59 ms·

My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

357 points by jroovers 5y ago

0ld 5y ago
HA is nice, and I've been running it on RPi for a few years, mainly to make my air purifiers work in the way I want, plus some light switches and a motion detector The only annoying thing are random breaking changes which make me overhaul my configs a couple of times per year
criddell 5y ago
When your power goes out for a few minutes, what state does everything go into when it resumes?
- jaywalk 5y ago
  For things like smart bulbs, that's usually set on the device itself. For a smart switch, it's usually just going to be off. However, with HA you could easily create an automation to set everything how you want it when the power comes back on. It could even be conditional based on the time of day or whatever else you want to consider.
- Tyr42 5y ago
  Hm, rebooting the pi doesn't change any state on its own. Lights which are ZigBee or wifi might turn on when power is restored, and most of my automations are of the form "when motion sensor state changes to occupied: turn on light. When motion sensor state is vacant for X minutes, turn off the lights", so they might stay on until you walk by the motion sensor, at which point they fix themselves. If you have smart switches, I think they would be off after a power outage.
casenjo 5y ago
I really enjoyed reading this, thanks for posting. I've been struggling to find a more sustainable solution on my end for all the sensors and buttons I have set up. Anecdotally I feel their battery life tends to be shorter based on whether they're in busy locations or not. I've ordered the CR2477 and CR2450 batteries they use in bigger quantities but I'd much rather be able to recharge them instead. Have you ever found devices of this type that allow them to be recharged?
- tylergetsay 5y ago
  I have been using ZWave motion sensors that have USB input so no battery required, for buttons I have replaced a lot of wall switches with Tasmota switches that are programmed for single/double/hold click actions on multiple buttons. This can be great on multi gang switches where I have one button control the relays in all three switches, leaving two buttons open.
- andylynch 5y ago
  Have a look online for LIR2450s. They are rechargeable button cells.
thebean11 5y ago
Whoa, I didn't realize automatic radiator valves existed. Always feel guilty about using a space heater because the radiator gets way to hot.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  The valves/thermostats in the article is actually kinda big. More modern ones are not much larger than the regular thermostats. It might be a question about which models can be integrated into Home Assistant.
  - vetinari 5y ago
    > It might be a question about which models can be integrated into Home Assistant. There are also multiple ways (zha vs zigbee2mqtt); and the given valve may support one, but not the other.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    You can also get them that look exactly like a regular one, just with a mains cable coming out too - add any HA-supported relay (or interface to a relay). I've been meaning to do that for some time; I'd prefer that to integrated temperature sensing & controls on every radiator personally.
tristanperry 5y ago
Great article, thanks for posting. I've been on a smart home journey myself, but I'm still currently relying on Alexa for most integration and a Hue Bridge. It works well for the 30-40 devices I currently have. I totally agree that Home Assistant is probably the way forward for many power users, but it doesn't quite feel beginner-friendly enough yet (although the HA devs do seem to be making some great improvements in this area). I'm still undecided on Matter and Thread. Both are naturally great technologies, but I can't see Google/Nest opening up to Amazon/Ring and vice versa. Not in any meaningful way, at least. My hunch is that Matter will help smaller smart home companies, but not make much difference for the pre-existing 'walled gardens' that the market has. I hope that I'm wrong though. (Disclaimer: I blog and do YouTube videos as Smart Home Point, but I mainly cover consumer friendly products - and hence I haven't delved into Home Assistant too much)
- mmerickel 5y ago
  The promise of thread versus reality I feel will be a big problem - I'd love to be wrong though. I'm on the outside of things (haven't used thread, only read about it... use zigbee a lot though). But the way I understand it is that once you join a device to a particular bridge you will still need to use that bridge's ecosystem to communicate - even though the device has its own IP address. For example, when a thread device joins to homekit and establishes an encrypted handshake, it's not like I'll be able to use that device's IP address to talk to it. It's not going to trust me - only homekit. But at least it'll be able to talk to any homekit bridge on the network and avoid a SPOF if I unplug one of my homepod minis.
- snapetom 5y ago
  It's not even power user friendly. Things were so fragile, I eventually created Ansible playbooks to maintain my setup. I couldn't trust a simple point upgrade wouldn't break anything, so I had to easily replay steps to revert. If you have to set up a whole devops infrastructure to maintain one simple home project, there's something wrong.
KennyBlanken 5y ago
> On caveat is that I have started running into some reliability issues (occasional device unavailability) once I exceeded 50 or so devices. This seems to be common for Zigbee networks, It's patently ridiculous that you could add a lightbulb to your network and be unable to get in your front door the next day because now you have too many devices. Even more so when you consider that the standard is twenty years old and should be extremely mature. This is the problem with all this home automation stuff...all of them, Zigbee, Zwave, wifi - seem to crap out as soon as you have a decent number of devices. WiFi seems the least robust for high device count, but why haven't Zwave and Zigbee figured out how to get their systems to work for a large number of devices, a decade-ish into things? Security is also something of a joke for both zigbee and z-wave. > I'm excited about the upcoming Matter and Thread standards which are likely to replace/augment Zigbee (and Z-wave) as true interoperable home automation connectivity standards. Interoperable, but you'll be forced by vendors to use someone's online services. There is no way Matter and Thread will be designed in such a way that you will have freedom from paying somebody every month and give data that will eventually make its way to marketers. Edit: the author's upstairs window automation devices are ludicrously dangerous from a fire safety standpoint as there appears to be no easy way to open them if the device breaks or loses power. Folks, do not remove manual control from windows. It's not just dangerous, it's likely illegal. Windows and doors MUST be operable, easily, by one hand.
- secabeen 5y ago
  > It's patently ridiculous that you could add a lightbulb to your network and be unable to get in your front door the next day because now you have too many devices. I am not aware of any keypad zigbee or z-wave door lock that depends on that network to unlock in standard config. Yes, you could set it up that way, to unlock based on presence detection, etc, but that's on you. The standard setup is a local code list on the lock, with updates and status reported to home automation to enable integration. Most locks also have a standard key backup as well, so you're doubly protected.
  - vetinari 5y ago
    Similarly with radiator valves; they operate locally. You program them with a mode (normal/off/away) and schedule (given temp at given time) upfront, and then they maintain the required temperature.
FanaHOVA 5y ago
I tried to build a company around this in ~2014, we built our own boards and everything, and had a fork with HASS that had more defaults based on our hardware. Too bad it didn't quite work out as a business. The 3D designs for the hardware cases are still on GitHub: https://github.com/Smart-Torvy/3D-Objects https://github.com/Smart-Torvy/3D-Objects
- gh02t 5y ago
  Ubiquiti also briefly employed the founder of Home Assistant in 2018 and paid him specifically to work on it. People speculated that they were considering releasing some sort of product built on HA, but it never materialized. It's maybe for the better from a user/community POV, but I'm surprised there hasn't been more commercial interest. HA in its current form is still probably a bit too technical for mass market, but I would think a company could easily spruce it up a bit and instantly have a fairly strong software ecosystem and a lot of good will as long as they handled it right.
fuzzieozzie 5y ago
I imagine readers here would want local control for home automation. Take a look at www.hubitat.com
- JshWright 5y ago
  The setup described in the article is local as well.
- detaro 5y ago
  The article describes a fully local setup, with much more open components...
- afavour 5y ago
  I really want hubitat to succeed but to me it feels like it’s in a tricky place: less open/customisable than HA but not user-friendly enough to be used by total beginners. Hopefully they get the second half of that sorted out and can carve out a niche.
turtlebits 5y ago
