28 ms·

Open-Source Home Automation

869 points by neya 7y ago

bjd2385 7y ago
I spun this OS up as a VM and it does not detect my Wemo smart plugs. However, I'm also not able to detect them from my current phone (running v1.24, I believe, of the app). However, my former phone, which is still running v1.23.1 of the app, _is_ able to see them and connect to them. Anyone else experiencing this same thing?
mlaretallack 7y ago
I have been using home assistant for about 6 months now. Currently I am mainly using it to show what is happening around the home (device detection, adsl data usage, weather from my simple weather station, house power usage etc, local train level crossing state (barrier down/up)) Very impressed with how easy it is to add new items to the overview. I have one smart plug, the intention is to control the Christmas lights this year. I did do this about 15 years ago with my old x10 system and it would be nice to try something a bit more advanced.
- taxidump 7y ago
  How do you track the train barrier state?
  - mlaretallack 7y ago
    The data comes from the open rail data project https://wiki.openraildata.com//index.php?title=Main_Page https://wiki.openraildata.com//index.php?title=Main_Page Some crossings in the uk are directly available as a state within the data, mine is not so I have to track the trains into and out of a region. When the train enters the region, I assume the crossing must be down and when it leaves, I assume it must be up. Its about 30 seconds to a minute off, but for my purpose that's OK.
    - 0xffff2 7y ago
      Out of curiosity, what is your purpose? Do the crossings stay down long enough to cause backups sufficiently large that you alter your schedule to avoid them?
      - alexfoo 7y ago
        Probably yes (I'm guessing as I'm not the OP). There's a level crossing a few miles from me that has automated barriers. The tricky bit is the crossing is right next to a station and there will be various rules in force:- * barriers must be down at least X seconds before a train is due to go through * barriers must be down even if the train is coming in to the station to stop (before it gets to the crossing) - the barriers must be down in case it overshoots * etc Whilst the barriers can go up as soon as a train has passed there may be another one along shortly enough that it's not worth opening the barriers only to close them a few seconds later. Combine those with a timetable that puts 10+ trains an hour each direction and the barriers will probably be down for longer than they are up in peak times. I've seen them down for 10+ minutes at a time. Here's the google streetview that just happens to have a train that has already passed and stopped at the station: https://goo.gl/maps/jhzApjZHUAJ4FcSt6 https://goo.gl/maps/jhzApjZHUAJ4FcSt6 As a pedestrian (or a cyclist without lots of luggage) it's often faster to use the footbridge to cross rather than waiting for the train(s) to pass and the barriers to rise.
        0xffff2 7y ago
        Wow. There's a similar intersection near me in the bay area, and it always struck me as an incredibly poor design. I'm sort of surprised to see that there's another such intersection in the world. Fortunately (?), I don't think CalTrain runs any more than every 15 minutes, so the gates are rarely down for more than a couple minutes at a time.
      - mlaretallack 7y ago
        Originally it was curiosity, however of has moved on from that. I work in the traffic industry. If we can slow people down before they reach the queue, then we can reduce the impact of them joining the queue (co2 etc....).
- canada_dry 7y ago
  > old x10 According to wiki they filed for bankrupcy in 2013. Their www.x10.com website is still going - flogging the same stuff as 20 years ago. I still have a few boxes of x10 hardware that I spent a small fortune on back in the 90's. I like that signals went through mains (vs. radio signals) but the reliability is poor.
  - mikepurvis 7y ago
    I looked into it a few years ago when the radio-based stuff was still fairly immature/expensive, and it seemed like it was super low bandwidth. Like, fine for on/off operations, but not really fast enough to do things like have a light track a dimmer.
  - mlaretallack 7y ago
    I have my old flat in 2000(ish) fully linked. This. Included PIR sensors, door sensors, and lamps, lights. I also had. The heating fitted with an x10 switch. This meant that I could turn the heating on and my kettle on remotely on the way home from work. X10 was nice that it could communicate through main, but when I started to use Ethernet over power, it stopped working. It also was one-way. There was no confirm or status from the switch devices.
  - jedberg 7y ago
    The nice thing about x10 is that most of the commands were idempotent. As such, I would send every signal once a second for 10 seconds. Usually the light came in within 3-5 seconds but sometimes it would be 10 seconds.
- MrQuincle 7y ago
  You mean like what I'm doing right now on a fair all the time... :-) https://twitter.com/annevanrossum/status/1200478825458622464?s=19 https://twitter.com/annevanrossum/status/1200478825458622464... This is not the interesting feature of this system by the way. That is microgeofencing, knowing per room where people are. Yes, you know where you are in the house. However, your "smart" home does not. Integration with home assistant is on the roadmap. We need a few more people to want it. Yes, it's a shameless plug. However, there aren't many open source hardware products on the market, so I think it contributes to the discussion.
  - giancarlostoro 7y ago
    Mycroft gets my attention in this regard.
    - MrQuincle 7y ago
      Definitely! It's the only open source smart speaker I know. Here in Holland there's also the Homey, but they locked most of it. It's benefit is that you can run local connections. Even the Google Local SDK does not support BLE connections to local devices.
      - mackrevinack 7y ago
        there is Snips as well. you can install it on a raspberry pi but I think they are working on making an actual hardware speaker too
        SEJeff 7y ago
        Snips was recently purchased by Sonos, who already makes actual hardware speakers.
  - a254613e 7y ago
    > Yes, you know where you are in the house. However, your "smart" home does not. I solved this in home assistant by adding sensors to my doors inside the apartment. For example if the living room doors are closed, and after that there's movement inside, the room is marked as "occupied". It works really well. Same could be achieved with straight line movement sensors on the door frames, if you're someone who keeps the doors open all the time. And speaking of open source, my whole smart home setup (from sensors, lights, heating, etc) works offline and using open source software and protocols even if hardware isn't open source itself. Which I found to be a good tradeoff.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
MrQuincle 7y ago
Is it possible to adopt this as a manufacturer? For example, can we deploy easily new functionality? Can we push security updates?
- q3k 7y ago
  It's a Python service license under Apache 2.0. If you write tooling around it to perform updates/rollbacks (and whatever else you need) then yes.
  - MrQuincle 7y ago
    For that Ubuntu Core seems more appropriate. It's the kind of tooling that is a lot of work even though it might not seem like it at first sight.
- orev 7y ago
  Assuming you’re a manufacturer, it would be really amazing if you were to adopt a system like this. Instead everyone currently tries to get you locked in the their own proprietary crappy system that’s going to be shut down in two years because everyone is smart enough to see through the scheme and doesn’t buy into it.
- adamfeldman 7y ago
  Check out the existing hass.io infrastructure and HassOS open-source project, which among other bits assist in pushing security updates: * https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/ https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/ * https://github.com/home-assistant/hassos https://github.com/home-assistant/hassos
  - kingosticks 7y ago
    I looked at using hassOS as a base for my rpi project but I struggled with how exactly to do that. Looking at the readmes in that repo it doesn't look like anything has changed on the documentation front.
wwweston 7y ago
If I want something simple that either passes power through or triggers a switch in response to a configurable/trainable voice command that isn’t net connected, what’s my best bet?
- nsomaru 7y ago
  Mycroft?
  - milofeynman 7y ago
    I want to switch over to Mycroft, does anyone here have a good experience with it? What kind of hardware are you running?
    - llamataboot 7y ago
      I run it on a pi, but it is definitely not ready for primetime yet unless you want to write your own add-ons. But if you just need it to do one or two things it's pretty great at voice/intent recognition.
- tssk 7y ago
  What about https://iot.mozilla.org/gateway/ https://iot.mozilla.org/gateway/ ?
  - JshWright 7y ago
    How would that help? It appears to provide a subset of Home Assistant's functionality.
    - tssk 7y ago
      I thought it provides simple alternative (as asked) with voice commands. But when reading the details the voice processing is not offline (as asked). --- Note that in the 0.8 gateway release, browser-based voice commands are processed using Google’s voice assistant API, so the audio strings are processed in the cloud. The speech-to-text result is passed back to your gateway. If you instead type a command into the text field of the smart assistant screen, those commands are processed locally and do not require a connection to the Internet. https://iot.mozilla.org/docs/gateway-user-guide.html https://iot.mozilla.org/docs/gateway-user-guide.html EDIT: But hopefully they will move to something like offline Common Voice in some future release.
