13 ms·

Home Assistant 2023.11

288 points by looperhacks 3y ago

ulrischa 3y ago
I like the UI for scripts
lvncelot 3y ago
I've tried getting into Home Assistant a few years ago, but it was right at the switch from declarative yaml files for (almost) everything to most of the stuff being set up via the UI. I would love to give Home Assistant another shot - is that still the case, or is there some way to set up the Home Assistant config via code?
- robert_dipaolo 3y ago
  All the config can be done via YAML still. The UIs are just another option that makes it easier, as far as I can tell the UIs just build the YAML.
  - pta2002 3y ago
    This is false. While you can set a lot of things through yaml, some like setting the MQTT broker have to be done via the UI.
    - robert_dipaolo 3y ago
      Ah interesting, I didn't realise that! I often drop into the YAML to configure Automations, etc. I'm not using MQTT at the moment.
      - pta2002 3y ago
        Yes, automations and UI can still be done using yaml (and I don't think they plan on dropping that - it's very useful to be able to put that on version control). It's mostly for configuring integrations that they've dropped the yaml (annoying if you're trying to set it up with NixOS or something, but the home assistant maintainers are unusually aggressive against distro packages anyway, especially for nix...)
- sdflhasjd 3y ago
  Most of the YAML-configuration has been deprecated and is now in the process of being removed. With the exception of manually-configured MQTT entities and some database configuration, everything is mostly done through the UI now.
- 8fingerlouie 3y ago
  I ran HA for a few years, but have since switched to Homey, which is more like an appliance, but also not quite as powerful as HA can be, provided you have the right hardware. It works well for me.
- Dayshine 3y ago
  I used to be annoyed by the push from yaml to ui. I wanted my config to be version controlled, and I wanted the power that I though text based config gave me. However, it turns out it's really annoying to use text based config for most things. Primarily because integrations can't edit your config, so you have to do a lot more manual migration of config. Yaml also doesn't have any proper ide support, so it's an annoying loop of restarting the app and staring at logs looking for typos. And finally the version control was useless because so much of what I wanted to keep was state, which can't be in config. I've recently realised that I only actually needed the complex rules and UI to be in code. And they still are: now through the ui with instant validation.
  - wjdp 3y ago
    I'm very much in the same boat as you here I think. I loved the idea of version controlled config and accepted the edit/reboot loop as that was the only way of doing it back then. It does seem though most of what was in config does live more naturally in UI, a great example is editing a scene with realtime feedback on the actual devices. I do still periodically go into the config folder and do a bulk 'bump' commit, though given the config is likely useless without the state of the database I don't know if this is ever going to be useful. Perhaps having some history is good in case a complex automation is lost but still quite limited.
  - garblegarble 3y ago
    >Yaml also doesn't have any proper ide support, so it's an annoying loop of restarting the app and staring at logs looking for typos. Since YAML is a superset of JSON, I highly recommend converting[1] it to JSON, and then just treating it as a JSON config file. 1: For this, I use yaml2json (npm yaml-to-json)
  - maxerickson 3y ago
    Isn't Yaml a serialization format? Seems like it shouldn't be a big deal to read it into a live object, remap things and then write the updated config back out.
- zyberzero 3y ago
  You can do most of the setup right from the UI nowadays. I rarely resort to yaml-files, and if I do it is because the integration is old (and probably not that many that uses it - I can think of two integrations on top of my head that I needed to configure with yaml, traccar for tracking my bike and my local public transport organization) or it's something really special special (I have a thing that calculates the block of the cheapest two hours every day to schedule my dish washer, that was tricky to do OOB in the UI). Otherwise it's pretty straight forward nowadays!
- herbst 3y ago
  When I tried HA that was exactly what made me hate it. It was all configurable via files, and it was documented that way back then. But my instance wasn't. It took a while and a few useless tries until I realised the UI config is the upgrade and not the other way around.
- kiliancgn 3y ago
  I was a complete beginner and had a hard time setting it up years ago since I didn't know much about it. Here's how I did it: https://www.amalytix.com/en/blog/home-assistant-with-conbee-ii-deconz-xiaomi-aqara-and-hass-io-from-scratch/ https://www.amalytix.com/en/blog/home-assistant-with-conbee-... Note: This guide is based on an older version of Home Assistant, but it might still be useful for someone just starting out to understand some general concepts.
- OJFord 3y ago
  Well that sucks, I missed that. I've been 'intending' to set it up nicely for years (more than 'a few', clearly) but that's a dealbreaker. Every time I've thought about/planned it, the main annoyance has been NodeRed being like this, I didn't realise HA was now too. It makes sense maybe for mass market appeal I suppose, but is there something else catering more to developers/tinkerers, those who want it all in text (or better: terraform!) for version control (and just as a more familiar way to edit it than a love-it-or-hate-it UI)?
- Rebelgecko 3y ago
