18 ms·

Home Assistant – open-source home automation

561 points by gjvc 5y ago

vxxzy 5y ago
With the HomeKit and UniFi integration I can finally say “Hey Siri, turn off the Xbox internet” I do have to say, the amount of integrations are quite remarkable. I’ve been running Homeassistant for about two years now. It can only see it getting even better.
reid 5y ago
The UniFi Protect integration is awesome. Turn on outdoor lights on motion, disable loud doorbell ding when the dog is sleeping, change privacy zones, send critical notifications to bypass silent mode on iOS devices when a person is detected while away… really amazing stuff. The HomeKit Controller integration is also neat. All kinds of HomeKit compatible devices can just work with Home Assistant. Honeywell Lyric is the best example: PIR sensors with local push for lighting automation or special alerts when gates open to prevent the dog from escaping the backyard. Edit: More useful things! I have my washer and dryer in a garage. Can’t hear the machines inside. The Z-Wave light switches around my house have status LEDs, so one LED is dedicated to the washer and dryer status based on power draw from the outlet. Works really well. The same status LEDs are shared for all light switches around the house, so it’s a good ambient notification. The Mac app can provide webcam or mic status as a sensor, which turns on a key light when I join video calls and turns on an LED on the light switch outside my office to signal when I’m on a call. I also get a push notification on my computer and a LED light on the light switches when the Roomba is full. It fills up a few times during its typical run while I’m working. I also have the door status (open/closed/locked) from the Lyric as LEDs on the light switches. Very easy to tell if something is unlocked or open at a glance while walking around the house.
- paisawalla 5y ago
  Amazing write up! Can you provide a link to the switches you use? Also, how does HA know when the dog is asleep?
  - function_seven 5y ago
    > Also, how does HA know when the dog is asleep? I have the same question! Until OP answers, I'm going to guess some accelerometer collar that reports when little motion has occurred in 3 minutes?
    - reid 5y ago
      Haha, just a time based schedule and nothing that fancy. But if anyone out there has made an API client for the Fi collar… let me know!
  - reid 5y ago
    I use the HomeSeer HS-WD200+ which has programmable LEDs over Z-Wave: https://shop.homeseer.com/products/z-wave-dimmer-switch-archive https://shop.homeseer.com/products/z-wave-dimmer-switch-arch... HomeSeer is coming out with a new model soon so that model is discontinued. But the new one looks better since it doesn’t need a neutral wire! My dog has really consistent daytime nap times. So I can disable the doorbell chime during those times to prevent the barking during a delivery. :)
- zrail 5y ago
  How do you disable the doorbell chime?
  - reid 5y ago
    I have a UniFi Protect G4 Doorbell, so it’s as easy as calling the service unifiprotect.set_doorbell_chime_duration and setting the duration to 0. I still get phone and other notifications when the button is pushed! Just no indoor bell.
    - zrail 5y ago
      Whoa! That's awesome. I didn't know that that existed.
- matthew-wegner 5y ago
  Bolting on to this comment with some other neat things, as a fellow HASS enthusiast: * Every single light in my house moves from dim/orange -> bright/bluer -> very dim/orange throughout the day (basically like an whole-home f.lux or Night Shift). Sadly still third party, but it's easy to use: Circadian Lighting component will find it * I have "night" modes in all my rooms. This is usually a single bulb in lowest-brightness full red. You can barely see it during the day, but at night it makes bathroom trips a non-blinding affair * I have 6+ speaker zones, on Raspberry Pis mostly. Snapcast runs the audio stream, but turning on/off a room mutes the speakers in it (walking into a room turns on the lights via motion detectors and music continues to follow, which is neat) * I pipe a lot of text-to-speech messages. Some rooms won't play them if the room is off (outer stuff like my garage), but others always do (so I hear them). This is more custom now, and I even duck the playing music stream for the TTS portion. It can take in text, so I do things like have my automation say a bunch of things every morning (my age in days, some web-scraped snippets, etc) * $10 power sensor is enough to know when your washer is finished. Power for awhile -> running state, no power after awhile in running state -> finished. This goes right into the text to speech system * Every room has a 10-button remote (the very, very cheap zap remote kind). Most of the layout is the same--room on, room off, start music (or skip track if playing), stop music, full-bright lights, night lights. This still leaves a few for custom-to-the-room buttons, which I use * Contact sensors on all openings to the house. I let me cats into the backyard during the day. Cat access via any configuration is still open, and sun is below X degrees? Text to speech * Most of my logic is Node-RED (another comment here about that), which gives me a lot of flexibility. I have a global "house" mode, which I can set to guests or party to suppress most of my assumptions that I'm home alone * Example of one of those: My setup knows if I'm using one of my two desk computers. If I am, and house is in "home" (alone) mode, I turn off all the other rooms in the house I could go on--I went pretty deep when I first set up Home Assistant, but that was years ago now. Every now and then I do a major update or add functionality to smooth over something that's been bugging me Once you hit some tipping point of soooo many things available as sensors or services in HASS, adding completely new functionality is a very incremental change
  - crooked-v 5y ago
    > walking into a room turns on the lights via motion detectors Do you know if there's anything good in this space yet for detecting presence (not just entry)? There are some spots in my home where I only want the lights on while I'm there, and I haven't found anything yet that can reliably detect that somebody's actually left a space other than Hiome (https://www.hiome.com https://www.hiome.com), and that doesn't work for something not delineated by a doorway.
- jkestner 5y ago
  Honest question: do you live with other people? I'd ask matthew-wegner as well but I can infer that he doesn't.
  - jon-wood 5y ago
    Reading between the lines here, I guess the real question is “does this stuff work when not everyone is technically inclined”. When I first started working in home automation my boss at the time had a saying “if you have to press a button, it’s not home automation”. That single phrase is the core of making automation work with non-technical users. The house should always do the least surprising thing by default, for example turning on lights when you enter a room, but only if it’s dark. Light switches should turn the lights on and off, rather than disable the light automation (looking at you Hue). If you can configure things to that extent, then yeah, it works beautifully. If everyone has to faff around with a mobile app to be able to see where their aiming on a 4am toilet run it’ll be hated with a passion.
    - dagw 5y ago
      The huge stumbling block I ran into when I proposed looking into home automation with my wife was that we had very different ideas of what the "right" thing to do in any given situation was. The combination of lights she wants to have on when in a room are very different from the ones I want to have on, for example. So unless there was face recognition so the room knew who was there, it would never automatically do the right thing. Also anything that involved having to use an app to do anything was a very hard No.
      - teekert 5y ago
        Having 1 button to switch an entire room filled with many light sources between your wife's and your preference is also automation, and exactly at the right level. HA is not going to solve disagreements between people ;). In this case the alternative would be changing many lights manually, right? I mean the face recognition sounds like huge overkill and a pita to get perfect. I have a Hue Tap, which has 4 buttons to program, we set: 1: Normal on, 2: Cosy on, 3: Cooking on (bright in the kitchen) and 4: All off. Near the couch I have an extra Hue switch to dim the couch area even more if desired. That works well for us. Atm this doesn't involve HA but it would if I had any other brands of lights and I would also want other aspects changed (like room temp, i.e. "cosy on" could also raise the thermostat by 1 degree, because it's couch time) with the same Hue Tap buttons. HA is great at having different brands of home automation stuff talk to each other, so you can pick the best of all worlds. I just got a smart thermostat, so my "All-off" Hue Tap button may just as well set the thermostat to "eco", of course only at night because otherwise it may just mean the sun being bright enough was the reason I turned all lights off. Or, maybe when I set my thermostat to "away", HA can signal the rest of the house that the lights and the coffee machine can now be turned off, if any were still left on, I'd do that with a 10 min delay or so because I may still be running around the house to get stuff. HA is perfect for this type of logic. Using a phone for anything is a big No for both of us as well. Home automation for us means having single buttons that do many things at once. We set timers for our garden lighting (dawn=off and sunset=on). And we use some motion sensors. In the bathroom for example, the Hue motion sensor switches the light on, and then HA turns on the fan, through a Sonoff flashed with Tasmota. At night the light also switches on but less bright, everybody loves this automation (more than the previous manual solution), and it's completely in line with Home Assistant's vision for Home Automation: [0]. It's easy to over-do Home Automation, the people you live with are good indicators for when you do so ;) [0]: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/01/19/perfect-home-automation/ https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/01/19/perfect-home-a...