abstractbarista 7y ago
I absolutely love HA. Using Z-Wave mesh network to control most things, especially lighting and fans. From automating your smart TV, alarm and CCTV, HVAC, garden watering, etc.. It's pretty limitless and there seems to be an integration for everything. You can get really smart about things by tying actions to complex combinations of states. I now often 'forget' to hit the light switch when entering rooms in other homes.
- lostlogin 7y ago
  What are you using for the watering? I’ve got a deep distrust of automation combined with mains pressure water which I’m trying to overcome.
  - BubRoss 7y ago
    If it is done with solenoids they can only let water through when there is power applied and the spring should return the stopper whenever there isn't any power.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - abstractbarista 7y ago
    Yes so it's a Z-Wave valve which has been connected to a split off of the cold water line to my kitchen sink. Typically this valve could be used to control your mains but I'm just using it to feed some drip lines. Basically one small garden and then a few runs to individual planters with an adjustable dripper on the end. I have automations to limit watering if it has rained recently, and also to increase watering if the day has been extremely hot. Still looking to make it even smarter but this has already been a great improvement.
    - brandon 7y ago
      Do you have a make/model or link for the valve? I went all-in on Z-Wave and am similarly interested in controlling drip-lines.
skittleson 7y ago
I started with home assistant then moved to node red. Both have rich communities and plugins. If you want to do more javascript, use node red.
- adamfeldman 7y ago
  I've really enjoyed using node-red together with Home Assistant. Home Assistant manages the connections to devices and allows me to set up a nice UI, while node-red allows me to do more complex automation logic. node-red is available as a hass.io add-on [1], with the Home Assistant node-red plugin pre-installed [1]: https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-node-red https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-node-red
  - skittleson 7y ago
    Oh cool! Going to check this out. I've been using the node red dashboard for ui.
  - mlaretallack 7y ago
    I think this is exactly the point of the developers, First seal to see Then seal to control Home assistant is the "see" bit. Then you use it (or something else) to control the process
jedberg 7y ago
Back in June an animal chewed through the fiber line to my house. It took AT&T three trips and five days to fix it. In those five days I became acutely aware of how internet dependent my home automation is. I vowed to no longer invest in home automation that requires non-local access. This will definitely help accelerate the process.
- ryall 7y ago
  Ever tried to use Plex? Your media's "right there" on your local network but you can't play it without internet.
  - aewens 7y ago
    There is a setting in Plex that will allow it to work without authentication for any devices connecting from a defined subnet. So I just set this to my home network's setup and can use it without issue whether I have an Internet connection or not. I confirmed this when I tested my Plex server on a Raspberry Pi out in a cabin in the middle of nowhere and it streamed fine without an Internet connection.
    - shostack 7y ago
      Which, for anyone who has learned the hard way, has to be enabled before your internet goes out.
    - LegitShady 7y ago
      ...help a brother out, what is this setting? I can't find it.
      - ThatPlayer 7y ago
        I believe he's talking about Server Settings > Network > List of IP Address and networks that are allowed without auth
        7y ago
sigwinch28 7y ago
I love home assistant, but find the automation subsystem to be lacking in both ease of configuration and features. I found a happy middle ground by installing Node-RED [0] on the same machine and linking it to home assistant via the home assistant websocket plugin [1]. It allows me to create visual workflows for automations, which I find much better to use than raw yaml files. [0]: https://nodered.org/ https://nodered.org/ [1]: https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-home-assistant-websocket https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-home-assista...
- adyus 7y ago
  If you speak a little Python, you should look into appdaemon, it's a developer's (non-UI) way of doing the same.
  - sigwinch28 7y ago
    I hadn't seen that before, but I don't think it addresses my biggest problem with HA automations: it's not a GUI. When I'm developing my automations I often need to do a lot of testing and debugging when things don't work as expected. I find that Node-RED allows me to do this extremely easily as I can click on nodes and see what values are being passed around, and what state things are in. Nonetheless, I'll look into AppDaemon :)
    - adyus 7y ago
      AppDaemon would be great for that, as the callback methods it requires for listening to state changes or scheduled timer can be independently unit tested and debugged.
- JshWright 7y ago
  Automation is an area of pretty active development. While visual workflows aren't a thing in HA, you definitely don't need to write yaml in order to create automations. The UI has supported it for quite some time (and is quite usable, in my opinion).
TeeWEE 7y ago
I used OpenHab2 in the past. But its quite heavy, and bulky. However it works well... What i did notice is z-wave commands where slow on the raspberry pi.. I moved to Home Assistent and i'm not moving back. I did like the more plugin-like architecture & technical design of openhab better... But that makes it bulky. Openhab feels more mature, but also has a lot more legacy... HA is just movign faster...
- dsteinman 7y ago
  Z-Wave is a bit slow/delayed even when interacting directly with the zwave open API.
adyus 7y ago
Any discussion of Home Assistant should start with the founder's vision, which I found very clear: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/01/19/perfect-home-automation/ https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/01/19/perfect-home-a... The purpose of Home Assistant is to first observe all data flowing through your house, by connecting all existing sensors, switches, gateways and anything else that has a digital pulse. The second step is control, having centralized access through a web or mobile app to all moving parts of a home. However, the power of HA comes from the third step: automation. The best interface is the one you can forget exists. I've been running HA for over two years. Aside from being lazy about upgrading to newer versions and adjusting to breaking changes, it's been working great and has spoiled me and my wife. We now expect every house we visit to automatically unlock before we reach the door, for the lights to turn on (and gradually off) automatically as we move through rooms, and for our phones to notify us when the best time to open a window would be, to naturally cool during the summer. It's great to have cold light during the day and warm, lower level light as the evening progresses. Together with the Python environment provided by appdaemon, there's almost no limits to what you can do, provided you instrument your house with sensors and switches as best as you can.
- ethanpil 7y ago
  I'm curious how you setup "automatically unlock before we reach the door"
  - BubRoss 7y ago
    Hooking into your phone getting on wifi is one way.
  - kevinsundar 7y ago
    Motion sensor on patio. When it detects motion, check if your phone joined the network in the last minute and that a few minutes ago you were not in the gps area of your house. Send command to unlock the lock. Send a push notification that it unlocked so you know if it triggered on accident (incredibly unlikely when using motion + gps + wifi). The motion sensor isn't strictly necessary, you can use the phone joining the network as a trigger. It's just an extra filter to ensure there are no accidental unlocks. It will also prevent unlocks if you come home, park, and then leave without attempting to enter. That's how I would do it, all easily doable in home assistant.
dang 7y ago
A thread from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826373 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15521743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15521743
Negitivefrags 7y ago
I have a pretty big install of Home Assistant. You can see a screenshot of my main dashboard here. https://i.imgur.com/pJAGAZT.png https://i.imgur.com/pJAGAZT.png When I built the house I decided that I was looking for a Home Automation system that was going to be: a) Open source, or open standards b) Everything can be done entirely locally I settled with using the KNX system for the primary actuators for the house, with Home Assistant for automation and control. One nice property of KNX is that it's distributed, you don't need any central manager for the system to work, so if you press a light switch, then that sends a packet on the KNX network directly to the light actuator. Then there is an IP/KNX bridge to allow you to interact with the KNX network to hack on it. All the "light" automation in the house is all done using KNX programming. For example, walk into hall, light turns on. You don't need a central authority for that. The motion sensor just talks to the light directly. For anything more complex, Home Assistant get's involved for all the more "global" automation via the IP/KNX bridge. And of course you can control everything through it's app. I love how fast and responsive it is since it's local. It's maybe 100ms at most from clicking the button in the app to the light being on. The main thing I can't do without the cloud is voice control. I'm using Google Homes for it which Home Assistant exposes all my devices to. Local voice control systems really suck compared to Google unfortunately. Another thing I'm happy I did is just put sensors for everything everywhere through the house. Here is a screenshot of most of them. https://i.imgur.com/5VeMuE1.png https://i.imgur.com/5VeMuE1.png I actually have more data then this that I haven't bothered to hook up yet since it hasn't been important. Like the motion sensors also provide light levels and so on. Overall, I would definately recommend Home Assistant.