  I end up having to do a mix of YAML and UI (on top of their templating language which i still can't grok). I think all-YAML is viable but all-UI is not if you use enough advanced feautures
Toutouxc 3y ago
Hass is the kind of software that has a lot of rough edges, but you use it anyway because there's very little direct competition. And every release feels like so much stuff has been finally polished, but then you deploy the new version and there's still a lot of stuff that feels or looks weird (the part-bad-UI-part-YAML automation). I have been using it for a couple of years now and I still haven't decided whether I like it or not. But it's still a huge piece of work and deserves a lot of praise.
- herbst 3y ago
  Competition is relative. You have mqtt, node red, ... You can piece together your own automations very easily using ready to use common components and some code. I am sure most just use the components as they are and use their own automation stuff. Like my mqtt stick that has its own automation control built in. Mixed with Google home you nearly have full control (with many limitations I know) IMO there is simply no need for a complex interface to control a few lights and power saving tricks.
  - ErneX 3y ago
    node-red + mqtt + zigbee2mqt + tasmota is what I went with. Happy so far.
  - jakupovic 3y ago
    I tried everything since arduino came out and HA is light years ahead of anything else, and as someone else mentioned HA works with ESPHome and let's you use all of the platform. For example creating a data collection tool that automatically integrates with Grafana HA has for data collection. Super useful and easy to setup.
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
  I think the haas team have done remarkably well. Haas have some rough edges but rapidly improves with every release. Far better than some commercial software I use.
- pierregillesl 3y ago
PennRobotics 3y ago
There's a decent amount of friction for a European resident trying to use HA. The landing page has two products with pricing in dollars and nothing else w.r.t. hardware. Click "Getting started" and there's still no sign of what to buy. Click "Installation" and then there are 9+ platforms (and multiple subplatforms) but no quick and realistic comparison of features or pricing. Is a NUC12WSHi3 a better deal, more energy efficient, and better equipped to handle wake words than an ODROID-M1 4GB/16GB-uSD/256GB-NVMe Addict? Will I need to buy an add-on microphone? Do I need just one box/bridge for multiple stories of a large house and then some supporting hardware? Can I finally throw my Amazon devices into the electronics trash bin at Penny? Even among HA products... It looks like I can get a Green from the official German supplier for 110 euros, from a different European vendor that I search on Google Shopping or Idealo for 103 euros, or from Slovakia for around 100 euros. It's all of the inconsistencies and friction that keep me from using HA. I have a solid theory on Linux distros: the landing page is a good indicator of how much of a pain it will be to install and use. I suspect that's also true with HA. 8fingerlouie mentioned Homey. When I go to that landing page, there's a flag to switch region and a big Buy button. It's only a few clicks to switch to their non-Pro bridge, and the pricing is consistent on the page and with any vendor I search online. ----- In any case, I'm not using a Home device until they remove Google from the wake word. I'm not using Alexa for its invasive behavior (most notably Amazon Sidewalk) and because the Philips skill mysteriously broke a few days ago, confusing the hell out of family members accustomed to a house full of working Philips lights with customized Alexa phrases. I'm not using Siri or Cortana ever. I'd love to move on to a better platform and would even pay a premium to get an industrial controller like my workplace. Such a platform either needs a dedicated installer-maintainer or exists only in my imagination.
- M95D 3y ago
  HomeAssistant is software and is free. All the hardware that you see on that page are ads.
- redrove 3y ago
  I'm European as well but I fail to see what's preventing you from buying hardware and deploying HASS. There's so many SBCs available now, in ARM or even x86 form (Zima Board). Pick one and deploy HASS on it. Pricing in USD be damned.
InsomniacL 3y ago
The new Todo-List integrations look good. I'm half tempted to do a mostly useless project to replace the pinboard/whiteboard in our kitchen with a wall-mounted tablet.
mongol 3y ago
I gave up on Home Assistant, it required too much tweaking of configs between releases. I took inspiration from https://github.com/stapelberg/regelwerk https://github.com/stapelberg/regelwerk instead
- yoavm 3y ago
  I don't know where all the frustration with HA is coming from. I've only started with it last year and so far the experience is amazing. Not only that everything just works with it, it's also so simple to create fun automations, and recently I've even built a little watering system with a Pi Pico, and integrating it with HA to show graphs and controls was a breeze. Also, literally can't recall one time I had to update a config when upgrading HA. It's the one piece of software I'm never worried when pressing "update".
  - Heliosmaster 3y ago
    I've only recently (less than a month ago) started to use HA and I have polar opposite impression from you. I gave up on updating because the 2 times i updated the HA Core package and the OS most of my integrations broke. The first time i bothered changing the config. The second time I decided to rollback and keep everything as is.
    - oakesm9 3y ago