- throwoutway 5y ago
  "The Z-Wave light switches around my house have status LEDs, so one LED is dedicated to the washer and dryer status based on power draw from the outlet." Could you elaborate on how this works? Which Z-Wave light switches measure the power draw?
  - mleo 5y ago
    Typically, there is zwave plug measuring the power draw and sending data to hub. Based on the data, an event is triggered to change an LED on a light switch. HomeSeer has zwave switches with LEDs used for dimmer feedback than can be programmed to show a color. I use the LEDs on one switch to match the state of two exterior door locks. Green/unlocked and Red/locked. I use another LED on the switch to match state of the Litter Robot, automatic cat litter box. Blinks red when full and needs to be emptied.
    - reid 5y ago
      Yup, exactly this! I send custom documented Z-Wave commands to switch the wall switch dimmers LEDs into “status mode” and can then control each one with a custom color and blink. I just send the same commands to all the dimmers so they all show the same thing.
  - matthew-wegner 5y ago
    Not OP, but I would guess they don't directly. If it's possible to set those status LEDs arbitrarily, you could use another power-sensing outlet's data, so a different device entirely. This is the magic of Home Assistant in general--it's really just a big bag of sensors (temperature/power/times/etc) and a bag of services (turn on, set to X, change color). You can have sensors from anything trigger a service on anything else.
jvilalta 5y ago
Works great with z-Wave devices on a raspberry pi. I've got a few 433mhz sensors as well, integrated with all rtl-sdr. Also other raspberry pi devices taking to it via mqtt. Fun stuff.
- function_seven 5y ago
  I bought an RTL-SDR dongle years ago thinking I was going to do all sorts of awesome things with it. After my initial screwing around with it, it landed in a drawer for a few years. Well a couple of months ago I found this[1] and hacked together my own daemon to read my power meter and publish the result via MQTT. I then wrote a couple of sensors in Home Assistant to estimate my upcoming electric bill and the instantaneous power draw of my house. It's been rock solid so far. I've been surprised how much energy I use while sleeping in the middle of the night (something like 350W) [1] https://hackaday.com/2017/12/21/read-home-power-meters-with-rtl-sdr/ https://hackaday.com/2017/12/21/read-home-power-meters-with-...
- ThatPlayer 5y ago
  How does rtl-sdr compare to say esphome and those cheap 433mhz receivers/transmitters? I remember playing around with those a long time ago, with arduinos and without esphome, with some outlets before wifi outlets became really common.
nickvanw 5y ago
Home Assistant really hits the right spot on the "enthusiast" vs "product" spectrum for me - it's flexible and configurable, but also easy enough to set up that I basically spent almost no time actually making it work. I've got it hooked up to a Z-Wave Hub so that I can control mechanized blinds with HomeKit (where no native integration exists), all the way over to Volvo On Call to report where my car is, how much gas is in the tank, and what the odometer reports. It's got a great community, and isn't too difficult to extend that it's not worth mucking around in the guts when I really want something to work.
nijave 5y ago
HA also has a pretty great community. I've done a couple small changes and have had very positive experiences
candiddevmike 5y ago
Funny, I'm finally throwing in the towel and going back to HASS after trying to go all node-red. I loathe the GUI experience in both, and node-red updates weren't as painless as I read online (better than HASS, but now I'm monitoring a litany of NPM packages). HASS seems like the least bad OSS solution for home automation--it has a lot of inertia but I'm not a fan of the group (company?) making big decisions for the project. I really wish they hadn't dictated the end of YAML/declarative configurations.
- tlrobinson 5y ago
  Doesn’t node-red complement HASS? I use Home Assistant for simple things and bridge to node-red for more complex automations.
  - candiddevmike 5y ago
    It can, a lot of users pushed people to use node-red in place of HASS automations prior to the automation update earlier this year and app daemon. "In theory", node-red can do everything HASS can (possibly missing some integrations, see inertia comment above), but in reality it's quite a bit more complex, especially when you don't have HASS handling all the stateful things. I think the consensus now is to just use HASS, node-red isn't necessary?
    - tlrobinson 5y ago
      Cool, I haven’t kept up to date, I’ll have to check out the latest version.
      - candiddevmike 5y ago
        Best of luck with your upgrades =D
- barbazoo 5y ago
  > I really wish they hadn't dictated the end of YAML/declarative configurations. Can you elaborate a bit here? I might be on an older version but afaict it's still configured via yml configs.
solarkraft 5y ago
HASS looked nice initially with all its polish, but I gave up on it when I couldn’t figure out how to interface with MQTT from the web interface and it generally just didn’t seem to have many features. I’m going to try OpenHAB next, as I’ve seen relatively complex setups with it.
jrm4 5y ago
Yep. Like many here I appreciate the idea of Home Assistant, but the abstraction on top of abstraction is a little disappointing, and seems like too much for someone who's pretty comfortable shell scripting.. ..so yes, thats kind of what I'm fishing for. Is anyone aware of something a little more shell-oriented?
- jonwest 5y ago
  Node red is probably closer to what you’re looking for, though it’s JavaScript and not shell, it’ll give you a lot more flexibility.
- ornornor 5y ago
  Some say nodered, I personally didn’t like it. Appdaemon however is exactly what I wanted. It can do anything python can and there is no drag and drop UI, you write actual code to make things happen.
  - dividedbyzero 5y ago
    Is appdaemon standalone or does it require HomeAssistant?
    - ornornor 5y ago
      I’m not sure if you can run it without HASS. I run it with, and I think it would be much harder without.
- Denvercoder9 5y ago
  You can try pyscript (https://github.com/custom-components/pyscript https://github.com/custom-components/pyscript), which allows you to write automations in plain Python.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
balloob 5y ago
Founder Home Assistant here. Home Assistant is turning 8 years this week. To celebrate we have launched crowdfunding campaign for Home Assistant Amber, a device for both beginners and home automation enthusiasts and the easiest way to get started with Home Assistant. For more info see https://www.crowdsupply.com/nabu-casa/home-assistant-amber https://www.crowdsupply.com/nabu-casa/home-assistant-amber
- oaiey 5y ago
  Product request: make it simple to create devices. Doing custom entities in the config, i miss those.
  - maartenh 5y ago
    I worked around this by creating a button that runs a git commit & push, and an iframe that points to a local running flask app that renders a <pre><code>{{ shell("git status")}}</pre><code>. Not as nice as fully declarative YAML, as this also captures the data files, but at least I have point in time restore.
- 3np 5y ago
  Thanks for posting and your service! Any chance declarative configuration (tank or any other format) will be getting a second chance? Like many here it’s the one way of working with HASS that feels/felt nice.
  - maweki 5y ago
    Yeah, I started out orchestrating Home Assistant via Ansible throughout many devices in my home. Now I feel that it would take me days to recreate the configurations that I needed to make with the UI. Deprecating yaml is bad for configuration versioning.
- croon 5y ago
  Sorry if this is a stupid question, but is there a reason for not having z-wave support on Amber? It wasn't mentioned in the picture and no ctrl+f "wave" hits on the page. I'm very excited about this device. I've been using Smartthings and then IKEAs gateway, but haven't been happy with their performance and features.
waynesonfire 5y ago
anyone creating an insolated network for IoT devices around the house? I'd be interesting in how this can be achieved.
- herewulf 5y ago
  Yes. VLANs.
  - stragies 5y ago
    Which is only the first half of the story for many installations. If something at your place uses SSDP/MDNS/UPNP/etc to communicate/find_each_other, you'll then have to start doing multicast bridging/rewriting and other hacks. And for those, there is no one-recipe-fits-all.
    - franga2000 5y ago
      That's only if you want non-IoT devices (like your phone) to communicate with IoT devices directly, right? If you use a bridge like HA you can simply have it be in both VLANs and control everything through it.
      - stragies 5y ago