- RickS 7y ago
  This is really impressive. Are you using separate sensors for humidity/temp/air quality? If so, which ones? Do you assemble these yourself (eg connecting a sensor to a network enabled board) or are they connected out of the box? Would really appreciate anything you've got in terms of parts list.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
baybal2 7y ago
One of our clients is using Home Assistant in a 10000+ apartments deployment with Rockchip + esp32 hardware we made.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  What is the client doing with this? Is it just for monitoring, or are there active processes dependent on the system?
  - baybal2 7y ago
    https://bi-group.org https://bi-group.org https://bi-group.org/ru/smart-home https://bi-group.org/ru/smart-home Functions so far: circuit breakers for mains, water valves, district heating PID control, intercom metering, door lock/sensor, curtain bobbin servomotor, thermometer, aircon control, smoke/co detector, lighting and rgb mood light. AV control is being worked on
- jmuguy 7y ago
  I'd be interested to know how they handle remote controlling the HA instances. I spent a little bit of time trying to come up with a prototype hub running Home Assistant but kept coming back to the deployment and remote control problem - for instance the REST HTTP API would allow me to send commands in but then I'd need to do something like MQTT to get an event stream from the device. It ended up being too complicated for me to implement.
  - baybal2 7y ago
    I assume some monkey patched central control it is. Never inquired about that.
- lostlogin 7y ago
  Is there are write up of this anywhere? This is truely massive and must have some unique problems and solutions.
  - 7y ago
soulskill 7y ago
Tangential to this -- anyone have a good resource for selecting smart devices that are private and secure?
- Vaslo 7y ago
  Yes - would really like a good doorbell camera that I can host at home. Seems like the Amazon and Google are the best unfortunately.
  - kevinsundar 7y ago
    See my sibling comment!
  - macrolime 7y ago
    Check out doorbird https://www.doorbird.com https://www.doorbird.com
    - SEJeff 7y ago
      Can confirm. The doorbird is great. I use it with home assistant
- kevinsundar 7y ago
  One good way I've found is to use Home Assistant's integrations page. Let's say you're looking for a smart doorbell. You'd go here: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/#doorbell https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/#doorbell You can then go to each integration and on the right if it says "IoT Class: Local Push" you can be fairly certain it can be locally controlled without the cloud and that it reports state without the cloud. In this scenario, it'd be DoorBird. You can be fairly certain you can block internet access at your router for this device and it'll work just fine. Don't quote me on that for Doorbird though.
  - Klathmon 7y ago
    This can be a good first place to look, but don't rely on it. Many integrations have their local access via reverse engineered APIs, and they often go away when they get popular enough. I wrote the Samsung Family Hub smart fridge integration for home assistant and one day Samsung removed the local access in a fridge update and now there is no way to access it without their android or iOS app.
krzyk 7y ago
How does it compare to openhab?
ananonymoususer 7y ago
Any discussion of open source home automation should include Mozilla's "Things": https://iot.mozilla.org/gateway/ https://iot.mozilla.org/gateway/
- gatherhunterer 7y ago
  I greatly prefer Mozilla’s solution. Home Assistant seemed to have some critical issues when I used it for my two switches and one light bulb. Even turning them on and off on a schedule was dubious. It would forget a device or two and leave it as-is indefinitely. I found it odd that Home Assistant would not alert me to a lost device. Not only does WebThings work for me but it also has a UI that has some thought put into it instead of just spitting its API into a Material interface. It is much easier to use on a small mobile device because of its intentional responsiveness. Maybe it just did not play well with my devices but Home Assistant felt like an MVP that was not up to the task of dependability.
  - SEJeff 7y ago
    When did you last try home assistant? It improves very rapidly and the new “Lovelace” interface is insanely customizable along with being excellent on mobile.
    - gatherhunterer 7y ago
      This was over the summer that I tried it and traded it in for Mozilla’s WebThings.
dannyrosen 7y ago
If you're interested in a similar solution (albeit closed sourced and managed) that works in a non-cloud, fully off-line (re: internet) environment. Take a look at http://www.hubitat.com http://www.hubitat.com. It supports zigbee, zwave and wifi devices and has strong compatibility with the smartthings ecosystem.
escapologybb 7y ago
Just wanted to say that my life as a quadriplegic would be 13.4 million percent more crap without Home Assistant. Being quadriplegic and having something as open as Home Assistant is absolutely amazing, I have automated absolutely everything in the house and home assistant has not choked once. Couple that with one of the friendliest communities for newbies I have come across in a long time and you have something really awesome. I've been using it for a couple of years, I have tried all the other open source alternatives but nothing really comes close for me. I'm actually fiddling with my installation right now as it were. I cannot plug my phone in to charge it up myself obviously, so I am writing a little automation that will check who is in the house and announce through the speakers my phone needs charging up or send them a text message if I have their phone number when my mobile phone charge gets below 20%. Totally cool beanz and I am totally serious about how much easier this makes my life as a quadriplegic.
- netfl0 7y ago
  I’d love to hear about your automations. Would you share them with us?
  - escapologybb 7y ago
    I thought somebody might ask, so I am just sanitising my config files and then they will be available on my Github[1] hopefully in about an hour. Was there any particular automation you were interested in? [1]: https://github.com/robotsandcake/homeassistant https://github.com/robotsandcake/homeassistant
    - netfl0 7y ago
      I’m interested in the whole thing, particularly any use cases I have not thought of. I’m curious to know how you’d rank them by usefulness.
      - escapologybb 7y ago
        No problem, in about an hour things will start appearing And I will include usefulness et cetera. The most commonly used automation by a very long way are the lights, because I use voice operated computer people were continually coming into my asking if I was okay because they could hear me talking. This obviously was crazy makin. So now they ignore all talking unless they see: All of the lights pulse on and off in a blue colour, which means can you please give me a hand when you have a minute I would like a drink or something similar and it is not urgent. Or All of the lights pulse on and off in a red colour, which means drop and come running as I am having and episode of autononmic dysreflexia, my hair is on fire or something equally problematic. It is a very much urgent. after that I would say that these three are the most used, I'm sure there is a way of pulling that information out of the database but I'm not sure how. If someone from home Assistant Team would like to tell me, that would be great! * Battery Level on iPhone is below 20%, get someone to plug it in * Notification asking that the basement be closed when it starts raining, or if someone opens the window when rain is predicted to please close it * Logging whenever the medication draw is opened and closed and keeping a running tally (this one is super important) actually,
martin_a 7y ago
Great to see this thread. Was thinking about getting into this just some days ago. What hardware are you people running the system on? Raspberry Pi? Or something more beefier? Or less? I think they recommend a RPi 4 for the latest release...
- JshWright 7y ago
  A Pi is fine, but don't rely on the SD card for storage. Home Assistant is very write-heavy (since it logs state changes, etc), and will kill an SD card pretty quickly. You're better off using the SD card as a read-only boot device and then use an external drive for the actual system.
  - martin_a 7y ago
    Thanks, that's important information. What kind of Pi should I use? Got a Pi 1 laying around which could be nicely powered by my router, but I doubt that will be enough...
    - JshWright 7y ago
      Give it a shot, HA isn't that resource intensive.
  - ananonymoususer 7y ago
    I connected a 1TB SATA SSD to one of my RPI machines with the Element 14 "PI DESKTOP - HAT AND ENCL". ($50) It's a nice RPI case with some extras. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh7AFRIdGi8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh7AFRIdGi8
- mongol 7y ago
  Can anyone comment on pros and cons of running it virtualized on a Linux host? I have capable hardware and would like to run it on that rather than on a separate Pi device.
  - timc3 7y ago
Krasnol 7y ago
Oh god... Hass = Hate in German...
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Consider it a little gift.
  - Krasnol 7y ago