      Maybe the issue is that you used the "Core" installation method which isn't a fully managed installation and only really there for "advanced" use cases. It has this warning above the installation steps: > This is an advanced installation process, and some steps might differ on your system. Considering the nature of this installation type, we assume you can handle subtle differences between this document and the system configuration you are using. When in doubt, please consider one of the other installation methods, as they might be a better fit instead. I use the container installation method and it's usually as simple as updating the version number in Docker Compose and restarting. I'd imagine the full OS image is even easier and more stable.
darkwater 3y ago
I want to use this space to instead praise publicly Home Assistant, it's IMO one of the biggest and most-useful opensource project out there, it's very professional and it let you do thing that are simply unthinkable with any other "smart hub" from a proprietary vendor. I can control a wifi device with a zigbee button, use an NFC and scan it with a mobile phone to execute some action in some software that doesn't even know what NFCs are etc etc etc. It also permits you to build a real "local-first" home automation system, which is the only way a home automation system should be, ever.
- jakecopp 3y ago
  Seconding this. I was able to just run it with docker compose on a cheap mini PC and it chugs away happily, interfacing with all manner of devices (Phillips/Lifx/IKEA/Airpurifier/Bunnings brands). Only gets tricky to set up devices when you're dealing with some hostile cloud based gadget that doesn't want to play nice. Unbelievable it can all be controlled offline using Siri on an iPhone, or other voice assistants. It can even display your electricity consumption by counting the LED pulses on your smart electricity meter that fires every 1000th of a kw/h, only takes a cheap ESP32 and a photodiode: https://github.com/klaasnicolaas/home-assistant-glow https://github.com/klaasnicolaas/home-assistant-glow Such a wonderful project.
  - PaulWaldman 3y ago
    >Unbelievable it can all be controlled offline using Siri on an iPhone, or other voice assistants. Does your iPhone need an i ternet connection for this to work?
    - Cyph0n 3y ago
      No, just WiFi. Your HA server acts as a HomeKit bridge and exposes its entities to the iOS Home app.
- rj45jackattack 3y ago
  Lots of negativity in here. So this is nice. I use HA at home and it's nothing short of amazing. I primarily use Zigbee devices and they all just work. I pay Nabu Casa for the external access and Google integration. I look forward to replacing my Google Homes with HA as well.
Heliosmaster 3y ago
I love Home Assistant. I only started using less than a month ago (moved into a new house). However, the two times i needed to upgrade Core (I use Home Assistant OS, their recommended installation procedure), it broke. The first time they had changed the spec of the 'correct' way of the YAML config file. Which means I didn't have an integration until i fixed the file manually (they deprecated something not gracefully). The second time I don't know: I couldn't see anymore my Viessman Heater and check everything related to my hot water / heating so I gave up and rolled back. I am a Clojure developer where there's almost never breaking changes, so this is a good reminder to not take that for granted. I think this is an aspect they have to improve a lot, if they want to cater to people who don't want a new hobby.
- michaelmior 3y ago
  I've been using Home Assistant for several years and I can count on hand the number of times I've had breaking upgrades. These were always pretty clearly explained in the release notes. I think the nature of the broad scope of Home Assistant is such that different users may have very different experiences depending on what integrations they use. But I don't think it's generally as bad as your comment suggests.
  - wolrah 3y ago
    > I think the nature of the broad scope of Home Assistant is such that different users may have very different experiences depending on what integrations they use. I think this is a common problem with "hub" projects that intend to bridge together multiple incompatible technologies. I work in VoIP and have been using Asterisk in one way or another for over 20 years. That project is even named after the wildcard character because originally it was intended to be able to connect any kind of telecom technology from analog to TDM to all sorts of VoIP. As the world moved on and most everyone has standardized around SIP as the future those of us who run all-SIP systems and/or common analog/TDM interfaces have generally been able to upgrade willy-nilly with little to no trouble, but there's always "that one guy" who has rigged up something where a call comes in over a SIP-GSM gateway, gets sent over an H.323 trunk to another box elsewhere in the world, then rings to a SCCP phone and of course they're always having issues because no one else is doing anything close to that. HA has that problem to an exponentially larger degree because at least the telecom world theoretically has widely accepted standards that most equipment uses where home automation gear has a few competing standards alongside hundreds of vendor-specific APIs that may or may not be documented or even officially open for use. Someone who is just using HA to unify their lighting control across a few vendors using well-tested Zigbee and Z-Wave implementations is going to have a much easier time than the people who have rigged up a Rube Goldberg machine of integrations of varying quality.
ur-whale 3y ago