        Well, where do you draw the line? Is e.g. the SmartTV an IOT-device, or not? If you want the TV to reach the Internet for some things (e.g. Netflix, Youtube, WhatEv), but also isolate it from your other devices, block ads, yet be able to use the UPNP-mediaservers in your network, and want to use the phone to control it for the things HomeAssistant cannot yet do, then you'll run into some difficulties. They can be worked around, but will need intimate knowledge of protocols and such. Also some of these issues can be worked around by e.g. using HomeAssistant also as UPNP-MediaController, which I haven't gotten around to set up yet. But "true", some categories of smart devices can be nicely sequestered into isolated VLANs.
    - ulzeraj 5y ago
      You can create zeroconf records on standard DNS servers. A few years ago one of my clients which ran a school wanted to give airprint access to his guest network so that parents could print documents into the school office printers. Creating those records is a bit of a PITA and you need to find out how to replicate SRV and TXT values but it works. Here is a good source for this type of configuration: http://www.dns-sd.org/ServerStaticSetup.html http://www.dns-sd.org/ServerStaticSetup.html
holoduke 5y ago
I have a large mix of devices in my house. From WiFi to Zwave to ZigBee. I have about 100 lights, garage doors, various sensors and switches. My configuration in HA is insane. Extremely large, with a lot of custom configs. I would say: unmaintainable. It works almost flawlessly for about 3 years.
01100011 5y ago
Been using HA for over a year now to run my Z-Wave+ network of sensors and switches. It has a rather steep learning curve but should be usable by most software folks. I feel like some of the terminology could be changed to make it more familiar and understandable, but after a few weeks you'll get the hang of it. One warning though: If you're running it off an SD card or other small, solid-state device, your first priority should be turning down the amount of logging. Without reducing log spewage, expect your SD card to die within the first few months of use. I can't complain too much, it's free software and I don't have the resources to contribute much right now, but there are some sharp edges you need to watch out for.
stragies 5y ago
I also use HomeAssistant, and am quite happy with it, but i wish, they would start including the [`remote_homeassistant`](https://github.com/custom-components/remote_homeassistant https://github.com/custom-components/remote_homeassistant) addon. It solves the Usecase, where not all BT(LE) devices in the house are reachable from the main HA, and you need remote "pickups" for their signals, and then want to integrate them back into the "master instance". It also solves a bunch of other problems, like integrating some sensors of the HA of your holiday home into the HA of your main home. The author describes the rationale better here: https://github.com/home-assistant/architecture/issues/246 https://github.com/home-assistant/architecture/issues/246 For some reason, NabuCasa doesn't want to integrate it. Maybe they see it as competing with an own upcoming (cloud?) solution of their own?
- splitbrain 5y ago
  Instead of running full blown secondary HA instances for that, simply use ESPhome on a ESP32. I used that method to pick up the signals of a couple of bluetooth hygrometers in the cellar: https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2021-08/16-humidity_control_with_home_assistant https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2021-08/16-humidity_control_...
  - stragies 5y ago
    But I already have devices running linux-SBCs with "free" bluetooth in most rooms. Why should I need to add ESP32s just for that? And what about the second-home-case I also mentioned? Also, I use remote_homeassistant also for e.g HDMI-CEC-control of devices in other rooms/places, which ESPHome cannot do. (I agree though, ESPhome@ESP32 is a viable solution for some subset of situations)
rcarmo 5y ago
I’ve been trying HA yearly (as my home set up is essentially HomeKit/homebridge with Node-RED bolted on to expose unsupported devices) and it always strikes me as very declarative and finicky to configure, requiring either maintaining a bunch of YAML files or clicking through screen after screen of longish forms. I wonder if there are any plans to make the UX feel simpler and less crowded…
- teekert 5y ago
  I think that is priority 1 for them, after starting as a yaml first system, you can now even add automation using natural language (never used that though). It will get less complicated for sure. As for the "crowded", I think that's up to you.
- edcastro 5y ago
  It already is. With the latest changes, almost everything can be done through the UI, hardly ever I touch YAML files.
- gregable 5y ago
  Ive just gotten started, but what I like so far is based on node-red but only using HA triggers, functions, and HA call service nodes. Essentially I use the trigger blocks to schedule my function calls. The function then ignores the inputs entirely and just inspects the variables from home assistant that it cares about, it then sends this output to any devices I want to toggle. This way, I'm just writing code. This works naturally for me, since it's my day job. But I can use node-red for visually organizing input output tuples, and the debugging data that it shows as things activate. I also add one manual trigger and one debug output node on each end of the function so I can just run it manually if desired. So far it's pretty goos, but I'm missing stuff like writing tests, which means I test my functions by turning on/off devices or something which isn't ideal.
Kosirich 5y ago
I'm looking into 2-3 wireless cameras and some movement trigger sensor for home security. Besides security, we are getting a dog and I want to see what she is doing when we are away. If anyone has good ideas, links to equipment they used, or just want to share their experience with HASS in regards to home security, it will be appreciated. Link to some good project is also great :) (I only played with is and connected few sensors I made with ESP32s)
- l72 5y ago
  For any camera that provides an rtsp stream, you can use frigate[1], which has some excellent detection algorithms (it differentiate between people, dogs, ...). It also has hooks to integrate with HASS. I use it with a LaView system to monitor my external cameras and get notifications (including push to my iphone) through HASS. [1] https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate
  - Kosirich 5y ago
    Thanks!
maweki 5y ago
My main problem with Home assistant is the automation language. It could be very powerful, but isn't. I feel that if there was a way to introduce temporary state and force an expression as the value of a switch it could be great. I would love for something ASP/Datalog based. Having a light that's just on if some expression is True and off if the expression is false is more difficult than it should be. The automations are not goal-based. But maybe in a decade the next project will do it that way.
- Denvercoder9 5y ago
  You can try pyscript (https://github.com/custom-components/pyscript https://github.com/custom-components/pyscript), which allows you to write automations in plain Python.
  - maweki 5y ago
    That's not AI/Logic programming though. Ideally I'd write a boolean formula and the system tries to make it true by adjusting the values it can adjust. Say I want something like the light should be off it is dark and the window is open (bugs), but if the window is closed and it is dark, the light should be on. dark & window.open -> !light dark & !window.open -> light Obviously, it can't close the window. But it can turn the light to make the formulas true. If this were answer-set-based, the system could find multiple ways to make the formulas true (that's why I say goal-based) and act in a truly intelligent manner. Edit: if it could close the window, it had a second way to make the formulas true. That would be nice as well, that the window closes when I turn on the light. Edit 2: note that at daytime the formulas are always true, such that I can adjust the light and window as I like. Edit 3: We could also rewrite this as dark -> (window.open != light) And it is great that we could reason about our rules in that manner.
    - Denvercoder9 5y ago
      That's an interesting idea, and I agree it would make a great addition to HA. From an outside standpoint it doesn't even seem to be that hard to implement, all the pieces are already there, "just" needs some glue.
35mm 5y ago
Can anyone recommend what the best way is for me to set up a simple temperature sensor connected to Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi?
- Semaphor 5y ago
  Best is hard to say. Depends on what you want. I have 4 Temperature sensors (2 Aqara temp & humidity sensors, and 2 Hue motions sensors that have temperature sensing included) connected via Zigbee (using Deconz) to my HA on the PI. No issues at all.
  - 35mm 5y ago
    Sounds like a great solution. What are you using in terms of hardware to get Zigbee on your Pi?
    - Semaphor 5y ago
      The Conbee II (USB Stick)
roland35 5y ago
I believe things like Home Assistant are the future of IoT. There are always going to be thousands of random devices and sensors - many of which may become obsolete or unsupported by their manufacturer. A centralized intelligent and well-maintained hub which can communicate with many different things really helps keep everything glued together and working long term.
alex3305 5y ago