    "Gift" meaning "poison" German is quite fitting ;)
    - lostlogin 7y ago
      When the smart switch loses its connection and the coffee machine doesn’t start at 6am, this is exactly correct.
jeena 7y ago
Last year I gave a talk about my setup in Gothenburg: https://conf.tube/videos/watch/e4bab8ef-be61-4036-b165-76890c30bfc1 https://conf.tube/videos/watch/e4bab8ef-be61-4036-b165-76890...
rb2k_ 7y ago
I've switched a lot of my existing light automation over to esphome [0]. I flashed it on various cheap LED Wifi bulbs that have been 'liberated' via tuya convert [1] After going through zigbee and zwave, I feel like I finally arrived at a solution that allows me plenty of reasonably priced selection and extreme customization (e.g. just using the warm/cold white LEDs on a RGB+white bulb). Great experience so far and completely automated integration within homeassistant. I hope that the esphome-configs project [2] will grow over the next little while and provide more and more copy+paste configurations for various hardware. [0] https://esphome.io/ https://esphome.io/ [1] https://github.com/ct-Open-Source/tuya-convert https://github.com/ct-Open-Source/tuya-convert [2] https://esphome-configs.io/ https://esphome-configs.io/
- balloob 7y ago
  ESPHome is amazing. it makes building your own IoT sensors and devices so easy.
- BrandoElFollito 7y ago
  Another excellent firmware is ESPurna (https://github.com/xoseperez/espurna https://github.com/xoseperez/espurna). It covers zillionsof devices (including the WiFi bulbs)
mattlondon 7y ago
I found that home assistant does not appear to have native integration with Google home the last time I looked? I ended up using openhab which has native Google and Alexa integration, although I am not a fan of openhab as it feels ludicrously over-complicated for even the simplest of things. My lesson learnt after several years going through smartthings, home-brew stuff with raspberry pis, home assistant, demoticz, and openhab using ZigBee or zwave is to make sure your core infrastructure (i.e. things you want to control) is MQTT-based running over wi-fi/ethernet and all your plugs/lights/etc are independently controllable via sending raw MQTT commands on your home network. If you need to rely on a working internet connection, or too many third party things (e.g. IFTTT) you are going to have a bad time when things inevitably break/change/have an outage/become inexplicably slow/get shutdown etc. Once you standardise on MQTT you can switch out HA/OpenHab/others with minimal fuss, and you have great controll and backup options. WiFi just seems rock-solid Vs ZigBee or z-wave that just seemed so troublesome and unreliable. Tasmota (1) + mosquito running on a RPi has finally given me a reliable set up after years of struggling. It is some rock-solid MQTT compatible firmware for ESP8266 devices. 1 - https://github.com/arendst/Tasmota https://github.com/arendst/Tasmota
- jmuguy 7y ago
  Z-wave/Zigbee are complicated but a necessary evil since wifi and batteries don't play well together. You might want to look into https://github.com/OpenZWave/Zwave2Mqtt https://github.com/OpenZWave/Zwave2Mqtt and other projects like it to give you the nice mqtt control over zwave.
balloob 7y ago
Founder Home Assistant here. Thanks for all the wonderful comments.
- mlaretallack 7y ago
  And thank you for a great system, from a user.
- Sendotsh 7y ago
  As a disabled person, I couldn’t even begin to describe how much of a tangible improvement HA has had in my life. Being able to turn all the lights off from my bed before I go to sleep, or have the heater in the kids room turn on automatically if temps drop, etc etc, has quite literally saved me immeasurable amounts of physical pain. Thank you so much.
mlaretallack 7y ago
I do not have home automation However I use Home assistant. Why, because it shows me what is going on.... Its a dashboard for my house.
dazhbog 7y ago
We are a manufacturer too with a new product that brings home and industrial equipment online (smart hub and stuff). Only heard of openHAB but this looks awesome. We shall implement. Thanks HN.
- SEJeff 7y ago
  Pull requests for integrations are always happily accepted. Just fork the project, follow the contribution guidelines, and send a GitHub pull request. Thanks! I got started as a contributor to home assistant by sending patches to the Sonos integration.
debiandev 7y ago
If only it was not so painful to package. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=839786 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=839786
Norther 7y ago
Can anyone recommend an affordable temperature/humidity sensor?
- metrix 7y ago
  I would flash it with Tasmota, but these sensors are cheap/awesome: https://www.amazon.com/Sonoff-Temperature-Humidity-Controller-Appliances/dp/B075FSHKQ5/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?hvadid=78134099057334&hvbmt=be&hvdev=c&hvqmt=e&keywords=sonoff+th16&qid=1575083424&sr=8-1-spons&psc=1&spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUExUFVKQTFCSTRDTjZLJmVuY3J5cHRlZElkPUEwOTUzNjQ2MVYwRVY5NUlWQzg4UyZlbmNyeXB0ZWRBZElkPUEwNTI5ODQzMVhNOFJPSDlBNFhTUSZ3aWRnZXROYW1lPXNwX2F0ZiZhY3Rpb249Y2xpY2tSZWRpcmVjdCZkb05vdExvZ0NsaWNrPXRydWU= https://www.amazon.com/Sonoff-Temperature-Humidity-Controlle...
- BrandoElFollito 7y ago
  Xiaomi Aquara devices. They work with Zigbee, which I manage through Zigbee2MQTT (https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/ https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/). Cheap and reliable.
ngcc_hk 7y ago
Need a bit intro as even state of union seem to need to watch a video. The problem is it said open source then there is here and there Alexa. Do not want to go into Apple and amazon and google ecology sphere as long as I can. It is my home. Not want someone listen to mine. Not to mention we do not know what authorury can get hold of given in a police state here
rb666 7y ago
HASS is amazing, my entire house runs on it. Could not recommend it more!
shocks 7y ago
I’m using Home Assistant to join all my IoT devices together, and Node RED to provide a graphical programming layer for automation. It works really well.
escapologybb 7y ago
EditedTo Add: well, that was meant to be a minor comment and request for pointers but turned into somewhat of a rant. My apologies HMN, my apologies. This kind of dashboard really does have the possibility of reducing the overdoses I am subjecting amongst any number of other mistakes brought about by lack of clear and understandable documentation. And once we have fixed it for me, well from THEREON IS WHERE WE TAKE OVER THE WORLD! On a slightly related note, does anybody remember that about a year or so ago somebody posted his "Personal Analytics Dashboard" I think he called it. Basically it detailed every aspect of his life. it was things like heart rate, steps walked, miles run, cycles cycled along with all manner of other nutritional input. The thing that marked it out for me was that it took all those desperate threads of information and display them in one easy to understand and beautiful layout. But I cannot for the life of me find it! At the moment I want to get to the state that when one of the nurses comes on duty, she can get the iPad out of the server cupboard (after first pressing her flic button to login) and see on one or two pages things like but not limited to: * Is the catheter turn on or off * What is the bosses current heart rate (BPM) * What is today's resting heart rate and how does it fit in over the week, the month and the year * Which of the doors and windows are open and are they locked or not * Did the boss get into his wheelchair today, and if so for how long and how far did he travel * How many doses of his medication has he had today, and how many does that leave him with for the rest of the day * Have there been any incidences of Autononmic Dysreflexia[1] or any other life-threatening shenanigans other parts of the team will need to know about And on and on and on, so it would need to be expandable. It may be possible to skin home assistance with something simple enough but I am not a designer. I've lots of this data coming in already from lots of different sensors, I am however just struggling with a way of turning those data into information that non-technical users will not be put off by. Because if they are put off by it then they will not use the system, and as this is going to be one of the systems monitoring medication and my health et cetera I would really like them to use. Non-technical users make up the huge majority of people who will be using this system. And to pre-empt what I know one of you will mention because you care about me, I do not ever put my life in the hands of anyone person, process, widget or anything else! It's nice to know you care. <3 I also hate spreadsheets. I mean, I will continue to use them obviously because there is no choice. Just thought world should know that I hate them. So yes I am pretty much totally comfortable purchasing sensors and and getting my work PA to install them, I'm also having enormous fun creating new sensors but what I am not enjoying is being quadriplegic and trying to draw out nice designs. Have a feeling it is not necessary and that there will be a simple way for me to plug in all of my data streams and be given a very shiny dashboard that I could maybe put on the wall of my office on some 17 inch screen something similar. --------- I've included a couple of links describing autonomic dysreflexia, but be warned it's not a nice condition and it is not fun having one of these episodes. Not happy reading, just put them here for completeness [1]: https://www.christopherreeve.org/living-with-paralysis/health/secondary-conditions/autonomic-dysreflexia https://www.christopherreeve.org/living-with-paralysis/healt... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_dysreflexia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_dysreflexia