Not sure why there is some much negativity in this thread towards HA. I'm a very happy user, and there simply is nothing out there that comes close in terms of ease of use and breadth of devices supported. Sure, if you're going to (and can afford to) pay 200K USD for a vendor locked-in, turnkey home automation system, you'll get something that likely will be a little smoother and more polished that HA. For a while. The day something breaks or goes out of date, you'll have to pull out the checkbook again. And good luck integrating anything in there that does not come from the vendor in the first place. The whole HASS thing is - true - a little bit unusual, but OTOH, does work fairly flawlessly as long as you don't start making outlandish customizations to it.
- izacus 3y ago
  Yep, I was able to replace a whole set of really really shitty IoT vendor apps with a nice dashboard in HomeAssistant. It's now accessible for everyone in the household from any device or OS without jumping through hoops by creating multiple IoT accounts in multiple clouds. It's an incredible project (and easily extensible too for a few items of hardware that didn't have official integrations yet).
xrd 3y ago
Is anyone here using repurposed Mycroft devices with HA? Is this possible and worthwhile?
awsanswers 3y ago
I will never understand the petty gripes people have about HA. This category of software requires a community keeping the integration ecosystem up to date. Software with easy to understand abstractions and no frills UI/UX makes it easy to hack on without having to grok complexity. A base project for home automation centralization free of big name companies is inherently valuable software and a public good.
- walth 3y ago
  I don't think you'll find much software that touches the day-to-day life of the average user as much as Home Assistant does. Living through breaking backwards compatibility and deprecations I think is the paint point- just continued paper cuts for the grumpy here. it's easy to lose sight of how great a piece of software it is
  - organsnyder 3y ago
    > I don't think you'll find much software that touches the day-to-day life of the average user as much as Home Assistant does. This is very true. Whenever I mess around with my homelab cluster (the current iteration is going to be the stable one, I promise!), Home Assistant is the service that needs to work—even though I've built our home automation system to not preclude manual control.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - nomel 3y ago
    My Samsung, Google, Wyze, and car charger integrations slowly stopped working. I'm replacing everything with dumb stuff again, because the breakage (not usually HA's fault) is just too annoying. This stuff needs to be an appliance, or managed by someone else, to make sense.
    - Avamander 3y ago
      I just took the ZigBee approach. A vendor can't (usually) remove or break the features available and it'll just work for years and years. Though such an approach doesn't work with many other integrations.
polivier 3y ago
I've never really been into home automation, but when I stumbled upon Philips Hue bulbs on sale for $5 at Home Depot a few years ago, I went ahead a bought a few. It turns out that they are great to wake up the kids on a schedule in the morning. I used the Philips app because it worked well enough that I couldn't be bothered to look for alternatives. Then recently I got a notification saying that the app wouldn't work without a Philips account. Yeah, no thanks. The bulbs don't directly work with Home Assistant for protocol reasons (I think). I went ahead a bought a ConBee II dongle, which is a kind of USB stick that interfaces with the Philips bulbs (and devices from other companies). Plug that into a Raspberry Pi that has Home Assistant installed and you got yourself a single app that can manage smart devices from almost all imaginable companies. It works very well for my use case. If you have devices from several different manufacturers, you should definitely look into HA to have a single app manage everything, and to future-proof your setup against shady moves by some these companies.
- agloe_dreams 3y ago
  > The bulbs don't directly work with Home Assistant for protocol reasons They are based on the Zigbee networking standard, that's why you had to buy the stick. It is effectively a networking adapter like a wifi usb adapter. That said, you can buy most other Zigbee devices now as well. Ikea has far cheaper Zigbee switches than Hue or almost anyone and you can configure them to also cross control other HA features.
  - acidburnNSA 3y ago
    Yup. I got mad at Hue for forcing an account, so I got a $20 USB zigbee hub and spent 2 hours swapping all my Hue stuff over to it with zigbee2mqtt with Home Assistant. I've never felt better about my ability as a consumer to give a vendor the middle finger. I gleefully tweeted them some pics of my Hue hub in the trash. https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/ https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/
    - smith7018 3y ago
      I recently did the same and have been thrilled with it though I'm sad that the bulbs don't transition to new colors. They immediately change which looks a little jarring.
gaganyaan 3y ago
Are they still gallivanting their way around the internet being assholes? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277 I still use HA but haven't upgraded in a good while. Partially because of the switch away from YAML, and partially because that link left a pretty sour taste in my mouth.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  The company does not come off as an asshole at all, unlike the nixos person who came to their forums.
- anonymous_sorry 3y ago
  Wild. I recognise that I'm starting to become more dependent on Home Assistant. It offers me a lot of value, but this makes me rather worried.
- asylteltine 3y ago
  Who cares and there was no such switch away from yaml