Nice to see HA getting some love on HN. A colleague recommended it to me about 3 years ago as an alternative to Domoticz. I've migrated back than and haven't looked back since. I consider myself a real Home Assistant enthousiast. I've contributed some small amounts to the project, created and maintain my own add-ons and love to share my configuration with others. Although most of the things currently just work, especially with the (migrated) UI integrations. Some things still feel very unfinished, like blueprints. Which was a terrific idea, but maintaining and keeping those up to date is an absolute nightmare and you will have to that yourself [1]. Same with battery powered devices. When they work, it's all great, but having to watch their battery level is just a hassle. You can create your own automation to do that for you, but it seems unnecessary. For me the community also sometimes feels very hostile. For instance, you can have a Portainer add-on, but installing other Docker images makes your system 'unsupported'. Same with some blacklisted images [2], which break Home Assistant Supervisor. Or when the maintainer of one of the add-ons completely ignores a breaking issue after a day [3]. 1. https://community.home-assistant.io/t/reload-automations-automatically-when-a-blueprint-is-changed/253977 https://community.home-assistant.io/t/reload-automations-aut... 2. https://github.com/home-assistant/supervisor/blob/main/supervisor/resolution/evaluations/container.py#L15-L18 https://github.com/home-assistant/supervisor/blob/main/super... 3. https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-adguard-home/issues/195 https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-adguard-home/issues/1...
- Denvercoder9 5y ago
  If you want to do anything more than just run Home Assistant with the system it's on, I recommend ditching their whole OS and Supervisor, and just running HA Core in a virtualenv. The developers have shown that they're very opinionated about how their software should be used, and they're hostile to everything that falls outside of that. That makes their OS totally unusable as a general-purpose solution. Besides, it's an OS that doesn't get regular security updates, so that alone should disqualify it from serious use.
  - Gatsky 5y ago
    Well their approach allows them to deliver software that works without being inundated by issues related to someone’s peculiar set up. I don’t think ‘hostile’ is a very fair assessment.
JustinAiken 5y ago
I used to use this quite heavily, but about a year ago the move away from YAML made it too hard to keep a declarative config that can be checked into source control... Ended up giving up and just have a dumb home now.
afavour 5y ago
I am very grateful for Home Assistant but I’m in a weird spot with my setup now. I’m running an old version (honestly can’t remember which) in a Docker container and when I tried to upgrade all my integrations stopped working. So I downgraded again and have been sat there ever since. Every now and then it stops responding and I restart the container. There’s a tricky balance between a dumb appliance that doesn’t do what you want and a smart one that requires too much babysitting, and for me HA is just too far towards the latter. Not enough that I’m going to replace it tomorrow but I’ve been looking at Hubitat lately: https://hubitat.com/ https://hubitat.com/ More and more I’m liking the idea of a box that runs itself more than HA does.
- spacemanmatt 5y ago
  Every HA I setup and invested time in cratered beyond repair within a few months. I gave up due to the Discord experience.
- dzikimarian 5y ago
  Try upgrading version by version, not directly to the newest. I've dockerized instance I upgrade very regularly for over a year, and it had zero issues.
meteo-jeff 5y ago
Hi balloob! I was showing my non-commercial weather API project [0] to HN 2 days ago. Another HN member was already pointing out your project. If you are interested, we could have a look at integrating weather data without the need of your users to sign up for API plans with their personal data. [0] https://open-meteo.com https://open-meteo.com
MrDunham 5y ago
I just started switching to Home Assistant and LOVE it. Rather shocked to see this is just now being posted to HN to be honest. Up until the switch I’ve had a patchwork system consisting of Alexa, Smart Life (app), Smart Things, and a lot of digital duct tape. Having both 1) a central "command center" and 2) Zigbee/Z-Wave capabilities (requires a dongle) suddenly opens up so much more opportunities than WiFi components alone. EG I've attached door sensors to my garage doors to trigger lights and notify my dumbass when I leave the garage open at night. Plus, I'm no longer locked into one brand's ecosystem and can keep my patchwork hardware setup. Big fan here, strongly recommended. Note: I have no association with any smart home brand/equipment nor home assistant… though I'd consider being associated with HA.
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  > Rather shocked to see this is just now being posted to HN to be honest. Home Assistant frontpages on HN probably every other month, fear not, lol.
melenaos 5y ago
Are there alternatives to homeassistant? I liked the idea until i figured out that i cannot easily create a new integration with my custom adruino automation. The forums didnt had any example and the discord/irc channels couldn't help.
c0wb0yc0d3r 5y ago
Anyone have an idea as to why you wouldn't be able to get the PoE version with their nice looking case? Too big, too hot?
michaelmior 5y ago
One of my favorite uses of Home Assistant so far has been to allow to be a bridge for voice control for cheap Bluetooth lights. I'm running it off a Raspberry Pi and wrote my own code to control the lights based on a reverse engineered description of the protocol I found online. HA makes it easy to connect to Google Assistant and Alexa as well. It's also great being able to set whatever rules for automation I want. Far more powerful than IFTTT or any routines with Google Assistant or Alexa.
djanogo 5y ago
I currently use HA OS for my automation and have bad experience with it and would immediately jump ship if there is any other alternative. I have my lights, thermostats and MOST importantly my pool pump automated with it. Home automation is meant to control devices VERY VERY reliably. The previous pool automation system lasted outdoors for over 30 years, I don't trust HA to last even 3 week without code issues or reboots. Most of the UI decisions don't seem well thought out. LONG RANT 1. Too many moving pieces to get Z-Wave working, they deprecated native Z-Wave support and now use 2 or 3 different JS open source projects whose reliability is still in-flux! (running on node!, NPM is part of your home automation) 2. Z-Wave network randomly goes down, if you enable logging to debug the issue it will only show top 20 or 30 lines, no indication on how to access rest of the log data. After you google for it, you have install addons for SSH and go through bunch of steps to enable it and then google where the logs are getting stored. WHY the heck are logs not downloadable in UI? 3. Forced updates, yes the system will auto update after certain days and restart itself. No way to disable it, the dev for OS actively refuses providing option to disable auto updates. They push updates VERY frequently, multiple times every month, I guess my home automation is that dev's russian roulette? Screw your pool pump if it runs too long or doesn't run or burns itself because update messed up automation task. 4.iOS app makes your system cloud dependent!. I don't think the dev who writes iOS app uses HA himself. The app in your own home, on your own Wifi requires the local computer named connection to have valid SSL certs, it can't save signature of self signed or cloudflare or letsenrypt cert and verify that for future connections. You have to override your router DNS resolution and use public domain name. App has option for internal/external URL's but uses WiFi name to decide which to use, which requires iOS location permission!. BRUH, why don't you try local URL connection in parallel and if it connects, use it?, Why is there no option to ignore local URL cert verification and make app not internet/cloud dependent? 5. Number of "ideas" to name stuff, "Blue Prints" - Auomation template, "Scripts" - Automation without trigger, "Automation", "Devices" - DuckDNS and File Editor are devices, "Entities", "Helpers" - Variables for use in automation, "Scenes" - Goodluck, "Addons", "Integrations" 6. Significantly less reliable than Samsung Smart Home, which ran for 5 years and rebooted less than dozen times (and Samsung notified me about update reboot through email ahead of time). If you can't beat Samsung's software reliability that says something. 7. The left navigation screen is cluttered with irrelevant(for me) hard-coded links. (Energy - for solar panels because everybody got them?, Map - Why?, Media Browser - Why would I want my automation server to deal with video streams - is it reliable home automation or storage for movie files?), 8. Log book and History, why aren't these same thing with different visual options?, it's like 2 people developed them without talking to each other and both had git permission to hard code those links in left nav. 9. History defaults to 3 hours, if you change it and leave that screen it will go back to 3 hours again. Good luck debugging any issue which spans more than 3 hours. 10. iOS app starts auto-tracking iOS device properties without asking if user wants them, these properties flood your logbook and history, can't disable or delete these easily. Dozen of these properties start showing up in every screen and drop down.