Not sure if I'm just getting older, but the less things/complications in my home, the more peace of mind I have. Been watching the youtube LTT channel on his smart home and I feel all the things going on would drive me crazy. This doesn't apply only to tech, but even for my next house (Looking into passive homes, least possible HVAC footprint, floorplan for minimal plumbing/electrical).
- jonathankoren 5y ago
  I get the geeky joy of monitoring and possibly automatically controlling things, but the added benefit feels marginal at best for a home. It’s less than marginal unless you go big into the automation. The other thing that jades me to automation is that in my experience with technology, you either get a easy to use, but limited, remotely brickable, subscriptionware, or you have to roll your own, and end up debugging your bathtub. Neither is very appealing.
- amphitheatre 5y ago
  I struggle with this too. Whilst there is a lot of opportunities for learning and fun when setting these systems up, you soon forget how things intermingle and monitoring, upgrading, or debugging things becomes a chore. Systems like this balloon in complexity with all of the different server hardware, IoT standards, subnets, cables, etc. For the average user, things that aren't easy or set-and-forget are probably too much. That sense of overwhelm is my personal experience, at least.
- iamjackg 5y ago
  For me, a lot of that came down to making sure every automation I add is usable with the least amount of mental effort. For the longest time I didn't automate much at all and often questioned whether I needed all this or not, then we had a baby. Now we have a button in his nursery that will dim the lights, start playing white noise on a Google Home speaker, mark the start of a new nap on our Babybuddy instance, then turn off the lights after 30 seconds. When I press it again, it turns off the noise and stops the sleep tracking. If we didn't have Home Assistant we'd have to do all these things manually multiple times a day. Instead it just takes a single button press. It's a small example, but things like this will keep popping up, and I'm looking forward to making them easier.
vladgur 5y ago
I dont think its clear from the blog, but HomeAssistant Blue and/or Yellow are nice, but not required to get going with HA. If you get your hands on RPI 3 or 4, an SSD card and a supported Zigbee/ZWave card, you should be good to go. Installation is well documented. But overall customization is in fact a major time sink regardless of hardware you use
- nomel 5y ago
  > But overall customization is in fact a major time sink I think that depends on what you're trying to accomplish, since "customization" doesn't really have a limit. If it's just exposing your smart devices so you can access them with your iPhone, it's easy. If it's having your lights turn to 5% brightness if you enter the kitchen at 3am, to get some milk, but then slowly ramp up the brightness to 15% when you linger around to make pancakes, then sure. You'll need to write an automation for that. Having my HomePod remind me that my car charger isn't plugged in at 8:30pm required an automation that involved selecting things from some dropdown boxes.
idatum 5y ago
Good article that gets into the details of leveraging Home Assistant (HA) to glue together various types of sensors and switches, etc. I think categorizing HA users into 2 groups of either technical or non-technical is too coarse. You have to add another dimension that captures how much a user is willing to automate their home (making it "smart"). I'm technical, but my goal is to make things as seamless as possible. For example, my Z-Wave wall switches are the type that allow the original switch to override what the remote command sent. These in-wall Z-Wave switches are embedded in the switch box and the existing switch is then low voltage. The same for my thermostat. Any household member can override locally. I detect the change and make sure I hold that new value over any automations that run that day. In the end, my HA setup is pretty minimal with no HA add-ons and a few integrations, such as Z-WaveJS2MQTT and MQTT being the most used. This way I rarely hit any issues upgrading HA.
- koheripbal 5y ago
  What is still stopping me from jumping into this is the cost of each individual smart device. They are just too expensive for what they are replacing.
spaetzleesser 5y ago
Nice! If I understand correctly this is fully local and doesn't depend on cloud stuff? After a few failures I don't want anything that relies on somebody's buggy cloud systems.
- nomel 5y ago
  It's all local unless you want to pay for the cloud service, which just gives you safe remote access to your local home assistant instance, and gives some services like a nice (cloud based) text to speech engine. Neither are required. You can happily open up DMZ and use whatever TTS engine, yourself.
  - boring_twenties 5y ago
    Do you have any suggestions for a local TTS engine to use with HA? I have HA up and running but have only used its web interface so far.
    - nomel 5y ago
      No, but I was looking at ha-rhvoice before I went with Nabu Casa (to support the devs). The readily available local TTS voices will, obviously, not sound as good.
- llamataboot 5y ago
  It also depends on what /you/ setup - eg, you can certainly control some things locally and some things only through the cloud if you are using the manufacturers hub, but most things you can also buy a zwave stick and/or a zigbee stick and connect to your devices directly. Some are a perpetual cat and mouse game though for the companies that simply must snoop your data as part of their biz model or have another reason to be terrified of you directly talking to their things. And like any smart thing you put in your house, some things you need to block at the DNS level if they are hardwired to phone home constantly. But yes, Home Assistant and choosing the right things makes it possible to keep everything internal for sure
buro9 5y ago
When you sell a house like this... what do you leave behind and what do you take? This has increasingly been on my mind. I've no desire to sell soon, but there's a Nest doorbell that is wired in, so it stays. A Nest thermostat, which I could remove but when I got the boiler I chose to not have the control panel extra with timer as I knew I had Nest. Then the lighting, the motion sensors... should I take the few thousand GBP worth of Hue bulbs? That feels like a yes, just put in the cheapest bulbs. And so it begins... some things stay, some things go, and the tooling is the hardest. This person has touch screen control panels and Home Assistant. Even if you left it behind, you'd need to transfer the knowledge around it too. But remove it, and the house goes beyond dumb in many ways.
- tremon 5y ago
  Speaking as a prospective buyer, I'd expect the seller to remove any and all cloud-connected devices before selling. To the point where I will explicitly list them as deductions in my offer.
  - crazystar 5y ago
    How are you able to make such demands given the current market? Every single house on the market has atleast 4 offers...atleast here in SoCal.
- denimnerd42 5y ago
  you wouldn't be required to perform KT. in Texas anything attached stays so even lightbulbs but you can also exclude anything explicitly.
  - mrweasel 5y ago
    I believe one of the hosts on the Coder Radio podcast moved into a home with some home automation stuff (light, heating and locks), but wasn't informed about the configuration or how to operate it. He described it as moving into a haunted house.
    - 5y ago
pixelbreaker 5y ago
no thanks. I like switches and using my body. This kind of tech as progress is a fallacy.
- Kiro 5y ago
  Good for you. I personally wish I could control everything with my mind.
- nmcfarl 5y ago
  I'm not sure. I love my house, but the lights are insane with a switch under every overhead light, and using smart switches to control them has been so very useful. Generally I control all the lights in a room with 1 smart switch so I don't have to walk across the room to turn on all the lights in the room My bedroom came with 3 switches in 2 panels across the room from each other, the kids room 2 in 2 locations, bathroom 4 in 1, kitchen 4 in 3, living room 6 in 2, dinning room 2 in 2. Detailed example: It takes 4 light switches in 3 locations to turn on my kitchen lights: • 1 panel - 3 sides of the kitchen ceiling lights switch, kitchen recessed lights switch • separate panel 4 feet away on the other side of a counter - breakfast bar (4th side) ceiling light switch. • final panel 10 feet to the right, down the breakfast bar counter to turn on the recessed breakfast bar lights. Is it too much to ask that you circumnavigate the kitchen every morning to turn on the lights to make coffee? No, the previous owners did it every day for 20 some odd years. But do I want to do it? No. And I certainly think it's progress that I can choose not to.
  - grvdrm 5y ago
    I'm right there with you. I own a relatively new house (8 years old) and it has SO many switches associated with various lights. Easy to use the switches as they exist, sure. But some simple automations make it easy to flip things on/off without walking all over the house to find the right switch. Also, some of us have roommates that don't obey the rules. My 3-year old DOES NOT turn on the lights when she walks downstairs on her own in the morning. Perfect opportunity for a simple Z-Wave motion senor + switch automation,. Otherwise, I agree with the general sentiment to keep it simple. I use Z-Wave switches for lights, a Z-Wave lock for one of my doors, and run HA on a RPi4. Haven't spent an insane amount of time building custom scripts because I want to do other things. And those switches still work without HA too. (totally see the benefits of Shelly, but hard to stuff in some electrical boxes like those in my house)