  - gaganyaan 3y ago
    https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/04/14/the-future-of-yaml/ https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/04/14/the-future-of-... Just one relevant quote: > Any new integration that communicates with devices and/or services, must use configuration via the UI. Configuration via YAML is only allowed in very rare cases, which will be determined on a case by case basis.
    - asylteltine 3y ago
      It’s misleading at best. You can configure literally everything via yaml including your dashboard. Mine runs custom js and css for crying out loud. Even if they changed some options that can’t be configured via yaml which I haven’t encountered, what’s the actual damage to you?
spandextwins 3y ago
Fragile but great work!
viccuad 3y ago
I wonder how a home assistant built with an Entity Component System architecture would look like.
Mashimo 3y ago
Oh neat Today I learned that if you have residency in Denmark can just log into eloverblik.dk and see yearly, monthly, daily and up to hourly statistics about your energy consumption. Going back to 2021 for me. And it has an API, for which there is an HA plugin. No special hardware or account required. Fantastic.
- 8fingerlouie 3y ago
  It goes even further back. Mine goes back to 2013, though "recent" changes with heat pump and EVs makes the data points kinda moot. As for the HA plugin, sadly the data is delayed by ~48 hours, so you can't use it for the energy monitor plugin.
goodlinks 3y ago
I love HA and will persist with it. Main complaint is that it (and more so its docker containers) want access to the things that are not documented or configurable. E.g. it tries to contact DNS other than the configured one and i cannot figure out what exactly it needs access to to allow updates to work. This is especially important for home automation tools as i want them as far from the internet as possible
- onedr0p 3y ago
  If you want to try, I build and maintain a rootless home-assistant container (which they refuse to support) that shouldn't have the issue. Container: https://github.com/onedr0p/containers/pkgs/container/home-assistant https://github.com/onedr0p/containers/pkgs/container/home-as... Source: https://github.com/onedr0p/containers https://github.com/onedr0p/containers
nunez 3y ago
I love HA but hate how manufacturers are going all-in on preventing people from integrating their devices into the platform without an alternative. Chamberlain MyQ did this by turning on CloudFlare Super Bot Fight and 429'ing anything that doesn't look like it came from their app. That's fine and reasonable, but I can't even pay to create an OAuth client, even though I am paying for their Tesla integration, and they provide no pathways for integrating with Apple HomeKit or Alexa. I don't want to use a billion apps to control my house. HomeKit was supposed to solve this, but companies just won't let up.
- 404mm 3y ago
  MyQ was my reason for trying HA. When I saw that the plug-in keeps hitting their API over and over, my excitement faded. I know Chamberlain are the ones causing this issue to begin with (missing HomeKit integration) but DDOSing somebody’s API is not a solution. My experience with HA came to an end when my gate unexpectedly opened on its own - and based on the log in the phone app, it came from HA.
  - tbyehl 3y ago
    MyQ had a HomeKit bridge... which they cancelled [1]. My experience with it was that, aside from eliminating the Internet/cloud dependency, it didn't make the MyQ experience any more reliable overall and I'm much happier with ATHOM's ESPHome-based kit. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/23/23318157/chamberlain-myq-home-bridge-hub-discontinued-homekit https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/23/23318157/chamberlain-myq-...
    - 404mm 3y ago
      I have a Meross garage door opener and it has been rock solid for 2 years. Not a single hiccup or miss. The issue I’d like to solve is my driveway gate. It’s too far from WiFi and I don’t want to run any cables. It’s Homelink and MyQ compatible but that’s about it. I suppose I could take one wireless remote and replace the switch with a HomeKit compatible relay. lol
nirav72 3y ago
I switched from Samsung's Smarthub to HASS - been really happy with the move. Took me a while to wrap my head around some of the manual configuration. Regardless, due to strong community support, HASS plays nice with devices that I could never get to work with Samsung's HA.
stvsu 3y ago
HA is so great. It can be used for much more than "home automation/IoT", and I find myself using it as a piece of infrastructure for other self hosted stuff. For example, rather than sending SMTP email logs for backup jobs, I just push that data to a HA webhook. I also use it for scraping alerts: once the scraper fires a trigger, it pushes a webhook to Home Assistant, which sends me a push notification on my iPhone. Great all around tool -- for the house, but for a bunch of other random stuff too!
tibbon 3y ago
The only negative thing I can say about HASS is that getting it running in Kubernetes with a USB Zigbee/Zwave adapter is a real pain. I've got a local cluster and had it working once, but had to rebuild everything for some unrelated reason, and haven't been able to get it consistently working since. There are too many in-built assumptions about how you're running it and the USB access. Documentation assumes that _maybe_ you're using an old version with some Helm chart. I'm normally pretty good at getting anything running in k8s quickly, but this is difficult! I'm going to say "screw it" and just run it bare on a Pi soon instead.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  What benefit would running it in k8s have? I’ve been running it on a bare pi for years without issue and have never once thought I needed abstractions upon abstractions… is this more a “because I can” sort of thing?
