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I'm in the same boat. I'm running two instances of Home Assistant with Zigbee2MQTT for sensors, lights and switches, a few non-Zigbee devices via built-in integ

I'm in the same boat. I'm running two instances of Home Assistant with Zigbee2MQTT for sensors, lights and switches, a few non-Zigbee devices via built-in integrations, and NodeRed for more complex automations. I find the stack to be a bit of a Sisyphean mess, quite unreliable, and a significant time sink. I'll give some examples: - HA occasionally freezes for a few seconds during automation runs, though system load, IO etc. look fine. No idea what's going on. It should have more than enough resources. Both instances do this (on different hardware). - After every restart, ZigBee switches only work after the second press (the first message shows up on MQTT, but is apparently ignored). This is especially annoying if we're having guests when HA acts up; also, some switches use double-press for special behavior. - Sometimes an automation or two just don't trigger until HA is restarted, but everything else works (happens about once every two weeks). - Outlets and sensors may be gone from the network for a week (e.g. accidentally left unplugged) but will never be shown as stale in HA. - Most automations I want devolve into huge YAML messes or huge NodeRed graphs, since I seem to need a lot more flexibility than other HA users. I've found it's a lot easier to just write a script for these, but the developer experience of the various scripting plugins leaves a lot to be desired. Also, yet more flaky abstractions. - Why is it that checking whether a scene is active is so hard? That's just the sort of heavy lifting I expect HA to do for me. - Every release of HA seems to add new little quirks; apparently, lots of people in the community don't even bother updating regularly? - It's very hard to know what's going on inside HA; it seems to log every last thing except for what I'm looking for. I usually just look if MQTT sees the right things, then restart HA until the issue I'm having disappears. That this strategy usually works is problematic in itself. All in all, it feels more like training a cat, not the hands-off appliance-style setup I'd like to have, and it takes up way too much of my limited spare time. I really like HA for the user-facing part, great app, great web interface, even supports Apple Watch. I'm comfortable with writing code, perhaps a bunch of scripts against MQTT and the HA API would be the way to go for me, or perhaps something like AppDaemon. I've also tried using Apple Homekit with Homebridge, and while that was rock solid, hands-off and very reliable, it doesn't have the flexibility I want either.

throwaway346434 3y ago
You arent wrong, there's a different mindset with a lot of homeassistant. It feels like there isnt an understanding of something like MQTT - I want automations that listen to events, which include data in the payload. "Subscribe to a topic" and "filter relevant happenings" seems conceptually so easy. Building a UI to do this, harder. But adding a (bad) widget system of the actions? Hmm. Its not IFTTT, it should not try to be. Provide visualisation tools to manage what listens and what broadcasts. Have black boxes of logic, just mandate they must respond in a particular way. Leave the rest to programming. And if non devs are frustrated: help turn them into devs
bussyfumes 3y ago
I've setup HA so that I can turn on/off a couple of WLED smart lights and I found the UX of the dashboard to be a bit confusing. After setting up a HomeKit Bridge integration, you are given a QR code to connect from the Home app. The code appears in the Notifications tab. I missed the code at first so the Notifications tab was empty and I thought that there should be a button to issue another one? After looking it up online, apparently the way to go is: delete the integration, create it again and be more careful with the Notifications tab. Then if I want another person in the house to be able to control the lights from their device, I can't show them the code. This makes me wonder whether the HomeKit Bridge supports only one connection or if I just have to screenshot the QR code? It can't be that bad, right? Other than that, a great piece of software. When I got the smart lights it bummed me out that I couldn't control them with Home and had to use some third-party app to do it so eventually discovering HA significantly improved my experience.
- bouke 3y ago
  HomeKit can pair only once, to pair it another time it needs to be unpaired first; a design choice unrelated to HA. But you can “share” your home in the Home app. That will add additional “controllers” to those devices (HA being the device here).
  - bussyfumes 3y ago
    Thank you, I thought so. It'd still be nice if they could print it somewhere because that was my first impression so I assume other people not familiar with HA will run into it as well. Regarding sharing, I tried it, but it says "A home hub is required to add or remove accessories, scenes or people". I looked it up and apparently you were able to use an iPad as the home hub which you'd share access to, but since a certain version of iPadOS/iOS it can only be either an Apple TV or a Home Pod. I think Apple is focusing on being able to access your home setup anywhere so it requires a device that is supposed to stay at home all the time. Still a shame because it hinders offline-first setups like mine.

throwaway346434 3y ago

You arent wrong, there's a different mindset with a lot of homeassistant. It feels like there isnt an understanding of something like MQTT - I want automations that listen to events, which include data in the payload. "Subscribe to a topic" and "filter relevant happenings" seems conceptually so easy. Building a UI to do this, harder. But adding a (bad) widget system of the actions? Hmm. Its not IFTTT, it should not try to be. Provide visualisation tools to manage what listens and what broadcasts. Have black boxes of logic, just mandate they must respond in a particular way. Leave the rest to programming. And if non devs are frustrated: help turn them into devs

bussyfumes 3y ago

I've setup HA so that I can turn on/off a couple of WLED smart lights and I found the UX of the dashboard to be a bit confusing. After setting up a HomeKit Bridge integration, you are given a QR code to connect from the Home app. The code appears in the Notifications tab. I missed the code at first so the Notifications tab was empty and I thought that there should be a button to issue another one? After looking it up online, apparently the way to go is: delete the integration, create it again and be more careful with the Notifications tab. Then if I want another person in the house to be able to control the lights from their device, I can't show them the code. This makes me wonder whether the HomeKit Bridge supports only one connection or if I just have to screenshot the QR code? It can't be that bad, right? Other than that, a great piece of software. When I got the smart lights it bummed me out that I couldn't control them with Home and had to use some third-party app to do it so eventually discovering HA significantly improved my experience.

bouke 3y ago
HomeKit can pair only once, to pair it another time it needs to be unpaired first; a design choice unrelated to HA. But you can “share” your home in the Home app. That will add additional “controllers” to those devices (HA being the device here).
- bussyfumes 3y ago
  Thank you, I thought so. It'd still be nice if they could print it somewhere because that was my first impression so I assume other people not familiar with HA will run into it as well. Regarding sharing, I tried it, but it says "A home hub is required to add or remove accessories, scenes or people". I looked it up and apparently you were able to use an iPad as the home hub which you'd share access to, but since a certain version of iPadOS/iOS it can only be either an Apple TV or a Home Pod. I think Apple is focusing on being able to access your home setup anywhere so it requires a device that is supposed to stay at home all the time. Still a shame because it hinders offline-first setups like mine.