summari 5y ago
dmatos 5y ago
Home Assistant is also quite useful in a Company Office / Small Business. There's daily "added value" on repetitive tasks and simple automations that provide immediate productivity gains. It's also a great platform to implement weird "physical workflows" that aren't common in household scenarios.
sanguy 5y ago
Home Assistant is great, but it will face huge hurdles as the founder tries to cash in on the popularity. It's already underway. 1) Nabu Casa was founded with a claim that "it will all be transparent and reported" as to income, etc, etc. 2) Then the "private" components happened only for Nabu Casa - like the cloud connection stuff. 3) A few years later when pointed out nothing was transparent yet the response was "We will not share this information." 3) Nabu Casa then started to hire up the more active community developers and set off on their own closed vision. 4) NC has bought up many of the associated pieces - the companion apps, the ESP32 stuff, etc, etc. 5) NC has hired many of the community developers and now quite some secrecy around the roadmaps and decisions. 6) You dare not question decisions or you get thrown off the forums and Discord channels for life. Many cases of this happening. They have a community manager who is particularly sensitive over any perceived negative comment and prone to going off to which the founder needs to step in and smooth the emotions. Not sure why they've not fired him after strike 4 or 5. The end result is that Home Assistant is far less open than it was. It is going the same path pFsense did under the ownership of Netgate. The challenge is many people invested into it and when it implodes it won't be pretty. I am hopeful someone forks it with a better community engagement model. (I've been a user since the start, and a contributor in the early days. Left the community due to my work being monetized by NC without my consent.)
- robbiet480 5y ago
  Hello, I’m the original creator of the Home Assistant iOS Companion App. Just wanted to clear up that Nabu Casa took over the iOS and Android apps purely because of requirements by Apple and Google around a corporation being the only entity that can have a development team. At no time did Nabu Casa pay any money to me or anyone else to acquire the apps. They were transferred to Nabu Casa purely for convenience, since Home Assistant Inc doesn’t exist.
  - stingraycharles 5y ago
    Do I understand correctly that you just gave the iOS app out of your hands, for Nabu Casa to maintain? Or is it solely a legal structure? I find it interesting if it were the former, I personally would have considered monetizing it myself, but then again, it’s probably not a coincidence I haven’t founded any opensource projects as impactful as Home Assistant. :)
llamataboot 5y ago
I have slowly gone all in on Home Assistant over the past 5 years and I think it is an amazing community, and amazing open-source success story, and fantastic software. I will say that programming your house yourself can be fun (you can literally do anything) but you also have to then keep up with all the technical debt and changes over time. I still don't think it's a great choice for non technically minded folks that would find that level of tinkering and fixing overwhelming - but I must say that Home Assistant is moving positively in that direction by really focusing on UX - and having a giant community keeping integrations updated, even unofficial reverse-engineered ones, is great.
- tra3 5y ago
  What devices are you using with HA? I find that's the biggest hurdle for me. There are so many hurdles and the quality is unknown.
reacharavindh 5y ago
May be my day job of handling servers and services at scale makes me say this… I’d like my home, appliances and equipment to be dumb and simple. A basic level of automation by making all power switches controllable from a central private endpoint would be nice, but hooking that up to a non self-hosted service is a big No for me. I’m about to buy a home. It will be fun to find that simplicity in automation for myself.
- nomel 5y ago
  > making all power switches controllable from a central private endpoint would be nice This is what Zigbee and Z-Wave are for, and I would say one one of the main points of using home assistant: to keep it all local. The Nabu Casa stuff just allows you to access your required local home assistant setup (RPi, VM, whatever) without having to mess with DMZ to allow direct connections. Self hosted in the whole point of it all. If you buy smart devices that require cloud connections, then home assistant can also work with many of those, but it ends up being a much worse experience when turning your lightbulb on requires sending an http request halfway around the world and back.
- crooked-v 5y ago
  I'd personally recommend the Lutron Caseta line. They use a proprietary RF system so if you want full automation or phone-based control you need their hub, but even without one you can just use them as normal switches, pair switches and remotes, pair switches with motion sensors, etc just as built-in behavior. They've also covered basic usability issues that a lot of other smart switches overlook, like having a hard disconnect on every switch, so you don't need to go to the breaker box just to change a lightbulb.
  - thfuran 5y ago
    Why would I need to go to the breaker to change a lightbulb?
    - tass 5y ago
      Not necessarily a smart switch thing, but dimmers don’t break the circuit when off. If you remove a bulb, it will hurt if you put your finger in the socket. There’s usually a secondary way to break the circuit - pull out a bit of plastic, snap the switch plate away from the wall… something. All mine of different brands have some way to do it.
empiricus 5y ago
I use Home Assistant in my new house, and it kind of works. But the amount of effort needed to control a cheap wifi on/off plug did not impress me positively. It is basically one bit of information, but it goes through who knows how many layers of software and configurations. Took me a couple of hours to make it work.. I also use the standard thermostat component, which is basic beyond belief. The kind of control that is implemented in the cheapest hw thermostat you can buy. I mean, this is pure software, with 20 more lines of code you could implement a pid controller or smth. I looked into developing my own component, but the documentation for HA development also seems lacking at a quick look.
- alex3305 5y ago
  I am using Home Assistant for my home automation for about 4 years now, before just lurking. For me Home Assistant is about quantity, not quality. Look at the massive amount of Integrations, currently sitting at almost 2000 [1]. Which is really impressive, but not even half of them are apparently used [2]? Another example of this was when Blueprints were introduced [3]. I really, really love the idea of having templated automations, and I even introduced them into my setup. But sharing Blueprints is clunky, not mentioning updating Blueprints, which is borderline impossible from UI. Or at least, I haven't figured it out yet. I still wouldn't recommend Home Assistant to a non-technical person, as some aspects are really hard to work out. Even if you're *Ops person. 1. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/ https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/ 2. https://analytics.home-assistant.io/#integrations https://analytics.home-assistant.io/#integrations 3. https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/12/13/release-202012/#blueprints https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/12/13/release-202012...
- nouveaux 5y ago
  Home Assistant is the Linux Desktop of consumer applications. Tons of power under the hood and it is not designed with the end user in mind. Home Assistant has accomplished something literally no one else has, including Google, Amazon and Apple. Home Assistant has the best integration across the most number of devices. It is also extremely reliable and you can run it without the cloud. If you want easy to install, I would suggest using Alexa with Alexa compatible devices. Amazon has really made Home Automation easy. I agree that Home Assistant documentation is really bad. If you are technical and want to stick it out with Home Assistant, there are Python bridges you can use to write your own custom code.
01100011 5y ago
As a SWE I was initially skeptical about using software to control more aspects of my environment but I finally gave in and gave HA a shot. It took some work but I managed to cobble together a system using a RPI and ZWave which seemed to work reliably. I slowly added more features like HVAC and controlling my aquarium top-off pump. Everything worked reliably until I went on vacation and the switch controlling the aquarium top-off pump inexplicably fell off the network. I watched the water level slowly drop from 400 miles away over my webcam feed with no way to fix it. Moral of the story is beware of automation and always consider your failure cases. Building up these sorts of systems is fun and rewarding initially but can become a time sink and a liability if you're not careful.