  - NortySpock 3y ago
    High availability, I assume. I'm running HA in docker-compose (no USB device needs in my use case) , but being able to have docker-compose be the default tool that handles all of the external settings means I get something pretty close to Infrastructure-as-code, and that is nice for piece of mind and simplifying how the backup-and-restore process will work. Plus I can be very deliberate about the pace at which I upgrade HA versions.
  - tibbon 3y ago
    Having one way to deploy software is great. If I want to run 10 different home services (Pihole, Minecraft server, Plex, whatever), I'd prefer to not need different ways of updating/backing up/provisioning each. Ideally K8s w/Flux is pretty great for this, as I can just make a change in SCM and then let it rip. Hardware dies? Drop in a new one and keep going. Backups handled by the larger system, instead of individual computers. Additionally, my VPN/DNS and other networking setups with CloudFlare zero trust and MetalLB make it really easy to securely access it from anywhere for whatever service I need, with minimal fuss. But... getting the USB parts working with K8s is so annoying, as their assumptions around using Docker or Containderd are pretty fixed. Obviously I need to set an affinity/requirement of the node having the USB device, but even after that it just doesn't seem happy. I can see the device in HA, but it never connects.
samldev 3y ago
Shameless plug of my Go library for writing Home Assistant automations - for any HA users out there that want to be able to just write code instead of fussing with UI (built-in automations, Node Red, etc) https://github.com/saml-dev/gome-assistant https://github.com/saml-dev/gome-assistant
nusl 3y ago
I’m looking for reasons to use Home Assistant. I know a few folks using it actively in their lives for very many things. Someday I’ll have a good use case but maybe for now I can have it turn the lights off.
- shepherdjerred 3y ago
  One really cool thing it can do is adjust the color temperature based on the position of the sun in the sky. The lights throughout my house are cool during the day, and warm at night. It's quite nice! https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting
psyclobe 3y ago
These updates keep breaking my seemingly very brittle series of automations and glue holding my house together. As much as I love ha it still it pretty high maintenance
BrandoElFollito 3y ago
This thread is very interesting as it shows how difficult it is to provide a solution for everyday use, but that also requires some head scratching. With this in mind, I am surprised by the fact that people complain about HA. Software that uses words such as YAML, Integration etc. is obviously not a TV that requires a remote with 5 buttons. I would not complain about my TV not making coffee. I use HA for many years now and I had it breaking exactly once, at a key change. I had automated updates at that time and it just taught me to upgrade manually and read the release notes. This is the "price" you pay for a dynamic, complex system. I found it getting simpler (and more obscure) with time and overall I think it is a good thing. I used to have everything in YAML files and getting frustrated by the UI. Now I changed my mind and do not care anymore about renaming a device directly in the UI, even though I do not know where the change is (actually I know but this is not the place you want to dig in). It just works and I like home automation but it is not my full time job either. The learning curve is not smooth. It starts pretty much flat and then there are cliffs you climb through "eureka!" moments when you understand what is what and how it is connected. It takes some time. The automations went a great way (very great) from the time they were completely crazy all in YAML to today where you can do most of the things in th eUI. I used the YAML version for a short time, wrote my own, discovered AppDaemon, discovered pyscript and finally (the trip above lasted a few years) I am back to the built-in solution. Nothing beats a toggle switch to disable an automation at 4am in the morning from your bed. The documentation is a bit weird. It is very complete, but quite difficult to master. There are still things I do not understand, I see them in the documentation but still do not understand after reading it. Fortunately there is the community which is awesome. I think all the questions I ever had were answered. There is a big "but" though: it is very helpful when you are a beginner or an intermediate user, but you are mostly on your own for more advanced things. It is not that someone does not want to help, it is rather that there are so many possibilities with HA that you are likely to hit unchartered territory at some point if you want to become an advanced user. Otherise you will be fine. In conclusion: THANK YOU VERY MUCH HOME ASSISTANT (but my wife hates you because everything works only 90% of the time, but when it works it is awesome :))
khaki54 3y ago
Home assistant is really awesome. You can do a lot of crazy stuff with it and it's reliable. The best thing is you can build custom views in the PWA (I think per user as well) and you can make WAF and KAF go through the roof! I used it initially because when my kids were toddlers they would get up and turn on the lights in the middle of the night and play or leave them on. I set up some rules so it would block turning on the light between 8 and 6 but let the bathroom come on for 5 minutes at a dim level. WAF = Wife acceptance factor KAF = Kid acceptance factor

