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I too balked at the absurd complexity in the HomeAssistant stack, and it's kinda kept me off the "smart home" train because I refuse to buy into somebody's wall

by nvy 3y ago

I too balked at the absurd complexity in the HomeAssistant stack, and it's kinda kept me off the "smart home" train because I refuse to buy into somebody's walled garden. As a result the sum total of smartness in my home is... A little STM32 Blue Pill that reports whether or not the basement door is locked or not. Yay? Edit: oh and the raspberry pi that measures the moisture in the soil of my beloved Norfolk Island Spruce and tells me over IRC when it needs water.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
acidburnNSA 3y ago
I got into HomeAssistant in the early days, maybe around 2015. As such, I've stayed with the simpler installation method just make a hass venv and pip install homeassistant into it. This has mostly worked ok for years, and I've raised eyebrows as they've pushed more people to their linux distro, hoping they wouldn't stop supporting the basic installation method. I did finally have to install one docker thing to keep zwave working after support for the (legitimately bad) python-openzwave lib was deprecated.
Denvercoder9 3y ago
> I too balked at the absurd complexity in the HomeAssistant stack You can ditch their whole OS, management and orchestration/containerization stack, and just run it as a Python application in a virtualenv (they call it "Home Assistant Core"). I recommend it, it's much better than trying to keep up with their (mediocre, imo) distribution. Even if you don't want to manually setup a virtualenv, you can run it as a single container.
prmoustache 3y ago
What kept me for the smart home train is the lack of need. I am still trying to grasp what it would improve to my life
- LeafItAlone 3y ago
  I was like that too, for a long time. But for me, it comes down convenience, rather than need. Some examples: 1. I have a smart lock on the front door. Now when friends/family want to visit and I’m not around, I don’t need to hide a key that they then can lose. They just get a code that I can have expire when they leave. 2. I am constantly either too hot or too cold. Being able to change the thermostat from where I am means I don’t have to interrupt whatever I’m doing and walk across the house. 3. Same with lights. I can climb into bed, tell my phone “goodnight”, and it shuts off all lights and locks the door. Again, nothing that is “necessary”, and sometimes I feel lazy because of it, but it results in fewer interruptions. The one use case I use that I can’t really replicate without smart home, is being able to remotely toggle power. Smart outlets mean I can hard reset an unresponsive server, camera, or other device.
- nvy 3y ago
  >I am still trying to grasp what it would improve to my life I mean yeah, once the novelty wears off of having Siri turn off your lights to impress your boomer neighbours, or whatever, there seems to be no real "killer app" for home automation. However there are a lot of small things I wouldn't mind having: - The aforementioned "hey your tree is too dry" push notifications on my phone - No need to get out of bed to check the downstairs deadbolt(s) - Automatic and/or manually-controlled activation of garden bed hoses with some kind of zigbee solenoid valve or something
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    > Automatic and/or manually-controlled activation of garden bed hoses with some kind of zigbee solenoid valve or something A basic smart plug does this for me. I hooked one up to a cheap solenoid that opens a valve when powered up. It was very inexpensive and had been very reliable. It’s just on a TP-Link Kasa smart plug. It’s also in HA so that if I forget to turn it off, it turns itself off after 10 mins.
    - kevstev 3y ago
      Do you know which solenoid you used? I am not sure if our definitions of cheap are different, but I looked at this about a month ago and the options I found were fairly pricey, but would hopefully be more robust than the rainbird system I had go bust on me after three years.
georgehotelling 3y ago
> I refuse to buy into somebody's walled garden That's actually why I landed on Home Assistant. It's Open Source so I know that if things ever go bad someone will fork it and I won't have invested deeply in a dead-end ecosystem. Getting started for me felt like the first time I learn a new board game. The rules seem incomprehensible and everything is unfamiliar, but that's the price of trying something new. Eventually the concepts started to click and I saw how things fit together. I will say that telling my spouse to install an app with a web GUI was much easier than it would have been to get her on IRC to control the house.
cptskippy 3y ago
> I too balked at the absurd complexity in the HomeAssistant stack I did for the longest time, trying every alternative but I eventually embraced it. The modern docker container OS image runs perfectly fine on an old Raspberry Pi 2B and the modularized container architecture makes it easy to up/down grade parts of the system as needed. Add-Ons (e.g., Z-Wave, Zigbee, TP-Link, etc) are Docker Containers by default so they're easily maintained and upgraded by the core supervisor. It is a lot of complexity that they have been progressively hiding behind a pleasant UI but it still has some rough edges. The complexity is due to the modular ability to support nearly every smart home feature out there.