- jmathai 5y ago
  I had HA set up for a number of things at my house but it took too much babysitting for me. I found it fun as a hobby project. But when we did a large remodel last year I intentionally decided not to have smart anythings. This includes Z-Wave, Zigbee, Alexa, Google Home, Sonos wireless speakers, etc. Instead, I went the opposite direction. Wired everything including speakers. It was much more enjoyable figuring out and planning how to wire and install Sonance Invisible Series speakers behind drywall, pick the location for a Samsung Frame TV and bite the bullet to get a panel ready fridge. In the end, I found I enjoy form over function and all electronic devices and appliances are either not present or completely hidden.
  - 01100011 5y ago
    Yeah, the whole reason I got into this was to monitor my garage door and now I'm considering just going back to a wire and an LED. I can just hook up a RPi or ESP32 to the wire if I want to send myself text messages.
mdoms 5y ago
I simply flick a switch to turn on lights. Opening shades is no problem for me, a physically fit human.
- disqard 5y ago
  A non-technology solution? In this forum? How dare you, good sir? Seriously, I've been going as back-to-basics with my newer purchases as possible -- I recently purchased a used sewing machine that has gears made of metal, has no LCD/screen or computer firmware, and only relies on electricity to run its motor.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  How do you flick that switch when you're on vacation and want your home to appear occupied?
  - yurishimo 5y ago
    You joke, but we both know that automatic lamp timers have existed for decades. I like home automation stuff as much as the next person but this is a disingenuous argument.
    - jaywalk 5y ago
      With an automatic lamp timer, you lose the ability to (easily) control the lamp manually. Also, what about all of the lights that aren't lamps? If all you've got are lamps and you're willing to be a slave to the timer, then by all means just use the timer. But once it gets just a little bit more complicated, the timer isn't so great. I've got an "evening" scene that turns on 10 or so different lights. I will trigger it manually when I'm home and feel it's time, or if my system is in vacation mode it will trigger based on the sunset time. I don't have to worry about accidentally having left a switch off or anything like that. You cannot even begin the replicate this with an automatic lamp timer.
    - boring_twenties 5y ago
      I went from those to a basic HomeAssistant setup, and really enjoy the fact that my light timers can be "30 minutes before sunset" instead of a fixed time that needs to be adjusted throughout the year. On the other hand, the fact that everything stops working if wifi goes down is a real bummer. I can't for the life of me understand why these "smart" plugs don't just use powerline ethernet. I guess I should just be thankful that their API could be reverse engineered.
Havoc 5y ago
You can sidestep the cloud stuff if you've got a static IP and wireguard.
- vladgur 5y ago
  I have so far failed at setting up wireguard in my home, much less making it work with HASS. Can you share some pointers?
  - anderspitman 5y ago
    There are simpler tunneling solutions: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
  - jonwest 5y ago
    If you’re using Docker, the wg-easy project made it pretty easy. Otherwise I’d recommend PiVPN which worked well also with minimal setup. Setting WireGuard up from scratch was a failed endeavor multiple times for me but both of those mentioned projects made it significantly easier.
coreyp_1 5y ago
I want SO BADLY to convert my switches to smart switches, but it feels impossible to find what i need. Good luck searching on Amazon, too. Search for Zigbee, and it will return page after page of zwave, proprietary, and other listings. It's impossible to wade through. I've tried and given up multiple times. This is what i need that is evidently so difficult to find: 1. Zigbee 2. 3-way 3. Dimmable 4. Beige (almond?) Color Any ideas?
- 0ld 5y ago
  try searching zigbee2mqtt supported devices: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/#s=switch https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/#s=switch
- benley 5y ago
  I'd recommend checking out some of the "smart relay" devices that let you reuse your existing light switches. e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Compatible-SmartThings-Philips-ZBBridge-Required/dp/B08R79686G https://www.amazon.com/Compatible-SmartThings-Philips-ZBBrid... - this one says "2 way" but I'm pretty sure you can wire it up with two physical lightswitches to get the 3-way behavior that you're after. The wiring diagram on the amazon product page suggests as much. I've personally used this Aeotec z-wave variant and it has worked well for me: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XC4CH98 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XC4CH98
  - jonwest 5y ago
    For multi-way switches what I’ve usually done is wire one switch to the actual load (light) and a relay, and the other switches I pass the wire through as though the switch isn’t connected to the load and then use MQTT to provide the appropriate action. Probably not ideal, but it works and avoids sourcing specific relays and switches.
- nathan_f77 5y ago
  I highly recommend buying some Zigbee switch modules [1] and wiring them up behind your regular light switches. They convert any light switch into a smart switch that can be controlled through your Zigbee network. (This can be dangerous, but just make sure you turn off the power first, wear gloves, and learn all about line, neutral, ground. Get a good multimeter and triple check everything.) [1] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002164359835.html?spm=a2g0o.search0304.0.0.2cb91a79SSwVl2&algo_pvid=b2d9f665-597d-4ad4-a9d0-462a3ceeb565&aem_p4p_detail=202202171351051152484007190184479649&algo_exp_id=b2d9f665-597d-4ad4-a9d0-462a3ceeb565-0 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002164359835.html?spm=a2...
everyone 5y ago
All this smarthome stuff like an enormous amount of work. What are any actual concrete benefits over doing things the dumb way? I can't think of anything significant, certainly nothing to justify the cost (not just money, also time, embodied energy etc). Though I have 0 experience with this stuff, so I am asking a genuine question.
- nouveaux 5y ago
  Without knowing your home, it's hard to say. I think the biggest benefit right now is sun rise alarm lights and circadian rhythm lights. This should have a noticeable benefit for everyone. The hardest part is figuring out what to do with your physical light switches. At the end of the day though, the ones that benefit the most from home automation are enthusiasts who enjoy tinkering. If that's not you, get some hue lights and light switches, and call it a day.
  - randyrand 5y ago
    > get some hue lights and light switches, and call it a day. Or you know, physical light switches.
- markvdb 5y ago
  We use a traditional system at our first home, but at the family holiday home in the remote countryside, smart home stuff makes a lot of sense: - burglary alarm - smoke alarm - no guests? all lights off - minimal heat in winter to prevent freezing pipes - preheat home and boiler before arrival - ...
goodpoint 5y ago
Home Assistant seems to be hostile to Linux distributions. It's still difficult to package. Maybe they might want to have their own OS only. Maybe charge money for it in future.
- luma 5y ago
  The primary distribution method for Home Assistant is via a docker container, which should run just fine on most Linux platforms. There is a Home Assistant OS which is free to use and mostly exists as a lightweight docker host. It is the preferred installation method and is simple to deploy and keep updated.
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    No thanks. I wrote "distribution" and users should expect a home automation tool to be easily installed and updated without dedicated VMs, containers or other kludges.
    - luma 5y ago
      Docker is pretty darn easy to install my man! Linux doesn’t make it easy to package applications that work cross platform, so docker makes that possible and it works on a wide range of platforms, including systems like the Raspberry Pi.
      - goodpoint 5y ago
        "easy to install" is far, far from enough.
        luma 5y ago
        Then what exactly is missing? Currently, the Home Assistant OS offers the following: * Regular update checks and notification in the UI * Single-click update of the base OS and the docker images * Automated checks of your configuration versus the new version to alert if any breaking changes might impact you So, it's easy to install and it's easy to update. What doesn't it do that you feel it should offer?
anderspitman 5y ago
The most-requested feature for boringproxy has been WebSockets support (which landed in master just this week), from what I can tell primarily because Home Assistant needs it. I hadn't realized how popular HA is. Their forum is very active: https://community.home-assistant.io/ https://community.home-assistant.io/

