal either.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        There are MQTT libraries for Arduino that work with the Ethernet shield.

SEJeff 9y ago

Here is a really nice post from one of the home assistant contributors on visualizing the home using home assistant and some other goodies: http://www.vmwareinfo.com/2017/07/visualizing-smart-home-using-home.html http://www.vmwareinfo.com/2017/07/visualizing-smart-home-usi...

jo909 9y ago

Reasonable satisfied user here. I love python and even contributed support for one particular device to a component library. But my plan for the next free weekend is to look into Node-RED and a fully MQTT based system. I feel like that's the way to mix and match different frontends, automations, components etc.

balloob 9y ago

For people interested in the tech stack: Backend is Python 3 with asyncio. Source: https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant - License: Apache 2 Frontend is a PWA powered by Polymer 2 Source: https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant-polymer https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant-polymer - License: Apache 2 - Demo: https://home-assistant.io/demo/ https://home-assistant.io/demo/

exar0815 9y ago

One of the best things of HA is the Emulated Hue Bridge. It allows you the mapping of any kind of Hardware on the corresponding Hue Device. It basically translates e.g. MQTT to Hue. This nicely allowed it to me to integrate my custom built devices in my Home Automation and control them with Amazons Echo Dot.

Animats 9y ago

This thing seems to be mostly an interface for other home automation devices. In the demo, it doesn't directly control anything important. It's not like there are motor control relays connected to the Raspberry Pi's GPIO ports. A big question is how this fails. It needs to fail into some safe condition. Raspberry Pi machines have a full Linux and no stall timer, so they can end up crashed or hung. If this thing turns devices on and is relied on to turn them off, that's a problem.

JshWright 9y ago
Home Assistant supports sensors and switches using GPIO pins (if you're running on a Pi, obviously) https://home-assistant.io/components/rpi_gpio/ https://home-assistant.io/components/rpi_gpio/ Home Assistant is indeed an "aggregator" for a lot of different home automation devices. Personally, I find it very useful to have my Nest, my ZWave devices, various ESP8266 "things" (garage door controller, temp/humidity sensors, my doorbell, etc), along with my Chromecasts, and the home/away status of my wife and I all rolled into one state machine (plus a lot of "general" information... the time, sunrise/sunset timing, current weather in my area, traffic conditions, etc). Having all that information in one place means those various components can be controlled intelligently, based on all the available information, rather than just the small island each of them would be on their own. A Pi is totally optional, BTW. You can run HA on pretty much anything that runs Python3.
- LrnByTeach 9y ago
  Wonderful , this summarized the capabilities of this HAss > A Pi is totally optional, BTW. You can run HA on pretty much anything that runs Python3. > Home Assistant supports sensors and switches using GPIO pins (if you're running on a Pi, obviously) > Home Assistant is indeed an "aggregator" for a lot of different home automation devices. > Having all that information in one place means those various components can be controlled intelligently, based on all the available information, rather than just the small island each of them would be on their own.

dankohn1 9y ago

You might be interested in this analysis (that I co-authored) showing Home Assistant as one of the 20 highest velocity open source projects: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/06/05/30-highest-velocity-open-source-projects/ https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/06/05/30-highest-velocity-open...

a254613e 9y ago

I really really wanted to set this up and have it working, but configuring devices and actions with it is so unnecessarily complicated that I ended up writing my own scripts to do whatever I wanted rather than writing templating code inside YAML config files (literally) to do certain things.

johnjuuljensen 9y ago

I've experimented with both Home Assistant, Domoticz and OpenHab. They're all pretty good in different ways, but in the end in decided to roll my own. They all have built-in scripting, but it's pretty common to send events to mqtt and use some external tools for scripting. In ended up using node-red, because it looked interesting and was really easy to get going. After a while it seemed like the only reason for using any of those 3 systems was the device support, and since I was just using z-wave, for which there is a nice node-red library, I decided to do it all on my own. It only took a couple of week nights before I had most of the things I needed. It did feel kinda silly to do drag and drop programming, and I did en up using the function node a whole lot, but in the end I stuck with it because it allowed me to show the family what it does and how it works.

z3t4 9y ago

If you want to build everything yourself you can get stuff for very cheap eg a pir sensor for 1$ and it will be a good learning experience. If you think it's fun you can even start selling stuff, there's a huge market with huge margins.