561 points by gjvc 5y ago

With the HomeKit and UniFi integration I can finally say “Hey Siri, turn off the Xbox internet” I do have to say, the amount of integrations are quite remarkable. I’ve been running Homeassistant for about two years now. It can only see it getting even better.

reid 5y ago

The UniFi Protect integration is awesome. Turn on outdoor lights on motion, disable loud doorbell ding when the dog is sleeping, change privacy zones, send critical notifications to bypass silent mode on iOS devices when a person is detected while away… really amazing stuff. The HomeKit Controller integration is also neat. All kinds of HomeKit compatible devices can just work with Home Assistant. Honeywell Lyric is the best example: PIR sensors with local push for lighting automation or special alerts when gates open to prevent the dog from escaping the backyard. Edit: More useful things! I have my washer and dryer in a garage. Can’t hear the machines inside. The Z-Wave light switches around my house have status LEDs, so one LED is dedicated to the washer and dryer status based on power draw from the outlet. Works really well. The same status LEDs are shared for all light switches around the house, so it’s a good ambient notification. The Mac app can provide webcam or mic status as a sensor, which turns on a key light when I join video calls and turns on an LED on the light switch outside my office to signal when I’m on a call. I also get a push notification on my computer and a LED light on the light switches when the Roomba is full. It fills up a few times during its typical run while I’m working. I also have the door status (open/closed/locked) from the Lyric as LEDs on the light switches. Very easy to tell if something is unlocked or open at a glance while walking around the house.

paisawalla 5y ago
Amazing write up! Can you provide a link to the switches you use? Also, how does HA know when the dog is asleep?
- function_seven 5y ago
  > Also, how does HA know when the dog is asleep? I have the same question! Until OP answers, I'm going to guess some accelerometer collar that reports when little motion has occurred in 3 minutes?
  - reid 5y ago
    Haha, just a time based schedule and nothing that fancy. But if anyone out there has made an API client for the Fi collar… let me know!
- reid 5y ago
  I use the HomeSeer HS-WD200+ which has programmable LEDs over Z-Wave: https://shop.homeseer.com/products/z-wave-dimmer-switch-archive https://shop.homeseer.com/products/z-wave-dimmer-switch-arch... HomeSeer is coming out with a new model soon so that model is discontinued. But the new one looks better since it doesn’t need a neutral wire! My dog has really consistent daytime nap times. So I can disable the doorbell chime during those times to prevent the barking during a delivery. :)
zrail 5y ago
How do you disable the doorbell chime?
- reid 5y ago
  I have a UniFi Protect G4 Doorbell, so it’s as easy as calling the service unifiprotect.set_doorbell_chime_duration and setting the duration to 0. I still get phone and other notifications when the button is pushed! Just no indoor bell.
  - zrail 5y ago
    Whoa! That's awesome. I didn't know that that existed.
matthew-wegner 5y ago
Bolting on to this comment with some other neat things, as a fellow HASS enthusiast: * Every single light in my house moves from dim/orange -> bright/bluer -> very dim/orange throughout the day (basically like an whole-home f.lux or Night Shift). Sadly still third party, but it's easy to use: Circadian Lighting component will find it * I have "night" modes in all my rooms. This is usually a single bulb in lowest-brightness full red. You can barely see it during the day, but at night it makes bathroom trips a non-blinding affair * I have 6+ speaker zones, on Raspberry Pis mostly. Snapcast runs the audio stream, but turning on/off a room mutes the speakers in it (walking into a room turns on the lights via motion detectors and music continues to follow, which is neat) * I pipe a lot of text-to-speech messages. Some rooms won't play them if the room is off (outer stuff like my garage), but others always do (so I hear them). This is more custom now, and I even duck the playing music stream for the TTS portion. It can take in text, so I do things like have my automation say a bunch of things every morning (my age in days, some web-scraped snippets, etc) * $10 power sensor is enough to know when your washer is finished. Power for awhile -> running state, no power after awhile in running state -> finished. This goes right into the text to speech system * Every room has a 10-button remote (the very, very cheap zap remote kind). Most of the layout is the same--room on, room off, start music (or skip track if playing), stop music, full-bright lights, night lights. This still leaves a few for custom-to-the-room buttons, which I use * Contact sensors on all openings to the house. I let me cats into the backyard during the day. Cat access via any configuration is still open, and sun is below X degrees? Text to speech * Most of my logic is Node-RED (another comment here about that), which gives me a lot of flexibility. I have a global "house" mode, which I can set to guests or party to suppress most of my assumptions that I'm home alone * Example of one of those: My setup knows if I'm using one of my two desk computers. If I am, and house is in "home" (alone) mode, I turn off all the other rooms in the house I could go on--I went pretty deep when I first set up Home Assistant, but that was years ago now. Every now and then I do a major update or add functionality to smooth over something that's been bugging me Once you hit some tipping point of soooo many things available as sensors or services in HASS, adding completely new functionality is a very incremental change
- crooked-v 5y ago
  > walking into a room turns on the lights via motion detectors Do you know if there's anything good in this space yet for detecting presence (not just entry)? There are some spots in my home where I only want the lights on while I'm there, and I haven't found anything yet that can reliably detect that somebody's actually left a space other than Hiome (https://www.hiome.com https://www.hiome.com), and that doesn't work for something not delineated by a doorway.
jkestner 5y ago
Honest question: do you live with other people? I'd ask matthew-wegner as well but I can infer that he doesn't.
- jon-wood 5y ago
  Reading between the lines here, I guess the real question is “does this stuff work when not everyone is technically inclined”. When I first started working in home automation my boss at the time had a saying “if you have to press a button, it’s not home automation”. That single phrase is the core of making automation work with non-technical users. The house should always do the least surprising thing by default, for example turning on lights when you enter a room, but only if it’s dark. Light switches should turn the lights on and off, rather than disable the light automation (looking at you Hue). If you can configure things to that extent, then yeah, it works beautifully. If everyone has to faff around with a mobile app to be able to see where their aiming on a 4am toilet run it’ll be hated with a passion.
  - dagw 5y ago
    The huge stumbling block I ran into when I proposed looking into home automation with my wife was that we had very different ideas of what the "right" thing to do in any given situation was. The combination of lights she wants to have on when in a room are very different from the ones I want to have on, for example. So unless there was face recognition so the room knew who was there, it would never automatically do the right thing. Also anything that involved having to use an app to do anything was a very hard No.
    - teekert 5y ago
      Having 1 button to switch an entire room filled with many light sources between your wife's and your preference is also automation, and exactly at the right level. HA is not going to solve disagreements between people ;). In this case the alternative would be changing many lights manually, right? I mean the face recognition sounds like huge overkill and a pita to get perfect. I have a Hue Tap, which has 4 buttons to program, we set: 1: Normal on, 2: Cosy on, 3: Cooking on (bright in the kitchen) and 4: All off. Near the couch I have an extra Hue switch to dim the couch area even more if desired. That works well for us. Atm this doesn't involve HA but it would if I had any other brands of lights and I would also want other aspects changed (like room temp, i.e. "cosy on" could also raise the thermostat by 1 degree, because it's couch time) with the same Hue Tap buttons. HA is great at having different brands of home automation stuff talk to each other, so you can pick the best of all worlds. I just got a smart thermostat, so my "All-off" Hue Tap button may just as well set the thermostat to "eco", of course only at night because otherwise it may just mean the sun being bright enough was the reason I turned all lights off. Or, maybe when I set my thermostat to "away", HA can signal the rest of the house that the lights and the coffee machine can now be turned off, if any were still left on, I'd do that with a 10 min delay or so because I may still be running around the house to get stuff. HA is perfect for this type of logic. Using a phone for anything is a big No for both of us as well. Home automation for us means having single buttons that do many things at once. We set timers for our garden lighting (dawn=off and sunset=on). And we use some motion sensors. In the bathroom for example, the Hue motion sensor switches the light on, and then HA turns on the fan, through a Sonoff flashed with Tasmota. At night the light also switches on but less bright, everybody loves this automation (more than the previous manual solution), and it's completely in line with Home Assistant's vision for Home Automation: [0]. It's easy to over-do Home Automation, the people you live with are good indicators for when you do so ;) [0]: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/01/19/perfect-home-automation/ https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/01/19/perfect-home-a...
throwoutway 5y ago
"The Z-Wave light switches around my house have status LEDs, so one LED is dedicated to the washer and dryer status based on power draw from the outlet." Could you elaborate on how this works? Which Z-Wave light switches measure the power draw?
- mleo 5y ago
  Typically, there is zwave plug measuring the power draw and sending data to hub. Based on the data, an event is triggered to change an LED on a light switch. HomeSeer has zwave switches with LEDs used for dimmer feedback than can be programmed to show a color. I use the LEDs on one switch to match the state of two exterior door locks. Green/unlocked and Red/locked. I use another LED on the switch to match state of the Litter Robot, automatic cat litter box. Blinks red when full and needs to be emptied.
  - reid 5y ago
    Yup, exactly this! I send custom documented Z-Wave commands to switch the wall switch dimmers LEDs into “status mode” and can then control each one with a custom color and blink. I just send the same commands to all the dimmers so they all show the same thing.
- matthew-wegner 5y ago
  Not OP, but I would guess they don't directly. If it's possible to set those status LEDs arbitrarily, you could use another power-sensing outlet's data, so a different device entirely. This is the magic of Home Assistant in general--it's really just a big bag of sensors (temperature/power/times/etc) and a bag of services (turn on, set to X, change color). You can have sensors from anything trigger a service on anything else.