by nvy 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

acidburnNSA 3y ago

I got into HomeAssistant in the early days, maybe around 2015. As such, I've stayed with the simpler installation method just make a hass venv and pip install homeassistant into it. This has mostly worked ok for years, and I've raised eyebrows as they've pushed more people to their linux distro, hoping they wouldn't stop supporting the basic installation method. I did finally have to install one docker thing to keep zwave working after support for the (legitimately bad) python-openzwave lib was deprecated.

Denvercoder9 3y ago

> I too balked at the absurd complexity in the HomeAssistant stack You can ditch their whole OS, management and orchestration/containerization stack, and just run it as a Python application in a virtualenv (they call it "Home Assistant Core"). I recommend it, it's much better than trying to keep up with their (mediocre, imo) distribution. Even if you don't want to manually setup a virtualenv, you can run it as a single container.

prmoustache 3y ago

What kept me for the smart home train is the lack of need. I am still trying to grasp what it would improve to my life

LeafItAlone 3y ago
I was like that too, for a long time. But for me, it comes down convenience, rather than need. Some examples: 1. I have a smart lock on the front door. Now when friends/family want to visit and I’m not around, I don’t need to hide a key that they then can lose. They just get a code that I can have expire when they leave. 2. I am constantly either too hot or too cold. Being able to change the thermostat from where I am means I don’t have to interrupt whatever I’m doing and walk across the house. 3. Same with lights. I can climb into bed, tell my phone “goodnight”, and it shuts off all lights and locks the door. Again, nothing that is “necessary”, and sometimes I feel lazy because of it, but it results in fewer interruptions. The one use case I use that I can’t really replicate without smart home, is being able to remotely toggle power. Smart outlets mean I can hard reset an unresponsive server, camera, or other device.
nvy 3y ago
>I am still trying to grasp what it would improve to my life I mean yeah, once the novelty wears off of having Siri turn off your lights to impress your boomer neighbours, or whatever, there seems to be no real "killer app" for home automation. However there are a lot of small things I wouldn't mind having: - The aforementioned "hey your tree is too dry" push notifications on my phone - No need to get out of bed to check the downstairs deadbolt(s) - Automatic and/or manually-controlled activation of garden bed hoses with some kind of zigbee solenoid valve or something
- lostlogin 3y ago
  > Automatic and/or manually-controlled activation of garden bed hoses with some kind of zigbee solenoid valve or something A basic smart plug does this for me. I hooked one up to a cheap solenoid that opens a valve when powered up. It was very inexpensive and had been very reliable. It’s just on a TP-Link Kasa smart plug. It’s also in HA so that if I forget to turn it off, it turns itself off after 10 mins.
  - kevstev 3y ago
    Do you know which solenoid you used? I am not sure if our definitions of cheap are different, but I looked at this about a month ago and the options I found were fairly pricey, but would hopefully be more robust than the rainbird system I had go bust on me after three years.

georgehotelling 3y ago

> I refuse to buy into somebody's walled garden That's actually why I landed on Home Assistant. It's Open Source so I know that if things ever go bad someone will fork it and I won't have invested deeply in a dead-end ecosystem. Getting started for me felt like the first time I learn a new board game. The rules seem incomprehensible and everything is unfamiliar, but that's the price of trying something new. Eventually the concepts started to click and I saw how things fit together. I will say that telling my spouse to install an app with a web GUI was much easier than it would have been to get her on IRC to control the house.

cptskippy 3y ago

> I too balked at the absurd complexity in the HomeAssistant stack I did for the longest time, trying every alternative but I eventually embraced it. The modern docker container OS image runs perfectly fine on an old Raspberry Pi 2B and the modularized container architecture makes it easy to up/down grade parts of the system as needed. Add-Ons (e.g., Z-Wave, Zigbee, TP-Link, etc) are Docker Containers by default so they're easily maintained and upgraded by the core supervisor. It is a lot of complexity that they have been progressively hiding behind a pleasant UI but it still has some rough edges. The complexity is due to the modular ability to support nearly every smart home feature out there.