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As someone who is perfectly happy with Home Assistant and Z-Wave, I worry that a bunch of mega corps getting together to create a standard will crowd out the ma

As someone who is perfectly happy with Home Assistant and Z-Wave, I worry that a bunch of mega corps getting together to create a standard will crowd out the market, and prevent non-local, privacy-honoring options from continuing to be manufactured. If average consumers are told to simply "look for the CHIP logo", and the CHIP standard includes facilities for must-phone-home messages akin to streaming DRM, I'm afraid we'll just get pulled further into the corporate surveillance dystopia.

ak217 7y ago
I think people who expect Home Assistant to be useful to the general consumer are delusional. Home Assistant is an amateur piece of software with severe UX shortcomings and broken auto-update functionality (it phones home continuously and often bricks itself after auto-updates). I appreciate the enthusiasm in the home automation community, and I agree there's a need for an offline solution, but Home Assistant is not it, and we'd be better off scrapping that codebase and starting something better.
- specto 7y ago
  Don't you think delusional is a bit strong... There is a real company, nabu casa, hiring real developers to work on making a 1.0 release that's easy for others to use. Yeah right now it's complicated, but check out some of the projects they're working on like stanford's almond integration. https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2019/11/20/privacy-focused-voice-assistant/ https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2019/11/20/privacy-focuse...
- gerdesj 7y ago
  You are perhaps taking about a particular distribution of HA and not HA itself. I run mine out of Python venvs on Ubuntu LTS. I can't remember hearing of autobricking installs on hass.io which might be what you are referring to but I doubt it. Citation please.
- JediWing 7y ago
  You're focusing too much on the home assistant part, and not enough on the local control part. There are solutions with hubs such as some parts of the Wink hub that do work locally without internet. I'm sure there are professional-grade installers who install various pieces of software that use Z-Wave and/or Zigbee to setup a locally controlled home automation solution. Needing connected to the internet (and all the latency associated with it) is an anti-feature that most consumers aren't even aware of or think of, hence why I hope solutions that have the feature aren't crowded out before the market for home automation truly takes off
  - ak217 7y ago
    Sorry if I wasn't clear. I agree with you that local-only solutions are needed. Home Assistant is sucking up too much of the air in the room. I don't think it will ever be accessible or usable to the general population. If not for Home Assistant, I think the community would have developed better local-only solutions by now.
- tlrobinson 7y ago
  They are actively working to make Home Assistant much more user-friendly. I suggest watching the "state of the union" presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc17q1Zn0Xs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc17q1Zn0Xs

ak217 7y ago

I think people who expect Home Assistant to be useful to the general consumer are delusional. Home Assistant is an amateur piece of software with severe UX shortcomings and broken auto-update functionality (it phones home continuously and often bricks itself after auto-updates). I appreciate the enthusiasm in the home automation community, and I agree there's a need for an offline solution, but Home Assistant is not it, and we'd be better off scrapping that codebase and starting something better.

specto 7y ago
Don't you think delusional is a bit strong... There is a real company, nabu casa, hiring real developers to work on making a 1.0 release that's easy for others to use. Yeah right now it's complicated, but check out some of the projects they're working on like stanford's almond integration. https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2019/11/20/privacy-focused-voice-assistant/ https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2019/11/20/privacy-focuse...
gerdesj 7y ago
You are perhaps taking about a particular distribution of HA and not HA itself. I run mine out of Python venvs on Ubuntu LTS. I can't remember hearing of autobricking installs on hass.io which might be what you are referring to but I doubt it. Citation please.
JediWing 7y ago
You're focusing too much on the home assistant part, and not enough on the local control part. There are solutions with hubs such as some parts of the Wink hub that do work locally without internet. I'm sure there are professional-grade installers who install various pieces of software that use Z-Wave and/or Zigbee to setup a locally controlled home automation solution. Needing connected to the internet (and all the latency associated with it) is an anti-feature that most consumers aren't even aware of or think of, hence why I hope solutions that have the feature aren't crowded out before the market for home automation truly takes off
- ak217 7y ago
  Sorry if I wasn't clear. I agree with you that local-only solutions are needed. Home Assistant is sucking up too much of the air in the room. I don't think it will ever be accessible or usable to the general population. If not for Home Assistant, I think the community would have developed better local-only solutions by now.
tlrobinson 7y ago
They are actively working to make Home Assistant much more user-friendly. I suggest watching the "state of the union" presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc17q1Zn0Xs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc17q1Zn0Xs