357 points by jroovers 5y ago

0ld 5y ago

HA is nice, and I've been running it on RPi for a few years, mainly to make my air purifiers work in the way I want, plus some light switches and a motion detector The only annoying thing are random breaking changes which make me overhaul my configs a couple of times per year

criddell 5y ago

When your power goes out for a few minutes, what state does everything go into when it resumes?

jaywalk 5y ago
For things like smart bulbs, that's usually set on the device itself. For a smart switch, it's usually just going to be off. However, with HA you could easily create an automation to set everything how you want it when the power comes back on. It could even be conditional based on the time of day or whatever else you want to consider.
Tyr42 5y ago
Hm, rebooting the pi doesn't change any state on its own. Lights which are ZigBee or wifi might turn on when power is restored, and most of my automations are of the form "when motion sensor state changes to occupied: turn on light. When motion sensor state is vacant for X minutes, turn off the lights", so they might stay on until you walk by the motion sensor, at which point they fix themselves. If you have smart switches, I think they would be off after a power outage.

casenjo 5y ago

I really enjoyed reading this, thanks for posting. I've been struggling to find a more sustainable solution on my end for all the sensors and buttons I have set up. Anecdotally I feel their battery life tends to be shorter based on whether they're in busy locations or not. I've ordered the CR2477 and CR2450 batteries they use in bigger quantities but I'd much rather be able to recharge them instead. Have you ever found devices of this type that allow them to be recharged?

tylergetsay 5y ago
I have been using ZWave motion sensors that have USB input so no battery required, for buttons I have replaced a lot of wall switches with Tasmota switches that are programmed for single/double/hold click actions on multiple buttons. This can be great on multi gang switches where I have one button control the relays in all three switches, leaving two buttons open.
andylynch 5y ago
Have a look online for LIR2450s. They are rechargeable button cells.

thebean11 5y ago

Whoa, I didn't realize automatic radiator valves existed. Always feel guilty about using a space heater because the radiator gets way to hot.

mrweasel 5y ago
The valves/thermostats in the article is actually kinda big. More modern ones are not much larger than the regular thermostats. It might be a question about which models can be integrated into Home Assistant.
- vetinari 5y ago
  > It might be a question about which models can be integrated into Home Assistant. There are also multiple ways (zha vs zigbee2mqtt); and the given valve may support one, but not the other.
- OJFord 5y ago
  You can also get them that look exactly like a regular one, just with a mains cable coming out too - add any HA-supported relay (or interface to a relay). I've been meaning to do that for some time; I'd prefer that to integrated temperature sensing & controls on every radiator personally.

tristanperry 5y ago

Great article, thanks for posting. I've been on a smart home journey myself, but I'm still currently relying on Alexa for most integration and a Hue Bridge. It works well for the 30-40 devices I currently have. I totally agree that Home Assistant is probably the way forward for many power users, but it doesn't quite feel beginner-friendly enough yet (although the HA devs do seem to be making some great improvements in this area). I'm still undecided on Matter and Thread. Both are naturally great technologies, but I can't see Google/Nest opening up to Amazon/Ring and vice versa. Not in any meaningful way, at least. My hunch is that Matter will help smaller smart home companies, but not make much difference for the pre-existing 'walled gardens' that the market has. I hope that I'm wrong though. (Disclaimer: I blog and do YouTube videos as Smart Home Point, but I mainly cover consumer friendly products - and hence I haven't delved into Home Assistant too much)

mmerickel 5y ago
The promise of thread versus reality I feel will be a big problem - I'd love to be wrong though. I'm on the outside of things (haven't used thread, only read about it... use zigbee a lot though). But the way I understand it is that once you join a device to a particular bridge you will still need to use that bridge's ecosystem to communicate - even though the device has its own IP address. For example, when a thread device joins to homekit and establishes an encrypted handshake, it's not like I'll be able to use that device's IP address to talk to it. It's not going to trust me - only homekit. But at least it'll be able to talk to any homekit bridge on the network and avoid a SPOF if I unplug one of my homepod minis.
snapetom 5y ago
It's not even power user friendly. Things were so fragile, I eventually created Ansible playbooks to maintain my setup. I couldn't trust a simple point upgrade wouldn't break anything, so I had to easily replay steps to revert. If you have to set up a whole devops infrastructure to maintain one simple home project, there's something wrong.

KennyBlanken 5y ago

> On caveat is that I have started running into some reliability issues (occasional device unavailability) once I exceeded 50 or so devices. This seems to be common for Zigbee networks, It's patently ridiculous that you could add a lightbulb to your network and be unable to get in your front door the next day because now you have too many devices. Even more so when you consider that the standard is twenty years old and should be extremely mature. This is the problem with all this home automation stuff...all of them, Zigbee, Zwave, wifi - seem to crap out as soon as you have a decent number of devices. WiFi seems the least robust for high device count, but why haven't Zwave and Zigbee figured out how to get their systems to work for a large number of devices, a decade-ish into things? Security is also something of a joke for both zigbee and z-wave. > I'm excited about the upcoming Matter and Thread standards which are likely to replace/augment Zigbee (and Z-wave) as true interoperable home automation connectivity standards. Interoperable, but you'll be forced by vendors to use someone's online services. There is no way Matter and Thread will be designed in such a way that you will have freedom from paying somebody every month and give data that will eventually make its way to marketers. Edit: the author's upstairs window automation devices are ludicrously dangerous from a fire safety standpoint as there appears to be no easy way to open them if the device breaks or loses power. Folks, do not remove manual control from windows. It's not just dangerous, it's likely illegal. Windows and doors MUST be operable, easily, by one hand.

secabeen 5y ago
> It's patently ridiculous that you could add a lightbulb to your network and be unable to get in your front door the next day because now you have too many devices. I am not aware of any keypad zigbee or z-wave door lock that depends on that network to unlock in standard config. Yes, you could set it up that way, to unlock based on presence detection, etc, but that's on you. The standard setup is a local code list on the lock, with updates and status reported to home automation to enable integration. Most locks also have a standard key backup as well, so you're doubly protected.
- vetinari 5y ago
  Similarly with radiator valves; they operate locally. You program them with a mode (normal/off/away) and schedule (given temp at given time) upfront, and then they maintain the required temperature.

FanaHOVA 5y ago

I tried to build a company around this in ~2014, we built our own boards and everything, and had a fork with HASS that had more defaults based on our hardware. Too bad it didn't quite work out as a business. The 3D designs for the hardware cases are still on GitHub: https://github.com/Smart-Torvy/3D-Objects https://github.com/Smart-Torvy/3D-Objects

gh02t 5y ago
Ubiquiti also briefly employed the founder of Home Assistant in 2018 and paid him specifically to work on it. People speculated that they were considering releasing some sort of product built on HA, but it never materialized. It's maybe for the better from a user/community POV, but I'm surprised there hasn't been more commercial interest. HA in its current form is still probably a bit too technical for mass market, but I would think a company could easily spruce it up a bit and instantly have a fairly strong software ecosystem and a lot of good will as long as they handled it right.

fuzzieozzie 5y ago

I imagine readers here would want local control for home automation. Take a look at www.hubitat.com

JshWright 5y ago
The setup described in the article is local as well.
detaro 5y ago
The article describes a fully local setup, with much more open components...
afavour 5y ago
I really want hubitat to succeed but to me it feels like it’s in a tricky place: less open/customisable than HA but not user-friendly enough to be used by total beginners. Hopefully they get the second half of that sorted out and can carve out a niche.