Animats 9y ago

The Android client is on F-Droid. Nice. People who don't use Google services can download it easily.

fest 9y ago
I have been using the web interface on Android without installing anything. Home Assistant leverages web app manifest (essentially, creates an icon in apps list/homescreen which opens the web interface in a full-screen web browser).
JshWright 9y ago
That's not an official app (Home Assistant works well in a mobile browser, just add it to your home screen).

cordite 9y ago

Is there anything out there for setting up a DMX controlled light strip to something smart?

snw 9y ago
https://github.com/bluemaex/homebridge-dmxuniverse https://github.com/bluemaex/homebridge-dmxuniverse

cardmagic 9y ago

Is anyone else here completely confused at how much hype there is around automated light management systems? I don’t get it. Is it really that hard to turn on and off lights manually that people really need all this stuff? What am I not getting?

kabes 9y ago
Lots of time I'm lying in bed, almost falling asleep and suddenly realizing I left the kitchen light on. In fact, I'm not sure I did. But it doesn't allow me to sleep, so now I need to wake up, check the kitchen for a light that might not even be on. At that moment I'd be willing to pay a lot for a button on my phone to turn off all the lights.
- cardmagic 9y ago
  I have a Roomba and if I don't close my bathroom door at night, it always gets stuck in the bathroom when it goes off in the morning. So every night, I make sure the bathroom door is closed before I go to bed. I would not pay anything for an app that closed my bathroom door. I just make sure I check at night. It still doesn't make sense to me. Roomba makes sense to me. Sweeping is hard and takes a significant amount of time. Flipping a switch is not hard and takes no time at all.
  - trumpeta 9y ago
    One use I like is having the lamp come on gradually about 20 minutes before my alarm in the morning.
    - cardmagic 9y ago
      That's cool, I like that one, except the sun does that for me in my case. But if I needed to wake up earlier than the sun, I could see that being useful.
    - gulperxcx 9y ago
      That is a pretty cool use case

dberg 9y ago

I had a lot of challenges running home-assistant. Wouldnt find devices properly, issues with devices falling out of the zwave network. Would constantly have to "re-sync". I went and spent the money on HomeSeer and it has been so much better. Tons of great plugins that just work like MQ for the garage, IFTTT, etc. Has schedules, adhoc scripting integeration so you can run your own shell scripts on events, multi-event groups, a decent UI, logging and strong device support. Its strangely written in VB but from a device support standpoint has been extremely solid and finding any device i throw at it quite easily.

strin 9y ago

The home IoT world is broken - I got lots of devices (Sonos, Hue, Alexa, Roku, ...) and they don't play well with each other. Shoutout for data and API integration layer for Home IoT.

zild3d 9y ago
Haven't used it but I've heard openHAB is an option to speak to the various devices (alexa and hue directly supported, sonos and roku supported through IFTTT) http://docs.openhab.org/addons/io.html http://docs.openhab.org/addons/io.html

korijn 9y ago

Is it right that home automation is really just light automation? Or did I miss something?

rb666 9y ago

I love Home Assistant, by far my favorite automation platform. I couldn't recommend it more. At home we use it to automatically dim the lights based on the luminance outside, send us messages when laundry is done, activate and deactivate our alarm system based on who is home, turn the radio on in the morning when we enter the living room, turn off all lights in the house when we go to bed, etc. etc. !

vippat 9y ago

I have used this for a while now and say it's the best choice I've made, Still a WIP but really really good

wakkaflokka 9y ago

I love Home Assistant. I do wish that the auto-discovery feature was working in Windows 10.

autorun 9y ago

How would you maintain all those APIs ?