288 points by looperhacks 3y ago

I like the UI for scripts

I've tried getting into Home Assistant a few years ago, but it was right at the switch from declarative yaml files for (almost) everything to most of the stuff being set up via the UI. I would love to give Home Assistant another shot - is that still the case, or is there some way to set up the Home Assistant config via code?

robert_dipaolo 3y ago
All the config can be done via YAML still. The UIs are just another option that makes it easier, as far as I can tell the UIs just build the YAML.
- pta2002 3y ago
  This is false. While you can set a lot of things through yaml, some like setting the MQTT broker have to be done via the UI.
  - robert_dipaolo 3y ago
    Ah interesting, I didn't realise that! I often drop into the YAML to configure Automations, etc. I'm not using MQTT at the moment.
    - pta2002 3y ago
      Yes, automations and UI can still be done using yaml (and I don't think they plan on dropping that - it's very useful to be able to put that on version control). It's mostly for configuring integrations that they've dropped the yaml (annoying if you're trying to set it up with NixOS or something, but the home assistant maintainers are unusually aggressive against distro packages anyway, especially for nix...)
sdflhasjd 3y ago
Most of the YAML-configuration has been deprecated and is now in the process of being removed. With the exception of manually-configured MQTT entities and some database configuration, everything is mostly done through the UI now.
8fingerlouie 3y ago
I ran HA for a few years, but have since switched to Homey, which is more like an appliance, but also not quite as powerful as HA can be, provided you have the right hardware. It works well for me.
Dayshine 3y ago
I used to be annoyed by the push from yaml to ui. I wanted my config to be version controlled, and I wanted the power that I though text based config gave me. However, it turns out it's really annoying to use text based config for most things. Primarily because integrations can't edit your config, so you have to do a lot more manual migration of config. Yaml also doesn't have any proper ide support, so it's an annoying loop of restarting the app and staring at logs looking for typos. And finally the version control was useless because so much of what I wanted to keep was state, which can't be in config. I've recently realised that I only actually needed the complex rules and UI to be in code. And they still are: now through the ui with instant validation.
- wjdp 3y ago
  I'm very much in the same boat as you here I think. I loved the idea of version controlled config and accepted the edit/reboot loop as that was the only way of doing it back then. It does seem though most of what was in config does live more naturally in UI, a great example is editing a scene with realtime feedback on the actual devices. I do still periodically go into the config folder and do a bulk 'bump' commit, though given the config is likely useless without the state of the database I don't know if this is ever going to be useful. Perhaps having some history is good in case a complex automation is lost but still quite limited.
- garblegarble 3y ago
  >Yaml also doesn't have any proper ide support, so it's an annoying loop of restarting the app and staring at logs looking for typos. Since YAML is a superset of JSON, I highly recommend converting[1] it to JSON, and then just treating it as a JSON config file. 1: For this, I use yaml2json (npm yaml-to-json)
- maxerickson 3y ago
  Isn't Yaml a serialization format? Seems like it shouldn't be a big deal to read it into a live object, remap things and then write the updated config back out.
zyberzero 3y ago
You can do most of the setup right from the UI nowadays. I rarely resort to yaml-files, and if I do it is because the integration is old (and probably not that many that uses it - I can think of two integrations on top of my head that I needed to configure with yaml, traccar for tracking my bike and my local public transport organization) or it's something really special special (I have a thing that calculates the block of the cheapest two hours every day to schedule my dish washer, that was tricky to do OOB in the UI). Otherwise it's pretty straight forward nowadays!
herbst 3y ago
When I tried HA that was exactly what made me hate it. It was all configurable via files, and it was documented that way back then. But my instance wasn't. It took a while and a few useless tries until I realised the UI config is the upgrade and not the other way around.
kiliancgn 3y ago
I was a complete beginner and had a hard time setting it up years ago since I didn't know much about it. Here's how I did it: https://www.amalytix.com/en/blog/home-assistant-with-conbee-ii-deconz-xiaomi-aqara-and-hass-io-from-scratch/ https://www.amalytix.com/en/blog/home-assistant-with-conbee-... Note: This guide is based on an older version of Home Assistant, but it might still be useful for someone just starting out to understand some general concepts.
OJFord 3y ago
Well that sucks, I missed that. I've been 'intending' to set it up nicely for years (more than 'a few', clearly) but that's a dealbreaker. Every time I've thought about/planned it, the main annoyance has been NodeRed being like this, I didn't realise HA was now too. It makes sense maybe for mass market appeal I suppose, but is there something else catering more to developers/tinkerers, those who want it all in text (or better: terraform!) for version control (and just as a more familiar way to edit it than a love-it-or-hate-it UI)?
Rebelgecko 3y ago
I end up having to do a mix of YAML and UI (on top of their templating language which i still can't grok). I think all-YAML is viable but all-UI is not if you use enough advanced feautures