869 points by neya 7y ago

I spun this OS up as a VM and it does not detect my Wemo smart plugs. However, I'm also not able to detect them from my current phone (running v1.24, I believe, of the app). However, my former phone, which is still running v1.23.1 of the app, _is_ able to see them and connect to them. Anyone else experiencing this same thing?

mlaretallack 7y ago

I have been using home assistant for about 6 months now. Currently I am mainly using it to show what is happening around the home (device detection, adsl data usage, weather from my simple weather station, house power usage etc, local train level crossing state (barrier down/up)) Very impressed with how easy it is to add new items to the overview. I have one smart plug, the intention is to control the Christmas lights this year. I did do this about 15 years ago with my old x10 system and it would be nice to try something a bit more advanced.

taxidump 7y ago
How do you track the train barrier state?
- mlaretallack 7y ago
  The data comes from the open rail data project https://wiki.openraildata.com//index.php?title=Main_Page https://wiki.openraildata.com//index.php?title=Main_Page Some crossings in the uk are directly available as a state within the data, mine is not so I have to track the trains into and out of a region. When the train enters the region, I assume the crossing must be down and when it leaves, I assume it must be up. Its about 30 seconds to a minute off, but for my purpose that's OK.
  - 0xffff2 7y ago
    Out of curiosity, what is your purpose? Do the crossings stay down long enough to cause backups sufficiently large that you alter your schedule to avoid them?
    - alexfoo 7y ago
      Probably yes (I'm guessing as I'm not the OP). There's a level crossing a few miles from me that has automated barriers. The tricky bit is the crossing is right next to a station and there will be various rules in force:- * barriers must be down at least X seconds before a train is due to go through * barriers must be down even if the train is coming in to the station to stop (before it gets to the crossing) - the barriers must be down in case it overshoots * etc Whilst the barriers can go up as soon as a train has passed there may be another one along shortly enough that it's not worth opening the barriers only to close them a few seconds later. Combine those with a timetable that puts 10+ trains an hour each direction and the barriers will probably be down for longer than they are up in peak times. I've seen them down for 10+ minutes at a time. Here's the google streetview that just happens to have a train that has already passed and stopped at the station: https://goo.gl/maps/jhzApjZHUAJ4FcSt6 https://goo.gl/maps/jhzApjZHUAJ4FcSt6 As a pedestrian (or a cyclist without lots of luggage) it's often faster to use the footbridge to cross rather than waiting for the train(s) to pass and the barriers to rise.
      - 0xffff2 7y ago
        Wow. There's a similar intersection near me in the bay area, and it always struck me as an incredibly poor design. I'm sort of surprised to see that there's another such intersection in the world. Fortunately (?), I don't think CalTrain runs any more than every 15 minutes, so the gates are rarely down for more than a couple minutes at a time.
    - mlaretallack 7y ago
      Originally it was curiosity, however of has moved on from that. I work in the traffic industry. If we can slow people down before they reach the queue, then we can reduce the impact of them joining the queue (co2 etc....).
canada_dry 7y ago
> old x10 According to wiki they filed for bankrupcy in 2013. Their www.x10.com website is still going - flogging the same stuff as 20 years ago. I still have a few boxes of x10 hardware that I spent a small fortune on back in the 90's. I like that signals went through mains (vs. radio signals) but the reliability is poor.
- mikepurvis 7y ago
  I looked into it a few years ago when the radio-based stuff was still fairly immature/expensive, and it seemed like it was super low bandwidth. Like, fine for on/off operations, but not really fast enough to do things like have a light track a dimmer.
- mlaretallack 7y ago
  I have my old flat in 2000(ish) fully linked. This. Included PIR sensors, door sensors, and lamps, lights. I also had. The heating fitted with an x10 switch. This meant that I could turn the heating on and my kettle on remotely on the way home from work. X10 was nice that it could communicate through main, but when I started to use Ethernet over power, it stopped working. It also was one-way. There was no confirm or status from the switch devices.
- jedberg 7y ago
  The nice thing about x10 is that most of the commands were idempotent. As such, I would send every signal once a second for 10 seconds. Usually the light came in within 3-5 seconds but sometimes it would be 10 seconds.
MrQuincle 7y ago
You mean like what I'm doing right now on a fair all the time... :-) https://twitter.com/annevanrossum/status/1200478825458622464?s=19 https://twitter.com/annevanrossum/status/1200478825458622464... This is not the interesting feature of this system by the way. That is microgeofencing, knowing per room where people are. Yes, you know where you are in the house. However, your "smart" home does not. Integration with home assistant is on the roadmap. We need a few more people to want it. Yes, it's a shameless plug. However, there aren't many open source hardware products on the market, so I think it contributes to the discussion.
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  Mycroft gets my attention in this regard.
  - MrQuincle 7y ago
    Definitely! It's the only open source smart speaker I know. Here in Holland there's also the Homey, but they locked most of it. It's benefit is that you can run local connections. Even the Google Local SDK does not support BLE connections to local devices.
    - mackrevinack 7y ago
      there is Snips as well. you can install it on a raspberry pi but I think they are working on making an actual hardware speaker too
      - SEJeff 7y ago
        Snips was recently purchased by Sonos, who already makes actual hardware speakers.
- a254613e 7y ago
  > Yes, you know where you are in the house. However, your "smart" home does not. I solved this in home assistant by adding sensors to my doors inside the apartment. For example if the living room doors are closed, and after that there's movement inside, the room is marked as "occupied". It works really well. Same could be achieved with straight line movement sensors on the door frames, if you're someone who keeps the doors open all the time. And speaking of open source, my whole smart home setup (from sensors, lights, heating, etc) works offline and using open source software and protocols even if hardware isn't open source itself. Which I found to be a good tradeoff.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

MrQuincle 7y ago

Is it possible to adopt this as a manufacturer? For example, can we deploy easily new functionality? Can we push security updates?

q3k 7y ago
It's a Python service license under Apache 2.0. If you write tooling around it to perform updates/rollbacks (and whatever else you need) then yes.
- MrQuincle 7y ago
  For that Ubuntu Core seems more appropriate. It's the kind of tooling that is a lot of work even though it might not seem like it at first sight.
orev 7y ago
Assuming you’re a manufacturer, it would be really amazing if you were to adopt a system like this. Instead everyone currently tries to get you locked in the their own proprietary crappy system that’s going to be shut down in two years because everyone is smart enough to see through the scheme and doesn’t buy into it.
adamfeldman 7y ago
Check out the existing hass.io infrastructure and HassOS open-source project, which among other bits assist in pushing security updates: * https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/ https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/ * https://github.com/home-assistant/hassos https://github.com/home-assistant/hassos
- kingosticks 7y ago
  I looked at using hassOS as a base for my rpi project but I struggled with how exactly to do that. Looking at the readmes in that repo it doesn't look like anything has changed on the documentation front.

wwweston 7y ago

If I want something simple that either passes power through or triggers a switch in response to a configurable/trainable voice command that isn’t net connected, what’s my best bet?

nsomaru 7y ago
Mycroft?
- milofeynman 7y ago
  I want to switch over to Mycroft, does anyone here have a good experience with it? What kind of hardware are you running?
  - llamataboot 7y ago
    I run it on a pi, but it is definitely not ready for primetime yet unless you want to write your own add-ons. But if you just need it to do one or two things it's pretty great at voice/intent recognition.
tssk 7y ago
What about https://iot.mozilla.org/gateway/ https://iot.mozilla.org/gateway/ ?
- JshWright 7y ago
  How would that help? It appears to provide a subset of Home Assistant's functionality.
  - tssk 7y ago
    I thought it provides simple alternative (as asked) with voice commands. But when reading the details the voice processing is not offline (as asked). --- Note that in the 0.8 gateway release, browser-based voice commands are processed using Google’s voice assistant API, so the audio strings are processed in the cloud. The speech-to-text result is passed back to your gateway. If you instead type a command into the text field of the smart assistant screen, those commands are processed locally and do not require a connection to the Internet. https://iot.mozilla.org/docs/gateway-user-guide.html https://iot.mozilla.org/docs/gateway-user-guide.html EDIT: But hopefully they will move to something like offline Common Voice in some future release.