jvilalta 5y ago

Works great with z-Wave devices on a raspberry pi. I've got a few 433mhz sensors as well, integrated with all rtl-sdr. Also other raspberry pi devices taking to it via mqtt. Fun stuff.

function_seven 5y ago
I bought an RTL-SDR dongle years ago thinking I was going to do all sorts of awesome things with it. After my initial screwing around with it, it landed in a drawer for a few years. Well a couple of months ago I found this[1] and hacked together my own daemon to read my power meter and publish the result via MQTT. I then wrote a couple of sensors in Home Assistant to estimate my upcoming electric bill and the instantaneous power draw of my house. It's been rock solid so far. I've been surprised how much energy I use while sleeping in the middle of the night (something like 350W) [1] https://hackaday.com/2017/12/21/read-home-power-meters-with-rtl-sdr/ https://hackaday.com/2017/12/21/read-home-power-meters-with-...
ThatPlayer 5y ago
How does rtl-sdr compare to say esphome and those cheap 433mhz receivers/transmitters? I remember playing around with those a long time ago, with arduinos and without esphome, with some outlets before wifi outlets became really common.

nickvanw 5y ago

Home Assistant really hits the right spot on the "enthusiast" vs "product" spectrum for me - it's flexible and configurable, but also easy enough to set up that I basically spent almost no time actually making it work. I've got it hooked up to a Z-Wave Hub so that I can control mechanized blinds with HomeKit (where no native integration exists), all the way over to Volvo On Call to report where my car is, how much gas is in the tank, and what the odometer reports. It's got a great community, and isn't too difficult to extend that it's not worth mucking around in the guts when I really want something to work.

nijave 5y ago

HA also has a pretty great community. I've done a couple small changes and have had very positive experiences

candiddevmike 5y ago

Funny, I'm finally throwing in the towel and going back to HASS after trying to go all node-red. I loathe the GUI experience in both, and node-red updates weren't as painless as I read online (better than HASS, but now I'm monitoring a litany of NPM packages). HASS seems like the least bad OSS solution for home automation--it has a lot of inertia but I'm not a fan of the group (company?) making big decisions for the project. I really wish they hadn't dictated the end of YAML/declarative configurations.

tlrobinson 5y ago
Doesn’t node-red complement HASS? I use Home Assistant for simple things and bridge to node-red for more complex automations.
- candiddevmike 5y ago
  It can, a lot of users pushed people to use node-red in place of HASS automations prior to the automation update earlier this year and app daemon. "In theory", node-red can do everything HASS can (possibly missing some integrations, see inertia comment above), but in reality it's quite a bit more complex, especially when you don't have HASS handling all the stateful things. I think the consensus now is to just use HASS, node-red isn't necessary?
  - tlrobinson 5y ago
    Cool, I haven’t kept up to date, I’ll have to check out the latest version.
    - candiddevmike 5y ago
      Best of luck with your upgrades =D
barbazoo 5y ago
> I really wish they hadn't dictated the end of YAML/declarative configurations. Can you elaborate a bit here? I might be on an older version but afaict it's still configured via yml configs.

solarkraft 5y ago

HASS looked nice initially with all its polish, but I gave up on it when I couldn’t figure out how to interface with MQTT from the web interface and it generally just didn’t seem to have many features. I’m going to try OpenHAB next, as I’ve seen relatively complex setups with it.

jrm4 5y ago

Yep. Like many here I appreciate the idea of Home Assistant, but the abstraction on top of abstraction is a little disappointing, and seems like too much for someone who's pretty comfortable shell scripting.. ..so yes, thats kind of what I'm fishing for. Is anyone aware of something a little more shell-oriented?

jonwest 5y ago
Node red is probably closer to what you’re looking for, though it’s JavaScript and not shell, it’ll give you a lot more flexibility.
ornornor 5y ago
Some say nodered, I personally didn’t like it. Appdaemon however is exactly what I wanted. It can do anything python can and there is no drag and drop UI, you write actual code to make things happen.
- dividedbyzero 5y ago
  Is appdaemon standalone or does it require HomeAssistant?
  - ornornor 5y ago
    I’m not sure if you can run it without HASS. I run it with, and I think it would be much harder without.
Denvercoder9 5y ago
You can try pyscript (https://github.com/custom-components/pyscript https://github.com/custom-components/pyscript), which allows you to write automations in plain Python.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

balloob 5y ago

Founder Home Assistant here. Home Assistant is turning 8 years this week. To celebrate we have launched crowdfunding campaign for Home Assistant Amber, a device for both beginners and home automation enthusiasts and the easiest way to get started with Home Assistant. For more info see https://www.crowdsupply.com/nabu-casa/home-assistant-amber https://www.crowdsupply.com/nabu-casa/home-assistant-amber

oaiey 5y ago
Product request: make it simple to create devices. Doing custom entities in the config, i miss those.
- maartenh 5y ago
  I worked around this by creating a button that runs a git commit & push, and an iframe that points to a local running flask app that renders a <pre><code>{{ shell("git status")}}</pre><code>. Not as nice as fully declarative YAML, as this also captures the data files, but at least I have point in time restore.
3np 5y ago
Thanks for posting and your service! Any chance declarative configuration (tank or any other format) will be getting a second chance? Like many here it’s the one way of working with HASS that feels/felt nice.
- maweki 5y ago
  Yeah, I started out orchestrating Home Assistant via Ansible throughout many devices in my home. Now I feel that it would take me days to recreate the configurations that I needed to make with the UI. Deprecating yaml is bad for configuration versioning.
croon 5y ago
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but is there a reason for not having z-wave support on Amber? It wasn't mentioned in the picture and no ctrl+f "wave" hits on the page. I'm very excited about this device. I've been using Smartthings and then IKEAs gateway, but haven't been happy with their performance and features.

waynesonfire 5y ago

anyone creating an insolated network for IoT devices around the house? I'd be interesting in how this can be achieved.

