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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. I

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.
snapetom 5y ago
I used HomeAssistant for over five years and pretty much hated every minute of it due to the amount of effort you describe. Setup, upgrades and maintenance were always a major pain. Features were introduced, rearchitected, and dropped without any consideration whether users 1) Wanted them in the first place 2) Whether it would be a burden to change things. 3) For dropped features, whether anyone would miss it. It's just a very poorly ran and guided open source project. I ended up buying a Hubitat last year and it's required a lot less effort to run.
- mafro 5y ago
  I won't comment on the behaviour/oversight of the OS project itself, but as a user I have had an opposite experience to you. I am still using HA after about five years, and once I had it setup (which admittedly was hard work) it's been no trouble at all. - Upgrades have never caused an outage - Basically every device is already supported - I can write my own code to extend as necessary - It does not talk to the WAN at all - My only outage was when my SD card died in the rpi
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- klinquist 5y ago
  Agree on Hubitat. Decided to ditch SmartThings. Went all-in on HA for a month. Went to Hubitat and am much happier.

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.

snapetom 5y ago

I used HomeAssistant for over five years and pretty much hated every minute of it due to the amount of effort you describe. Setup, upgrades and maintenance were always a major pain. Features were introduced, rearchitected, and dropped without any consideration whether users 1) Wanted them in the first place 2) Whether it would be a burden to change things. 3) For dropped features, whether anyone would miss it. It's just a very poorly ran and guided open source project. I ended up buying a Hubitat last year and it's required a lot less effort to run.

mafro 5y ago
I won't comment on the behaviour/oversight of the OS project itself, but as a user I have had an opposite experience to you. I am still using HA after about five years, and once I had it setup (which admittedly was hard work) it's been no trouble at all. - Upgrades have never caused an outage - Basically every device is already supported - I can write my own code to extend as necessary - It does not talk to the WAN at all - My only outage was when my SD card died in the rpi
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
klinquist 5y ago
Agree on Hubitat. Decided to ditch SmartThings. Went all-in on HA for a month. Went to Hubitat and am much happier.