turtlebits 5y ago

Not sure if I'm just getting older, but the less things/complications in my home, the more peace of mind I have. Been watching the youtube LTT channel on his smart home and I feel all the things going on would drive me crazy. This doesn't apply only to tech, but even for my next house (Looking into passive homes, least possible HVAC footprint, floorplan for minimal plumbing/electrical).

jonathankoren 5y ago
I get the geeky joy of monitoring and possibly automatically controlling things, but the added benefit feels marginal at best for a home. It’s less than marginal unless you go big into the automation. The other thing that jades me to automation is that in my experience with technology, you either get a easy to use, but limited, remotely brickable, subscriptionware, or you have to roll your own, and end up debugging your bathtub. Neither is very appealing.
amphitheatre 5y ago
I struggle with this too. Whilst there is a lot of opportunities for learning and fun when setting these systems up, you soon forget how things intermingle and monitoring, upgrading, or debugging things becomes a chore. Systems like this balloon in complexity with all of the different server hardware, IoT standards, subnets, cables, etc. For the average user, things that aren't easy or set-and-forget are probably too much. That sense of overwhelm is my personal experience, at least.
iamjackg 5y ago
For me, a lot of that came down to making sure every automation I add is usable with the least amount of mental effort. For the longest time I didn't automate much at all and often questioned whether I needed all this or not, then we had a baby. Now we have a button in his nursery that will dim the lights, start playing white noise on a Google Home speaker, mark the start of a new nap on our Babybuddy instance, then turn off the lights after 30 seconds. When I press it again, it turns off the noise and stops the sleep tracking. If we didn't have Home Assistant we'd have to do all these things manually multiple times a day. Instead it just takes a single button press. It's a small example, but things like this will keep popping up, and I'm looking forward to making them easier.

vladgur 5y ago

I dont think its clear from the blog, but HomeAssistant Blue and/or Yellow are nice, but not required to get going with HA. If you get your hands on RPI 3 or 4, an SSD card and a supported Zigbee/ZWave card, you should be good to go. Installation is well documented. But overall customization is in fact a major time sink regardless of hardware you use

nomel 5y ago
> But overall customization is in fact a major time sink I think that depends on what you're trying to accomplish, since "customization" doesn't really have a limit. If it's just exposing your smart devices so you can access them with your iPhone, it's easy. If it's having your lights turn to 5% brightness if you enter the kitchen at 3am, to get some milk, but then slowly ramp up the brightness to 15% when you linger around to make pancakes, then sure. You'll need to write an automation for that. Having my HomePod remind me that my car charger isn't plugged in at 8:30pm required an automation that involved selecting things from some dropdown boxes.

idatum 5y ago

Good article that gets into the details of leveraging Home Assistant (HA) to glue together various types of sensors and switches, etc. I think categorizing HA users into 2 groups of either technical or non-technical is too coarse. You have to add another dimension that captures how much a user is willing to automate their home (making it "smart"). I'm technical, but my goal is to make things as seamless as possible. For example, my Z-Wave wall switches are the type that allow the original switch to override what the remote command sent. These in-wall Z-Wave switches are embedded in the switch box and the existing switch is then low voltage. The same for my thermostat. Any household member can override locally. I detect the change and make sure I hold that new value over any automations that run that day. In the end, my HA setup is pretty minimal with no HA add-ons and a few integrations, such as Z-WaveJS2MQTT and MQTT being the most used. This way I rarely hit any issues upgrading HA.

koheripbal 5y ago
What is still stopping me from jumping into this is the cost of each individual smart device. They are just too expensive for what they are replacing.

spaetzleesser 5y ago

Nice! If I understand correctly this is fully local and doesn't depend on cloud stuff? After a few failures I don't want anything that relies on somebody's buggy cloud systems.

nomel 5y ago
It's all local unless you want to pay for the cloud service, which just gives you safe remote access to your local home assistant instance, and gives some services like a nice (cloud based) text to speech engine. Neither are required. You can happily open up DMZ and use whatever TTS engine, yourself.
- boring_twenties 5y ago
  Do you have any suggestions for a local TTS engine to use with HA? I have HA up and running but have only used its web interface so far.
  - nomel 5y ago
    No, but I was looking at ha-rhvoice before I went with Nabu Casa (to support the devs). The readily available local TTS voices will, obviously, not sound as good.
llamataboot 5y ago
It also depends on what /you/ setup - eg, you can certainly control some things locally and some things only through the cloud if you are using the manufacturers hub, but most things you can also buy a zwave stick and/or a zigbee stick and connect to your devices directly. Some are a perpetual cat and mouse game though for the companies that simply must snoop your data as part of their biz model or have another reason to be terrified of you directly talking to their things. And like any smart thing you put in your house, some things you need to block at the DNS level if they are hardwired to phone home constantly. But yes, Home Assistant and choosing the right things makes it possible to keep everything internal for sure

buro9 5y ago

When you sell a house like this... what do you leave behind and what do you take? This has increasingly been on my mind. I've no desire to sell soon, but there's a Nest doorbell that is wired in, so it stays. A Nest thermostat, which I could remove but when I got the boiler I chose to not have the control panel extra with timer as I knew I had Nest. Then the lighting, the motion sensors... should I take the few thousand GBP worth of Hue bulbs? That feels like a yes, just put in the cheapest bulbs. And so it begins... some things stay, some things go, and the tooling is the hardest. This person has touch screen control panels and Home Assistant. Even if you left it behind, you'd need to transfer the knowledge around it too. But remove it, and the house goes beyond dumb in many ways.

tremon 5y ago
Speaking as a prospective buyer, I'd expect the seller to remove any and all cloud-connected devices before selling. To the point where I will explicitly list them as deductions in my offer.
- crazystar 5y ago
  How are you able to make such demands given the current market? Every single house on the market has atleast 4 offers...atleast here in SoCal.
denimnerd42 5y ago
you wouldn't be required to perform KT. in Texas anything attached stays so even lightbulbs but you can also exclude anything explicitly.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  I believe one of the hosts on the Coder Radio podcast moved into a home with some home automation stuff (light, heating and locks), but wasn't informed about the configuration or how to operate it. He described it as moving into a haunted house.
  - 5y ago

pixelbreaker 5y ago

no thanks. I like switches and using my body. This kind of tech as progress is a fallacy.

Kiro 5y ago
Good for you. I personally wish I could control everything with my mind.
nmcfarl 5y ago
I'm not sure. I love my house, but the lights are insane with a switch under every overhead light, and using smart switches to control them has been so very useful. Generally I control all the lights in a room with 1 smart switch so I don't have to walk across the room to turn on all the lights in the room My bedroom came with 3 switches in 2 panels across the room from each other, the kids room 2 in 2 locations, bathroom 4 in 1, kitchen 4 in 3, living room 6 in 2, dinning room 2 in 2. Detailed example: It takes 4 light switches in 3 locations to turn on my kitchen lights: • 1 panel - 3 sides of the kitchen ceiling lights switch, kitchen recessed lights switch • separate panel 4 feet away on the other side of a counter - breakfast bar (4th side) ceiling light switch. • final panel 10 feet to the right, down the breakfast bar counter to turn on the recessed breakfast bar lights. Is it too much to ask that you circumnavigate the kitchen every morning to turn on the lights to make coffee? No, the previous owners did it every day for 20 some odd years. But do I want to do it? No. And I certainly think it's progress that I can choose not to.
- grvdrm 5y ago
  I'm right there with you. I own a relatively new house (8 years old) and it has SO many switches associated with various lights. Easy to use the switches as they exist, sure. But some simple automations make it easy to flip things on/off without walking all over the house to find the right switch. Also, some of us have roommates that don't obey the rules. My 3-year old DOES NOT turn on the lights when she walks downstairs on her own in the morning. Perfect opportunity for a simple Z-Wave motion senor + switch automation,. Otherwise, I agree with the general sentiment to keep it simple. I use Z-Wave switches for lights, a Z-Wave lock for one of my doors, and run HA on a RPi4. Haven't spent an insane amount of time building custom scripts because I want to do other things. And those switches still work without HA too. (totally see the benefits of Shelly, but hard to stuff in some electrical boxes like those in my house)

summari 5y ago

dmatos 5y ago

Home Assistant is also quite useful in a Company Office / Small Business. There's daily "added value" on repetitive tasks and simple automations that provide immediate productivity gains. It's also a great platform to implement weird "physical workflows" that aren't common in household scenarios.