herewulf 5y ago
Yes. VLANs.
- stragies 5y ago
  Which is only the first half of the story for many installations. If something at your place uses SSDP/MDNS/UPNP/etc to communicate/find_each_other, you'll then have to start doing multicast bridging/rewriting and other hacks. And for those, there is no one-recipe-fits-all.
  - franga2000 5y ago
    That's only if you want non-IoT devices (like your phone) to communicate with IoT devices directly, right? If you use a bridge like HA you can simply have it be in both VLANs and control everything through it.
    - stragies 5y ago
      Well, where do you draw the line? Is e.g. the SmartTV an IOT-device, or not? If you want the TV to reach the Internet for some things (e.g. Netflix, Youtube, WhatEv), but also isolate it from your other devices, block ads, yet be able to use the UPNP-mediaservers in your network, and want to use the phone to control it for the things HomeAssistant cannot yet do, then you'll run into some difficulties. They can be worked around, but will need intimate knowledge of protocols and such. Also some of these issues can be worked around by e.g. using HomeAssistant also as UPNP-MediaController, which I haven't gotten around to set up yet. But "true", some categories of smart devices can be nicely sequestered into isolated VLANs.
  - ulzeraj 5y ago
    You can create zeroconf records on standard DNS servers. A few years ago one of my clients which ran a school wanted to give airprint access to his guest network so that parents could print documents into the school office printers. Creating those records is a bit of a PITA and you need to find out how to replicate SRV and TXT values but it works. Here is a good source for this type of configuration: http://www.dns-sd.org/ServerStaticSetup.html http://www.dns-sd.org/ServerStaticSetup.html

holoduke 5y ago

I have a large mix of devices in my house. From WiFi to Zwave to ZigBee. I have about 100 lights, garage doors, various sensors and switches. My configuration in HA is insane. Extremely large, with a lot of custom configs. I would say: unmaintainable. It works almost flawlessly for about 3 years.

01100011 5y ago

Been using HA for over a year now to run my Z-Wave+ network of sensors and switches. It has a rather steep learning curve but should be usable by most software folks. I feel like some of the terminology could be changed to make it more familiar and understandable, but after a few weeks you'll get the hang of it. One warning though: If you're running it off an SD card or other small, solid-state device, your first priority should be turning down the amount of logging. Without reducing log spewage, expect your SD card to die within the first few months of use. I can't complain too much, it's free software and I don't have the resources to contribute much right now, but there are some sharp edges you need to watch out for.

stragies 5y ago

I also use HomeAssistant, and am quite happy with it, but i wish, they would start including the [`remote_homeassistant`](https://github.com/custom-components/remote_homeassistant https://github.com/custom-components/remote_homeassistant) addon. It solves the Usecase, where not all BT(LE) devices in the house are reachable from the main HA, and you need remote "pickups" for their signals, and then want to integrate them back into the "master instance". It also solves a bunch of other problems, like integrating some sensors of the HA of your holiday home into the HA of your main home. The author describes the rationale better here: https://github.com/home-assistant/architecture/issues/246 https://github.com/home-assistant/architecture/issues/246 For some reason, NabuCasa doesn't want to integrate it. Maybe they see it as competing with an own upcoming (cloud?) solution of their own?

splitbrain 5y ago
Instead of running full blown secondary HA instances for that, simply use ESPhome on a ESP32. I used that method to pick up the signals of a couple of bluetooth hygrometers in the cellar: https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2021-08/16-humidity_control_with_home_assistant https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2021-08/16-humidity_control_...
- stragies 5y ago
  But I already have devices running linux-SBCs with "free" bluetooth in most rooms. Why should I need to add ESP32s just for that? And what about the second-home-case I also mentioned? Also, I use remote_homeassistant also for e.g HDMI-CEC-control of devices in other rooms/places, which ESPHome cannot do. (I agree though, ESPhome@ESP32 is a viable solution for some subset of situations)

rcarmo 5y ago

I’ve been trying HA yearly (as my home set up is essentially HomeKit/homebridge with Node-RED bolted on to expose unsupported devices) and it always strikes me as very declarative and finicky to configure, requiring either maintaining a bunch of YAML files or clicking through screen after screen of longish forms. I wonder if there are any plans to make the UX feel simpler and less crowded…

teekert 5y ago
I think that is priority 1 for them, after starting as a yaml first system, you can now even add automation using natural language (never used that though). It will get less complicated for sure. As for the "crowded", I think that's up to you.
edcastro 5y ago
It already is. With the latest changes, almost everything can be done through the UI, hardly ever I touch YAML files.
gregable 5y ago
Ive just gotten started, but what I like so far is based on node-red but only using HA triggers, functions, and HA call service nodes. Essentially I use the trigger blocks to schedule my function calls. The function then ignores the inputs entirely and just inspects the variables from home assistant that it cares about, it then sends this output to any devices I want to toggle. This way, I'm just writing code. This works naturally for me, since it's my day job. But I can use node-red for visually organizing input output tuples, and the debugging data that it shows as things activate. I also add one manual trigger and one debug output node on each end of the function so I can just run it manually if desired. So far it's pretty goos, but I'm missing stuff like writing tests, which means I test my functions by turning on/off devices or something which isn't ideal.

Kosirich 5y ago

I'm looking into 2-3 wireless cameras and some movement trigger sensor for home security. Besides security, we are getting a dog and I want to see what she is doing when we are away. If anyone has good ideas, links to equipment they used, or just want to share their experience with HASS in regards to home security, it will be appreciated. Link to some good project is also great :) (I only played with is and connected few sensors I made with ESP32s)

l72 5y ago
For any camera that provides an rtsp stream, you can use frigate[1], which has some excellent detection algorithms (it differentiate between people, dogs, ...). It also has hooks to integrate with HASS. I use it with a LaView system to monitor my external cameras and get notifications (including push to my iphone) through HASS. [1] https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate
- Kosirich 5y ago
  Thanks!

maweki 5y ago

My main problem with Home assistant is the automation language. It could be very powerful, but isn't. I feel that if there was a way to introduce temporary state and force an expression as the value of a switch it could be great. I would love for something ASP/Datalog based. Having a light that's just on if some expression is True and off if the expression is false is more difficult than it should be. The automations are not goal-based. But maybe in a decade the next project will do it that way.

Denvercoder9 5y ago
You can try pyscript (https://github.com/custom-components/pyscript https://github.com/custom-components/pyscript), which allows you to write automations in plain Python.
- maweki 5y ago
  That's not AI/Logic programming though. Ideally I'd write a boolean formula and the system tries to make it true by adjusting the values it can adjust. Say I want something like the light should be off it is dark and the window is open (bugs), but if the window is closed and it is dark, the light should be on. dark & window.open -> !light dark & !window.open -> light Obviously, it can't close the window. But it can turn the light to make the formulas true. If this were answer-set-based, the system could find multiple ways to make the formulas true (that's why I say goal-based) and act in a truly intelligent manner. Edit: if it could close the window, it had a second way to make the formulas true. That would be nice as well, that the window closes when I turn on the light. Edit 2: note that at daytime the formulas are always true, such that I can adjust the light and window as I like. Edit 3: We could also rewrite this as dark -> (window.open != light) And it is great that we could reason about our rules in that manner.
  - Denvercoder9 5y ago
    That's an interesting idea, and I agree it would make a great addition to HA. From an outside standpoint it doesn't even seem to be that hard to implement, all the pieces are already there, "just" needs some glue.

35mm 5y ago

Can anyone recommend what the best way is for me to set up a simple temperature sensor connected to Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi?