abstractbarista 7y ago

I absolutely love HA. Using Z-Wave mesh network to control most things, especially lighting and fans. From automating your smart TV, alarm and CCTV, HVAC, garden watering, etc.. It's pretty limitless and there seems to be an integration for everything. You can get really smart about things by tying actions to complex combinations of states. I now often 'forget' to hit the light switch when entering rooms in other homes.

lostlogin 7y ago
What are you using for the watering? I’ve got a deep distrust of automation combined with mains pressure water which I’m trying to overcome.
- BubRoss 7y ago
  If it is done with solenoids they can only let water through when there is power applied and the spring should return the stopper whenever there isn't any power.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- abstractbarista 7y ago
  Yes so it's a Z-Wave valve which has been connected to a split off of the cold water line to my kitchen sink. Typically this valve could be used to control your mains but I'm just using it to feed some drip lines. Basically one small garden and then a few runs to individual planters with an adjustable dripper on the end. I have automations to limit watering if it has rained recently, and also to increase watering if the day has been extremely hot. Still looking to make it even smarter but this has already been a great improvement.
  - brandon 7y ago
    Do you have a make/model or link for the valve? I went all-in on Z-Wave and am similarly interested in controlling drip-lines.

skittleson 7y ago

I started with home assistant then moved to node red. Both have rich communities and plugins. If you want to do more javascript, use node red.

adamfeldman 7y ago
I've really enjoyed using node-red together with Home Assistant. Home Assistant manages the connections to devices and allows me to set up a nice UI, while node-red allows me to do more complex automation logic. node-red is available as a hass.io add-on [1], with the Home Assistant node-red plugin pre-installed [1]: https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-node-red https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-node-red
- skittleson 7y ago
  Oh cool! Going to check this out. I've been using the node red dashboard for ui.
- mlaretallack 7y ago
  I think this is exactly the point of the developers, First seal to see Then seal to control Home assistant is the "see" bit. Then you use it (or something else) to control the process

jedberg 7y ago

Back in June an animal chewed through the fiber line to my house. It took AT&T three trips and five days to fix it. In those five days I became acutely aware of how internet dependent my home automation is. I vowed to no longer invest in home automation that requires non-local access. This will definitely help accelerate the process.

ryall 7y ago
Ever tried to use Plex? Your media's "right there" on your local network but you can't play it without internet.
- aewens 7y ago
  There is a setting in Plex that will allow it to work without authentication for any devices connecting from a defined subnet. So I just set this to my home network's setup and can use it without issue whether I have an Internet connection or not. I confirmed this when I tested my Plex server on a Raspberry Pi out in a cabin in the middle of nowhere and it streamed fine without an Internet connection.
  - shostack 7y ago
    Which, for anyone who has learned the hard way, has to be enabled before your internet goes out.
  - LegitShady 7y ago
    ...help a brother out, what is this setting? I can't find it.
    - ThatPlayer 7y ago
      I believe he's talking about Server Settings > Network > List of IP Address and networks that are allowed without auth
      - 7y ago

sigwinch28 7y ago

I love home assistant, but find the automation subsystem to be lacking in both ease of configuration and features. I found a happy middle ground by installing Node-RED [0] on the same machine and linking it to home assistant via the home assistant websocket plugin [1]. It allows me to create visual workflows for automations, which I find much better to use than raw yaml files. [0]: https://nodered.org/ https://nodered.org/ [1]: https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-home-assistant-websocket https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-home-assista...

adyus 7y ago
If you speak a little Python, you should look into appdaemon, it's a developer's (non-UI) way of doing the same.
- sigwinch28 7y ago
  I hadn't seen that before, but I don't think it addresses my biggest problem with HA automations: it's not a GUI. When I'm developing my automations I often need to do a lot of testing and debugging when things don't work as expected. I find that Node-RED allows me to do this extremely easily as I can click on nodes and see what values are being passed around, and what state things are in. Nonetheless, I'll look into AppDaemon :)
  - adyus 7y ago
    AppDaemon would be great for that, as the callback methods it requires for listening to state changes or scheduled timer can be independently unit tested and debugged.
JshWright 7y ago
Automation is an area of pretty active development. While visual workflows aren't a thing in HA, you definitely don't need to write yaml in order to create automations. The UI has supported it for quite some time (and is quite usable, in my opinion).

TeeWEE 7y ago

I used OpenHab2 in the past. But its quite heavy, and bulky. However it works well... What i did notice is z-wave commands where slow on the raspberry pi.. I moved to Home Assistent and i'm not moving back. I did like the more plugin-like architecture & technical design of openhab better... But that makes it bulky. Openhab feels more mature, but also has a lot more legacy... HA is just movign faster...

dsteinman 7y ago
Z-Wave is a bit slow/delayed even when interacting directly with the zwave open API.

adyus 7y ago

Any discussion of Home Assistant should start with the founder's vision, which I found very clear: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/01/19/perfect-home-automation/ https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/01/19/perfect-home-a... The purpose of Home Assistant is to first observe all data flowing through your house, by connecting all existing sensors, switches, gateways and anything else that has a digital pulse. The second step is control, having centralized access through a web or mobile app to all moving parts of a home. However, the power of HA comes from the third step: automation. The best interface is the one you can forget exists. I've been running HA for over two years. Aside from being lazy about upgrading to newer versions and adjusting to breaking changes, it's been working great and has spoiled me and my wife. We now expect every house we visit to automatically unlock before we reach the door, for the lights to turn on (and gradually off) automatically as we move through rooms, and for our phones to notify us when the best time to open a window would be, to naturally cool during the summer. It's great to have cold light during the day and warm, lower level light as the evening progresses. Together with the Python environment provided by appdaemon, there's almost no limits to what you can do, provided you instrument your house with sensors and switches as best as you can.

ethanpil 7y ago
I'm curious how you setup "automatically unlock before we reach the door"
- BubRoss 7y ago
  Hooking into your phone getting on wifi is one way.
- kevinsundar 7y ago
  Motion sensor on patio. When it detects motion, check if your phone joined the network in the last minute and that a few minutes ago you were not in the gps area of your house. Send command to unlock the lock. Send a push notification that it unlocked so you know if it triggered on accident (incredibly unlikely when using motion + gps + wifi). The motion sensor isn't strictly necessary, you can use the phone joining the network as a trigger. It's just an extra filter to ensure there are no accidental unlocks. It will also prevent unlocks if you come home, park, and then leave without attempting to enter. That's how I would do it, all easily doable in home assistant.

dang 7y ago

A thread from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17826373 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15521743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15521743

Negitivefrags 7y ago

I have a pretty big install of Home Assistant. You can see a screenshot of my main dashboard here. https://i.imgur.com/pJAGAZT.png https://i.imgur.com/pJAGAZT.png When I built the house I decided that I was looking for a Home Automation system that was going to be: a) Open source, or open standards b) Everything can be done entirely locally I settled with using the KNX system for the primary actuators for the house, with Home Assistant for automation and control. One nice property of KNX is that it's distributed, you don't need any central manager for the system to work, so if you press a light switch, then that sends a packet on the KNX network directly to the light actuator. Then there is an IP/KNX bridge to allow you to interact with the KNX network to hack on it. All the "light" automation in the house is all done using KNX programming. For example, walk into hall, light turns on. You don't need a central authority for that. The motion sensor just talks to the light directly. For anything more complex, Home Assistant get's involved for all the more "global" automation via the IP/KNX bridge. And of course you can control everything through it's app. I love how fast and responsive it is since it's local. It's maybe 100ms at most from clicking the button in the app to the light being on. The main thing I can't do without the cloud is voice control. I'm using Google Homes for it which Home Assistant exposes all my devices to. Local voice control systems really suck compared to Google unfortunately. Another thing I'm happy I did is just put sensors for everything everywhere through the house. Here is a screenshot of most of them. https://i.imgur.com/5VeMuE1.png https://i.imgur.com/5VeMuE1.png I actually have more data then this that I haven't bothered to hook up yet since it hasn't been important. Like the motion sensors also provide light levels and so on. Overall, I would definately recommend Home Assistant.