sanguy 5y ago

Home Assistant is great, but it will face huge hurdles as the founder tries to cash in on the popularity. It's already underway. 1) Nabu Casa was founded with a claim that "it will all be transparent and reported" as to income, etc, etc. 2) Then the "private" components happened only for Nabu Casa - like the cloud connection stuff. 3) A few years later when pointed out nothing was transparent yet the response was "We will not share this information." 3) Nabu Casa then started to hire up the more active community developers and set off on their own closed vision. 4) NC has bought up many of the associated pieces - the companion apps, the ESP32 stuff, etc, etc. 5) NC has hired many of the community developers and now quite some secrecy around the roadmaps and decisions. 6) You dare not question decisions or you get thrown off the forums and Discord channels for life. Many cases of this happening. They have a community manager who is particularly sensitive over any perceived negative comment and prone to going off to which the founder needs to step in and smooth the emotions. Not sure why they've not fired him after strike 4 or 5. The end result is that Home Assistant is far less open than it was. It is going the same path pFsense did under the ownership of Netgate. The challenge is many people invested into it and when it implodes it won't be pretty. I am hopeful someone forks it with a better community engagement model. (I've been a user since the start, and a contributor in the early days. Left the community due to my work being monetized by NC without my consent.)

robbiet480 5y ago
Hello, I’m the original creator of the Home Assistant iOS Companion App. Just wanted to clear up that Nabu Casa took over the iOS and Android apps purely because of requirements by Apple and Google around a corporation being the only entity that can have a development team. At no time did Nabu Casa pay any money to me or anyone else to acquire the apps. They were transferred to Nabu Casa purely for convenience, since Home Assistant Inc doesn’t exist.
- stingraycharles 5y ago
  Do I understand correctly that you just gave the iOS app out of your hands, for Nabu Casa to maintain? Or is it solely a legal structure? I find it interesting if it were the former, I personally would have considered monetizing it myself, but then again, it’s probably not a coincidence I haven’t founded any opensource projects as impactful as Home Assistant. :)

llamataboot 5y ago

I have slowly gone all in on Home Assistant over the past 5 years and I think it is an amazing community, and amazing open-source success story, and fantastic software. I will say that programming your house yourself can be fun (you can literally do anything) but you also have to then keep up with all the technical debt and changes over time. I still don't think it's a great choice for non technically minded folks that would find that level of tinkering and fixing overwhelming - but I must say that Home Assistant is moving positively in that direction by really focusing on UX - and having a giant community keeping integrations updated, even unofficial reverse-engineered ones, is great.

tra3 5y ago
What devices are you using with HA? I find that's the biggest hurdle for me. There are so many hurdles and the quality is unknown.

reacharavindh 5y ago

May be my day job of handling servers and services at scale makes me say this… I’d like my home, appliances and equipment to be dumb and simple. A basic level of automation by making all power switches controllable from a central private endpoint would be nice, but hooking that up to a non self-hosted service is a big No for me. I’m about to buy a home. It will be fun to find that simplicity in automation for myself.

nomel 5y ago
> making all power switches controllable from a central private endpoint would be nice This is what Zigbee and Z-Wave are for, and I would say one one of the main points of using home assistant: to keep it all local. The Nabu Casa stuff just allows you to access your required local home assistant setup (RPi, VM, whatever) without having to mess with DMZ to allow direct connections. Self hosted in the whole point of it all. If you buy smart devices that require cloud connections, then home assistant can also work with many of those, but it ends up being a much worse experience when turning your lightbulb on requires sending an http request halfway around the world and back.
crooked-v 5y ago
I'd personally recommend the Lutron Caseta line. They use a proprietary RF system so if you want full automation or phone-based control you need their hub, but even without one you can just use them as normal switches, pair switches and remotes, pair switches with motion sensors, etc just as built-in behavior. They've also covered basic usability issues that a lot of other smart switches overlook, like having a hard disconnect on every switch, so you don't need to go to the breaker box just to change a lightbulb.
- thfuran 5y ago
  Why would I need to go to the breaker to change a lightbulb?
  - tass 5y ago
    Not necessarily a smart switch thing, but dimmers don’t break the circuit when off. If you remove a bulb, it will hurt if you put your finger in the socket. There’s usually a secondary way to break the circuit - pull out a bit of plastic, snap the switch plate away from the wall… something. All mine of different brands have some way to do it.

empiricus 5y ago

I use Home Assistant in my new house, and it kind of works. But the amount of effort needed to control a cheap wifi on/off plug did not impress me positively. It is basically one bit of information, but it goes through who knows how many layers of software and configurations. Took me a couple of hours to make it work.. I also use the standard thermostat component, which is basic beyond belief. The kind of control that is implemented in the cheapest hw thermostat you can buy. I mean, this is pure software, with 20 more lines of code you could implement a pid controller or smth. I looked into developing my own component, but the documentation for HA development also seems lacking at a quick look.

alex3305 5y ago
I am using Home Assistant for my home automation for about 4 years now, before just lurking. For me Home Assistant is about quantity, not quality. Look at the massive amount of Integrations, currently sitting at almost 2000 [1]. Which is really impressive, but not even half of them are apparently used [2]? Another example of this was when Blueprints were introduced [3]. I really, really love the idea of having templated automations, and I even introduced them into my setup. But sharing Blueprints is clunky, not mentioning updating Blueprints, which is borderline impossible from UI. Or at least, I haven't figured it out yet. I still wouldn't recommend Home Assistant to a non-technical person, as some aspects are really hard to work out. Even if you're *Ops person. 1. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/ https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/ 2. https://analytics.home-assistant.io/#integrations https://analytics.home-assistant.io/#integrations 3. https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/12/13/release-202012/#blueprints https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/12/13/release-202012...
nouveaux 5y ago
Home Assistant is the Linux Desktop of consumer applications. Tons of power under the hood and it is not designed with the end user in mind. Home Assistant has accomplished something literally no one else has, including Google, Amazon and Apple. Home Assistant has the best integration across the most number of devices. It is also extremely reliable and you can run it without the cloud. If you want easy to install, I would suggest using Alexa with Alexa compatible devices. Amazon has really made Home Automation easy. I agree that Home Assistant documentation is really bad. If you are technical and want to stick it out with Home Assistant, there are Python bridges you can use to write your own custom code.