Semaphor 5y ago
Best is hard to say. Depends on what you want. I have 4 Temperature sensors (2 Aqara temp & humidity sensors, and 2 Hue motions sensors that have temperature sensing included) connected via Zigbee (using Deconz) to my HA on the PI. No issues at all.
- 35mm 5y ago
  Sounds like a great solution. What are you using in terms of hardware to get Zigbee on your Pi?
  - Semaphor 5y ago
    The Conbee II (USB Stick)

roland35 5y ago

I believe things like Home Assistant are the future of IoT. There are always going to be thousands of random devices and sensors - many of which may become obsolete or unsupported by their manufacturer. A centralized intelligent and well-maintained hub which can communicate with many different things really helps keep everything glued together and working long term.

alex3305 5y ago

Nice to see HA getting some love on HN. A colleague recommended it to me about 3 years ago as an alternative to Domoticz. I've migrated back than and haven't looked back since. I consider myself a real Home Assistant enthousiast. I've contributed some small amounts to the project, created and maintain my own add-ons and love to share my configuration with others. Although most of the things currently just work, especially with the (migrated) UI integrations. Some things still feel very unfinished, like blueprints. Which was a terrific idea, but maintaining and keeping those up to date is an absolute nightmare and you will have to that yourself [1]. Same with battery powered devices. When they work, it's all great, but having to watch their battery level is just a hassle. You can create your own automation to do that for you, but it seems unnecessary. For me the community also sometimes feels very hostile. For instance, you can have a Portainer add-on, but installing other Docker images makes your system 'unsupported'. Same with some blacklisted images [2], which break Home Assistant Supervisor. Or when the maintainer of one of the add-ons completely ignores a breaking issue after a day [3]. 1. https://community.home-assistant.io/t/reload-automations-automatically-when-a-blueprint-is-changed/253977 https://community.home-assistant.io/t/reload-automations-aut... 2. https://github.com/home-assistant/supervisor/blob/main/supervisor/resolution/evaluations/container.py#L15-L18 https://github.com/home-assistant/supervisor/blob/main/super... 3. https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-adguard-home/issues/195 https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-adguard-home/issues/1...

Denvercoder9 5y ago
If you want to do anything more than just run Home Assistant with the system it's on, I recommend ditching their whole OS and Supervisor, and just running HA Core in a virtualenv. The developers have shown that they're very opinionated about how their software should be used, and they're hostile to everything that falls outside of that. That makes their OS totally unusable as a general-purpose solution. Besides, it's an OS that doesn't get regular security updates, so that alone should disqualify it from serious use.
- Gatsky 5y ago
  Well their approach allows them to deliver software that works without being inundated by issues related to someone’s peculiar set up. I don’t think ‘hostile’ is a very fair assessment.

JustinAiken 5y ago

I used to use this quite heavily, but about a year ago the move away from YAML made it too hard to keep a declarative config that can be checked into source control... Ended up giving up and just have a dumb home now.

afavour 5y ago

I am very grateful for Home Assistant but I’m in a weird spot with my setup now. I’m running an old version (honestly can’t remember which) in a Docker container and when I tried to upgrade all my integrations stopped working. So I downgraded again and have been sat there ever since. Every now and then it stops responding and I restart the container. There’s a tricky balance between a dumb appliance that doesn’t do what you want and a smart one that requires too much babysitting, and for me HA is just too far towards the latter. Not enough that I’m going to replace it tomorrow but I’ve been looking at Hubitat lately: https://hubitat.com/ https://hubitat.com/ More and more I’m liking the idea of a box that runs itself more than HA does.

spacemanmatt 5y ago
Every HA I setup and invested time in cratered beyond repair within a few months. I gave up due to the Discord experience.
dzikimarian 5y ago
Try upgrading version by version, not directly to the newest. I've dockerized instance I upgrade very regularly for over a year, and it had zero issues.

meteo-jeff 5y ago

Hi balloob! I was showing my non-commercial weather API project [0] to HN 2 days ago. Another HN member was already pointing out your project. If you are interested, we could have a look at integrating weather data without the need of your users to sign up for API plans with their personal data. [0] https://open-meteo.com https://open-meteo.com

MrDunham 5y ago

I just started switching to Home Assistant and LOVE it. Rather shocked to see this is just now being posted to HN to be honest. Up until the switch I’ve had a patchwork system consisting of Alexa, Smart Life (app), Smart Things, and a lot of digital duct tape. Having both 1) a central "command center" and 2) Zigbee/Z-Wave capabilities (requires a dongle) suddenly opens up so much more opportunities than WiFi components alone. EG I've attached door sensors to my garage doors to trigger lights and notify my dumbass when I leave the garage open at night. Plus, I'm no longer locked into one brand's ecosystem and can keep my patchwork hardware setup. Big fan here, strongly recommended. Note: I have no association with any smart home brand/equipment nor home assistant… though I'd consider being associated with HA.

ocdtrekkie 5y ago
> Rather shocked to see this is just now being posted to HN to be honest. Home Assistant frontpages on HN probably every other month, fear not, lol.

melenaos 5y ago

Are there alternatives to homeassistant? I liked the idea until i figured out that i cannot easily create a new integration with my custom adruino automation. The forums didnt had any example and the discord/irc channels couldn't help.

c0wb0yc0d3r 5y ago

Anyone have an idea as to why you wouldn't be able to get the PoE version with their nice looking case? Too big, too hot?

michaelmior 5y ago

One of my favorite uses of Home Assistant so far has been to allow to be a bridge for voice control for cheap Bluetooth lights. I'm running it off a Raspberry Pi and wrote my own code to control the lights based on a reverse engineered description of the protocol I found online. HA makes it easy to connect to Google Assistant and Alexa as well. It's also great being able to set whatever rules for automation I want. Far more powerful than IFTTT or any routines with Google Assistant or Alexa.

djanogo 5y ago

I currently use HA OS for my automation and have bad experience with it and would immediately jump ship if there is any other alternative. I have my lights, thermostats and MOST importantly my pool pump automated with it. Home automation is meant to control devices VERY VERY reliably. The previous pool automation system lasted outdoors for over 30 years, I don't trust HA to last even 3 week without code issues or reboots. Most of the UI decisions don't seem well thought out. LONG RANT 1. Too many moving pieces to get Z-Wave working, they deprecated native Z-Wave support and now use 2 or 3 different JS open source projects whose reliability is still in-flux! (running on node!, NPM is part of your home automation) 2. Z-Wave network randomly goes down, if you enable logging to debug the issue it will only show top 20 or 30 lines, no indication on how to access rest of the log data. After you google for it, you have install addons for SSH and go through bunch of steps to enable it and then google where the logs are getting stored. WHY the heck are logs not downloadable in UI? 3. Forced updates, yes the system will auto update after certain days and restart itself. No way to disable it, the dev for OS actively refuses providing option to disable auto updates. They push updates VERY frequently, multiple times every month, I guess my home automation is that dev's russian roulette? Screw your pool pump if it runs too long or doesn't run or burns itself because update messed up automation task. 4.iOS app makes your system cloud dependent!. I don't think the dev who writes iOS app uses HA himself. The app in your own home, on your own Wifi requires the local computer named connection to have valid SSL certs, it can't save signature of self signed or cloudflare or letsenrypt cert and verify that for future connections. You have to override your router DNS resolution and use public domain name. App has option for internal/external URL's but uses WiFi name to decide which to use, which requires iOS location permission!. BRUH, why don't you try local URL connection in parallel and if it connects, use it?, Why is there no option to ignore local URL cert verification and make app not internet/cloud dependent? 5. Number of "ideas" to name stuff, "Blue Prints" - Auomation template, "Scripts" - Automation without trigger, "Automation", "Devices" - DuckDNS and File Editor are devices, "Entities", "Helpers" - Variables for use in automation, "Scenes" - Goodluck, "Addons", "Integrations" 6. Significantly less reliable than Samsung Smart Home, which ran for 5 years and rebooted less than dozen times (and Samsung notified me about update reboot through email ahead of time). If you can't beat Samsung's software reliability that says something. 7. The left navigation screen is cluttered with irrelevant(for me) hard-coded links. (Energy - for solar panels because everybody got them?, Map - Why?, Media Browser - Why would I want my automation server to deal with video streams - is it reliable home automation or storage for movie files?), 8. Log book and History, why aren't these same thing with different visual options?, it's like 2 people developed them without talking to each other and both had git permission to hard code those links in left nav. 9. History defaults to 3 hours, if you change it and leave that screen it will go back to 3 hours again. Good luck debugging any issue which spans more than 3 hours. 10. iOS app starts auto-tracking iOS device properties without asking if user wants them, these properties flood your logbook and history, can't disable or delete these easily. Dozen of these properties start showing up in every screen and drop down.