RickS 7y ago
This is really impressive. Are you using separate sensors for humidity/temp/air quality? If so, which ones? Do you assemble these yourself (eg connecting a sensor to a network enabled board) or are they connected out of the box? Would really appreciate anything you've got in terms of parts list.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

baybal2 7y ago

One of our clients is using Home Assistant in a 10000+ apartments deployment with Rockchip + esp32 hardware we made.

jessaustin 7y ago
What is the client doing with this? Is it just for monitoring, or are there active processes dependent on the system?
- baybal2 7y ago
  https://bi-group.org https://bi-group.org https://bi-group.org/ru/smart-home https://bi-group.org/ru/smart-home Functions so far: circuit breakers for mains, water valves, district heating PID control, intercom metering, door lock/sensor, curtain bobbin servomotor, thermometer, aircon control, smoke/co detector, lighting and rgb mood light. AV control is being worked on
jmuguy 7y ago
I'd be interested to know how they handle remote controlling the HA instances. I spent a little bit of time trying to come up with a prototype hub running Home Assistant but kept coming back to the deployment and remote control problem - for instance the REST HTTP API would allow me to send commands in but then I'd need to do something like MQTT to get an event stream from the device. It ended up being too complicated for me to implement.
- baybal2 7y ago
  I assume some monkey patched central control it is. Never inquired about that.
lostlogin 7y ago
Is there are write up of this anywhere? This is truely massive and must have some unique problems and solutions.
- 7y ago

soulskill 7y ago

Tangential to this -- anyone have a good resource for selecting smart devices that are private and secure?

Vaslo 7y ago
Yes - would really like a good doorbell camera that I can host at home. Seems like the Amazon and Google are the best unfortunately.
- kevinsundar 7y ago
  See my sibling comment!
- macrolime 7y ago
  Check out doorbird https://www.doorbird.com https://www.doorbird.com
  - SEJeff 7y ago
    Can confirm. The doorbird is great. I use it with home assistant
kevinsundar 7y ago
One good way I've found is to use Home Assistant's integrations page. Let's say you're looking for a smart doorbell. You'd go here: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/#doorbell https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/#doorbell You can then go to each integration and on the right if it says "IoT Class: Local Push" you can be fairly certain it can be locally controlled without the cloud and that it reports state without the cloud. In this scenario, it'd be DoorBird. You can be fairly certain you can block internet access at your router for this device and it'll work just fine. Don't quote me on that for Doorbird though.
- Klathmon 7y ago
  This can be a good first place to look, but don't rely on it. Many integrations have their local access via reverse engineered APIs, and they often go away when they get popular enough. I wrote the Samsung Family Hub smart fridge integration for home assistant and one day Samsung removed the local access in a fridge update and now there is no way to access it without their android or iOS app.

krzyk 7y ago

How does it compare to openhab?

ananonymoususer 7y ago

Any discussion of open source home automation should include Mozilla's "Things": https://iot.mozilla.org/gateway/ https://iot.mozilla.org/gateway/

gatherhunterer 7y ago
I greatly prefer Mozilla’s solution. Home Assistant seemed to have some critical issues when I used it for my two switches and one light bulb. Even turning them on and off on a schedule was dubious. It would forget a device or two and leave it as-is indefinitely. I found it odd that Home Assistant would not alert me to a lost device. Not only does WebThings work for me but it also has a UI that has some thought put into it instead of just spitting its API into a Material interface. It is much easier to use on a small mobile device because of its intentional responsiveness. Maybe it just did not play well with my devices but Home Assistant felt like an MVP that was not up to the task of dependability.
- SEJeff 7y ago
  When did you last try home assistant? It improves very rapidly and the new “Lovelace” interface is insanely customizable along with being excellent on mobile.
  - gatherhunterer 7y ago
    This was over the summer that I tried it and traded it in for Mozilla’s WebThings.

dannyrosen 7y ago

If you're interested in a similar solution (albeit closed sourced and managed) that works in a non-cloud, fully off-line (re: internet) environment. Take a look at http://www.hubitat.com http://www.hubitat.com. It supports zigbee, zwave and wifi devices and has strong compatibility with the smartthings ecosystem.

escapologybb 7y ago

Just wanted to say that my life as a quadriplegic would be 13.4 million percent more crap without Home Assistant. Being quadriplegic and having something as open as Home Assistant is absolutely amazing, I have automated absolutely everything in the house and home assistant has not choked once. Couple that with one of the friendliest communities for newbies I have come across in a long time and you have something really awesome. I've been using it for a couple of years, I have tried all the other open source alternatives but nothing really comes close for me. I'm actually fiddling with my installation right now as it were. I cannot plug my phone in to charge it up myself obviously, so I am writing a little automation that will check who is in the house and announce through the speakers my phone needs charging up or send them a text message if I have their phone number when my mobile phone charge gets below 20%. Totally cool beanz and I am totally serious about how much easier this makes my life as a quadriplegic.

netfl0 7y ago
I’d love to hear about your automations. Would you share them with us?
- escapologybb 7y ago
  I thought somebody might ask, so I am just sanitising my config files and then they will be available on my Github[1] hopefully in about an hour. Was there any particular automation you were interested in? [1]: https://github.com/robotsandcake/homeassistant https://github.com/robotsandcake/homeassistant
  - netfl0 7y ago
    I’m interested in the whole thing, particularly any use cases I have not thought of. I’m curious to know how you’d rank them by usefulness.
    - escapologybb 7y ago
      No problem, in about an hour things will start appearing And I will include usefulness et cetera. The most commonly used automation by a very long way are the lights, because I use voice operated computer people were continually coming into my asking if I was okay because they could hear me talking. This obviously was crazy makin. So now they ignore all talking unless they see: All of the lights pulse on and off in a blue colour, which means can you please give me a hand when you have a minute I would like a drink or something similar and it is not urgent. Or All of the lights pulse on and off in a red colour, which means drop and come running as I am having and episode of autononmic dysreflexia, my hair is on fire or something equally problematic. It is a very much urgent. after that I would say that these three are the most used, I'm sure there is a way of pulling that information out of the database but I'm not sure how. If someone from home Assistant Team would like to tell me, that would be great! * Battery Level on iPhone is below 20%, get someone to plug it in * Notification asking that the basement be closed when it starts raining, or if someone opens the window when rain is predicted to please close it * Logging whenever the medication draw is opened and closed and keeping a running tally (this one is super important) actually,

martin_a 7y ago

Great to see this thread. Was thinking about getting into this just some days ago. What hardware are you people running the system on? Raspberry Pi? Or something more beefier? Or less? I think they recommend a RPi 4 for the latest release...

JshWright 7y ago
A Pi is fine, but don't rely on the SD card for storage. Home Assistant is very write-heavy (since it logs state changes, etc), and will kill an SD card pretty quickly. You're better off using the SD card as a read-only boot device and then use an external drive for the actual system.
- martin_a 7y ago
  Thanks, that's important information. What kind of Pi should I use? Got a Pi 1 laying around which could be nicely powered by my router, but I doubt that will be enough...
  - JshWright 7y ago
    Give it a shot, HA isn't that resource intensive.
- ananonymoususer 7y ago
  I connected a 1TB SATA SSD to one of my RPI machines with the Element 14 "PI DESKTOP - HAT AND ENCL". ($50) It's a nice RPI case with some extras. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh7AFRIdGi8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh7AFRIdGi8
mongol 7y ago
Can anyone comment on pros and cons of running it virtualized on a Linux host? I have capable hardware and would like to run it on that rather than on a separate Pi device.
- timc3 7y ago

Krasnol 7y ago

Oh god... Hass = Hate in German...

dredmorbius 7y ago
Consider it a little gift.
- Krasnol 7y ago
  "Gift" meaning "poison" German is quite fitting ;)
  - lostlogin 7y ago
    When the smart switch loses its connection and the coffee machine doesn’t start at 6am, this is exactly correct.

jeena 7y ago

Last year I gave a talk about my setup in Gothenburg: https://conf.tube/videos/watch/e4bab8ef-be61-4036-b165-76890c30bfc1 https://conf.tube/videos/watch/e4bab8ef-be61-4036-b165-76890...