01100011 5y ago

As a SWE I was initially skeptical about using software to control more aspects of my environment but I finally gave in and gave HA a shot. It took some work but I managed to cobble together a system using a RPI and ZWave which seemed to work reliably. I slowly added more features like HVAC and controlling my aquarium top-off pump. Everything worked reliably until I went on vacation and the switch controlling the aquarium top-off pump inexplicably fell off the network. I watched the water level slowly drop from 400 miles away over my webcam feed with no way to fix it. Moral of the story is beware of automation and always consider your failure cases. Building up these sorts of systems is fun and rewarding initially but can become a time sink and a liability if you're not careful.

jmathai 5y ago
I had HA set up for a number of things at my house but it took too much babysitting for me. I found it fun as a hobby project. But when we did a large remodel last year I intentionally decided not to have smart anythings. This includes Z-Wave, Zigbee, Alexa, Google Home, Sonos wireless speakers, etc. Instead, I went the opposite direction. Wired everything including speakers. It was much more enjoyable figuring out and planning how to wire and install Sonance Invisible Series speakers behind drywall, pick the location for a Samsung Frame TV and bite the bullet to get a panel ready fridge. In the end, I found I enjoy form over function and all electronic devices and appliances are either not present or completely hidden.
- 01100011 5y ago
  Yeah, the whole reason I got into this was to monitor my garage door and now I'm considering just going back to a wire and an LED. I can just hook up a RPi or ESP32 to the wire if I want to send myself text messages.

mdoms 5y ago

I simply flick a switch to turn on lights. Opening shades is no problem for me, a physically fit human.

disqard 5y ago
A non-technology solution? In this forum? How dare you, good sir? Seriously, I've been going as back-to-basics with my newer purchases as possible -- I recently purchased a used sewing machine that has gears made of metal, has no LCD/screen or computer firmware, and only relies on electricity to run its motor.
jaywalk 5y ago
How do you flick that switch when you're on vacation and want your home to appear occupied?
- yurishimo 5y ago
  You joke, but we both know that automatic lamp timers have existed for decades. I like home automation stuff as much as the next person but this is a disingenuous argument.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    With an automatic lamp timer, you lose the ability to (easily) control the lamp manually. Also, what about all of the lights that aren't lamps? If all you've got are lamps and you're willing to be a slave to the timer, then by all means just use the timer. But once it gets just a little bit more complicated, the timer isn't so great. I've got an "evening" scene that turns on 10 or so different lights. I will trigger it manually when I'm home and feel it's time, or if my system is in vacation mode it will trigger based on the sunset time. I don't have to worry about accidentally having left a switch off or anything like that. You cannot even begin the replicate this with an automatic lamp timer.
  - boring_twenties 5y ago
    I went from those to a basic HomeAssistant setup, and really enjoy the fact that my light timers can be "30 minutes before sunset" instead of a fixed time that needs to be adjusted throughout the year. On the other hand, the fact that everything stops working if wifi goes down is a real bummer. I can't for the life of me understand why these "smart" plugs don't just use powerline ethernet. I guess I should just be thankful that their API could be reverse engineered.

Havoc 5y ago

You can sidestep the cloud stuff if you've got a static IP and wireguard.

vladgur 5y ago
I have so far failed at setting up wireguard in my home, much less making it work with HASS. Can you share some pointers?
- anderspitman 5y ago
  There are simpler tunneling solutions: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
- jonwest 5y ago
  If you’re using Docker, the wg-easy project made it pretty easy. Otherwise I’d recommend PiVPN which worked well also with minimal setup. Setting WireGuard up from scratch was a failed endeavor multiple times for me but both of those mentioned projects made it significantly easier.

coreyp_1 5y ago

I want SO BADLY to convert my switches to smart switches, but it feels impossible to find what i need. Good luck searching on Amazon, too. Search for Zigbee, and it will return page after page of zwave, proprietary, and other listings. It's impossible to wade through. I've tried and given up multiple times. This is what i need that is evidently so difficult to find: 1. Zigbee 2. 3-way 3. Dimmable 4. Beige (almond?) Color Any ideas?

0ld 5y ago
try searching zigbee2mqtt supported devices: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/#s=switch https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/#s=switch
benley 5y ago
I'd recommend checking out some of the "smart relay" devices that let you reuse your existing light switches. e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Compatible-SmartThings-Philips-ZBBridge-Required/dp/B08R79686G https://www.amazon.com/Compatible-SmartThings-Philips-ZBBrid... - this one says "2 way" but I'm pretty sure you can wire it up with two physical lightswitches to get the 3-way behavior that you're after. The wiring diagram on the amazon product page suggests as much. I've personally used this Aeotec z-wave variant and it has worked well for me: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XC4CH98 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XC4CH98
- jonwest 5y ago
  For multi-way switches what I’ve usually done is wire one switch to the actual load (light) and a relay, and the other switches I pass the wire through as though the switch isn’t connected to the load and then use MQTT to provide the appropriate action. Probably not ideal, but it works and avoids sourcing specific relays and switches.
nathan_f77 5y ago
I highly recommend buying some Zigbee switch modules [1] and wiring them up behind your regular light switches. They convert any light switch into a smart switch that can be controlled through your Zigbee network. (This can be dangerous, but just make sure you turn off the power first, wear gloves, and learn all about line, neutral, ground. Get a good multimeter and triple check everything.) [1] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002164359835.html?spm=a2g0o.search0304.0.0.2cb91a79SSwVl2&algo_pvid=b2d9f665-597d-4ad4-a9d0-462a3ceeb565&aem_p4p_detail=202202171351051152484007190184479649&algo_exp_id=b2d9f665-597d-4ad4-a9d0-462a3ceeb565-0 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002164359835.html?spm=a2...

everyone 5y ago

All this smarthome stuff like an enormous amount of work. What are any actual concrete benefits over doing things the dumb way? I can't think of anything significant, certainly nothing to justify the cost (not just money, also time, embodied energy etc). Though I have 0 experience with this stuff, so I am asking a genuine question.

nouveaux 5y ago
Without knowing your home, it's hard to say. I think the biggest benefit right now is sun rise alarm lights and circadian rhythm lights. This should have a noticeable benefit for everyone. The hardest part is figuring out what to do with your physical light switches. At the end of the day though, the ones that benefit the most from home automation are enthusiasts who enjoy tinkering. If that's not you, get some hue lights and light switches, and call it a day.
- randyrand 5y ago
  > get some hue lights and light switches, and call it a day. Or you know, physical light switches.
markvdb 5y ago
We use a traditional system at our first home, but at the family holiday home in the remote countryside, smart home stuff makes a lot of sense: - burglary alarm - smoke alarm - no guests? all lights off - minimal heat in winter to prevent freezing pipes - preheat home and boiler before arrival - ...

goodpoint 5y ago

Home Assistant seems to be hostile to Linux distributions. It's still difficult to package. Maybe they might want to have their own OS only. Maybe charge money for it in future.

luma 5y ago
The primary distribution method for Home Assistant is via a docker container, which should run just fine on most Linux platforms. There is a Home Assistant OS which is free to use and mostly exists as a lightweight docker host. It is the preferred installation method and is simple to deploy and keep updated.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  No thanks. I wrote "distribution" and users should expect a home automation tool to be easily installed and updated without dedicated VMs, containers or other kludges.
  - luma 5y ago
    Docker is pretty darn easy to install my man! Linux doesn’t make it easy to package applications that work cross platform, so docker makes that possible and it works on a wide range of platforms, including systems like the Raspberry Pi.
    - goodpoint 5y ago
      "easy to install" is far, far from enough.
      - luma 5y ago
        Then what exactly is missing? Currently, the Home Assistant OS offers the following: * Regular update checks and notification in the UI * Single-click update of the base OS and the docker images * Automated checks of your configuration versus the new version to alert if any breaking changes might impact you So, it's easy to install and it's easy to update. What doesn't it do that you feel it should offer?

anderspitman 5y ago

The most-requested feature for boringproxy has been WebSockets support (which landed in master just this week), from what I can tell primarily because Home Assistant needs it. I hadn't realized how popular HA is. Their forum is very active: https://community.home-assistant.io/ https://community.home-assistant.io/