rb2k_ 7y ago

I've switched a lot of my existing light automation over to esphome [0]. I flashed it on various cheap LED Wifi bulbs that have been 'liberated' via tuya convert [1] After going through zigbee and zwave, I feel like I finally arrived at a solution that allows me plenty of reasonably priced selection and extreme customization (e.g. just using the warm/cold white LEDs on a RGB+white bulb). Great experience so far and completely automated integration within homeassistant. I hope that the esphome-configs project [2] will grow over the next little while and provide more and more copy+paste configurations for various hardware. [0] https://esphome.io/ https://esphome.io/ [1] https://github.com/ct-Open-Source/tuya-convert https://github.com/ct-Open-Source/tuya-convert [2] https://esphome-configs.io/ https://esphome-configs.io/

balloob 7y ago
ESPHome is amazing. it makes building your own IoT sensors and devices so easy.
BrandoElFollito 7y ago
Another excellent firmware is ESPurna (https://github.com/xoseperez/espurna https://github.com/xoseperez/espurna). It covers zillionsof devices (including the WiFi bulbs)

mattlondon 7y ago

I found that home assistant does not appear to have native integration with Google home the last time I looked? I ended up using openhab which has native Google and Alexa integration, although I am not a fan of openhab as it feels ludicrously over-complicated for even the simplest of things. My lesson learnt after several years going through smartthings, home-brew stuff with raspberry pis, home assistant, demoticz, and openhab using ZigBee or zwave is to make sure your core infrastructure (i.e. things you want to control) is MQTT-based running over wi-fi/ethernet and all your plugs/lights/etc are independently controllable via sending raw MQTT commands on your home network. If you need to rely on a working internet connection, or too many third party things (e.g. IFTTT) you are going to have a bad time when things inevitably break/change/have an outage/become inexplicably slow/get shutdown etc. Once you standardise on MQTT you can switch out HA/OpenHab/others with minimal fuss, and you have great controll and backup options. WiFi just seems rock-solid Vs ZigBee or z-wave that just seemed so troublesome and unreliable. Tasmota (1) + mosquito running on a RPi has finally given me a reliable set up after years of struggling. It is some rock-solid MQTT compatible firmware for ESP8266 devices. 1 - https://github.com/arendst/Tasmota https://github.com/arendst/Tasmota

jmuguy 7y ago
Z-wave/Zigbee are complicated but a necessary evil since wifi and batteries don't play well together. You might want to look into https://github.com/OpenZWave/Zwave2Mqtt https://github.com/OpenZWave/Zwave2Mqtt and other projects like it to give you the nice mqtt control over zwave.

balloob 7y ago

Founder Home Assistant here. Thanks for all the wonderful comments.

mlaretallack 7y ago
And thank you for a great system, from a user.
Sendotsh 7y ago
As a disabled person, I couldn’t even begin to describe how much of a tangible improvement HA has had in my life. Being able to turn all the lights off from my bed before I go to sleep, or have the heater in the kids room turn on automatically if temps drop, etc etc, has quite literally saved me immeasurable amounts of physical pain. Thank you so much.

mlaretallack 7y ago

I do not have home automation However I use Home assistant. Why, because it shows me what is going on.... Its a dashboard for my house.

dazhbog 7y ago

We are a manufacturer too with a new product that brings home and industrial equipment online (smart hub and stuff). Only heard of openHAB but this looks awesome. We shall implement. Thanks HN.

SEJeff 7y ago
Pull requests for integrations are always happily accepted. Just fork the project, follow the contribution guidelines, and send a GitHub pull request. Thanks! I got started as a contributor to home assistant by sending patches to the Sonos integration.

debiandev 7y ago

If only it was not so painful to package. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=839786 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=839786

Norther 7y ago

Can anyone recommend an affordable temperature/humidity sensor?

metrix 7y ago
I would flash it with Tasmota, but these sensors are cheap/awesome: https://www.amazon.com/Sonoff-Temperature-Humidity-Controller-Appliances/dp/B075FSHKQ5/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?hvadid=78134099057334&hvbmt=be&hvdev=c&hvqmt=e&keywords=sonoff+th16&qid=1575083424&sr=8-1-spons&psc=1&spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUExUFVKQTFCSTRDTjZLJmVuY3J5cHRlZElkPUEwOTUzNjQ2MVYwRVY5NUlWQzg4UyZlbmNyeXB0ZWRBZElkPUEwNTI5ODQzMVhNOFJPSDlBNFhTUSZ3aWRnZXROYW1lPXNwX2F0ZiZhY3Rpb249Y2xpY2tSZWRpcmVjdCZkb05vdExvZ0NsaWNrPXRydWU= https://www.amazon.com/Sonoff-Temperature-Humidity-Controlle...
BrandoElFollito 7y ago
Xiaomi Aquara devices. They work with Zigbee, which I manage through Zigbee2MQTT (https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/ https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/). Cheap and reliable.

ngcc_hk 7y ago

Need a bit intro as even state of union seem to need to watch a video. The problem is it said open source then there is here and there Alexa. Do not want to go into Apple and amazon and google ecology sphere as long as I can. It is my home. Not want someone listen to mine. Not to mention we do not know what authorury can get hold of given in a police state here

rb666 7y ago

HASS is amazing, my entire house runs on it. Could not recommend it more!

shocks 7y ago

I’m using Home Assistant to join all my IoT devices together, and Node RED to provide a graphical programming layer for automation. It works really well.

escapologybb 7y ago

EditedTo Add: well, that was meant to be a minor comment and request for pointers but turned into somewhat of a rant. My apologies HMN, my apologies. This kind of dashboard really does have the possibility of reducing the overdoses I am subjecting amongst any number of other mistakes brought about by lack of clear and understandable documentation. And once we have fixed it for me, well from THEREON IS WHERE WE TAKE OVER THE WORLD! On a slightly related note, does anybody remember that about a year or so ago somebody posted his "Personal Analytics Dashboard" I think he called it. Basically it detailed every aspect of his life. it was things like heart rate, steps walked, miles run, cycles cycled along with all manner of other nutritional input. The thing that marked it out for me was that it took all those desperate threads of information and display them in one easy to understand and beautiful layout. But I cannot for the life of me find it! At the moment I want to get to the state that when one of the nurses comes on duty, she can get the iPad out of the server cupboard (after first pressing her flic button to login) and see on one or two pages things like but not limited to: * Is the catheter turn on or off * What is the bosses current heart rate (BPM) * What is today's resting heart rate and how does it fit in over the week, the month and the year * Which of the doors and windows are open and are they locked or not * Did the boss get into his wheelchair today, and if so for how long and how far did he travel * How many doses of his medication has he had today, and how many does that leave him with for the rest of the day * Have there been any incidences of Autononmic Dysreflexia[1] or any other life-threatening shenanigans other parts of the team will need to know about And on and on and on, so it would need to be expandable. It may be possible to skin home assistance with something simple enough but I am not a designer. I've lots of this data coming in already from lots of different sensors, I am however just struggling with a way of turning those data into information that non-technical users will not be put off by. Because if they are put off by it then they will not use the system, and as this is going to be one of the systems monitoring medication and my health et cetera I would really like them to use. Non-technical users make up the huge majority of people who will be using this system. And to pre-empt what I know one of you will mention because you care about me, I do not ever put my life in the hands of anyone person, process, widget or anything else! It's nice to know you care. <3 I also hate spreadsheets. I mean, I will continue to use them obviously because there is no choice. Just thought world should know that I hate them. So yes I am pretty much totally comfortable purchasing sensors and and getting my work PA to install them, I'm also having enormous fun creating new sensors but what I am not enjoying is being quadriplegic and trying to draw out nice designs. Have a feeling it is not necessary and that there will be a simple way for me to plug in all of my data streams and be given a very shiny dashboard that I could maybe put on the wall of my office on some 17 inch screen something similar. --------- I've included a couple of links describing autonomic dysreflexia, but be warned it's not a nice condition and it is not fun having one of these episodes. Not happy reading, just put them here for completeness [1]: https://www.christopherreeve.org/living-with-paralysis/health/secondary-conditions/autonomic-dysreflexia https://www.christopherreeve.org/living-with-paralysis/healt... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_dysreflexia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_dysreflexia