Toutouxc 3y ago

Hass is the kind of software that has a lot of rough edges, but you use it anyway because there's very little direct competition. And every release feels like so much stuff has been finally polished, but then you deploy the new version and there's still a lot of stuff that feels or looks weird (the part-bad-UI-part-YAML automation). I have been using it for a couple of years now and I still haven't decided whether I like it or not. But it's still a huge piece of work and deserves a lot of praise.

herbst 3y ago
Competition is relative. You have mqtt, node red, ... You can piece together your own automations very easily using ready to use common components and some code. I am sure most just use the components as they are and use their own automation stuff. Like my mqtt stick that has its own automation control built in. Mixed with Google home you nearly have full control (with many limitations I know) IMO there is simply no need for a complex interface to control a few lights and power saving tricks.
- ErneX 3y ago
  node-red + mqtt + zigbee2mqt + tasmota is what I went with. Happy so far.
- jakupovic 3y ago
  I tried everything since arduino came out and HA is light years ahead of anything else, and as someone else mentioned HA works with ESPHome and let's you use all of the platform. For example creating a data collection tool that automatically integrates with Grafana HA has for data collection. Super useful and easy to setup.
hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
I think the haas team have done remarkably well. Haas have some rough edges but rapidly improves with every release. Far better than some commercial software I use.
pierregillesl 3y ago

PennRobotics 3y ago

There's a decent amount of friction for a European resident trying to use HA. The landing page has two products with pricing in dollars and nothing else w.r.t. hardware. Click "Getting started" and there's still no sign of what to buy. Click "Installation" and then there are 9+ platforms (and multiple subplatforms) but no quick and realistic comparison of features or pricing. Is a NUC12WSHi3 a better deal, more energy efficient, and better equipped to handle wake words than an ODROID-M1 4GB/16GB-uSD/256GB-NVMe Addict? Will I need to buy an add-on microphone? Do I need just one box/bridge for multiple stories of a large house and then some supporting hardware? Can I finally throw my Amazon devices into the electronics trash bin at Penny? Even among HA products... It looks like I can get a Green from the official German supplier for 110 euros, from a different European vendor that I search on Google Shopping or Idealo for 103 euros, or from Slovakia for around 100 euros. It's all of the inconsistencies and friction that keep me from using HA. I have a solid theory on Linux distros: the landing page is a good indicator of how much of a pain it will be to install and use. I suspect that's also true with HA. 8fingerlouie mentioned Homey. When I go to that landing page, there's a flag to switch region and a big Buy button. It's only a few clicks to switch to their non-Pro bridge, and the pricing is consistent on the page and with any vendor I search online. ----- In any case, I'm not using a Home device until they remove Google from the wake word. I'm not using Alexa for its invasive behavior (most notably Amazon Sidewalk) and because the Philips skill mysteriously broke a few days ago, confusing the hell out of family members accustomed to a house full of working Philips lights with customized Alexa phrases. I'm not using Siri or Cortana ever. I'd love to move on to a better platform and would even pay a premium to get an industrial controller like my workplace. Such a platform either needs a dedicated installer-maintainer or exists only in my imagination.

M95D 3y ago
HomeAssistant is software and is free. All the hardware that you see on that page are ads.
redrove 3y ago
I'm European as well but I fail to see what's preventing you from buying hardware and deploying HASS. There's so many SBCs available now, in ARM or even x86 form (Zima Board). Pick one and deploy HASS on it. Pricing in USD be damned.

InsomniacL 3y ago

The new Todo-List integrations look good. I'm half tempted to do a mostly useless project to replace the pinboard/whiteboard in our kitchen with a wall-mounted tablet.

mongol 3y ago

I gave up on Home Assistant, it required too much tweaking of configs between releases. I took inspiration from https://github.com/stapelberg/regelwerk https://github.com/stapelberg/regelwerk instead

yoavm 3y ago
I don't know where all the frustration with HA is coming from. I've only started with it last year and so far the experience is amazing. Not only that everything just works with it, it's also so simple to create fun automations, and recently I've even built a little watering system with a Pi Pico, and integrating it with HA to show graphs and controls was a breeze. Also, literally can't recall one time I had to update a config when upgrading HA. It's the one piece of software I'm never worried when pressing "update".
- Heliosmaster 3y ago
  I've only recently (less than a month ago) started to use HA and I have polar opposite impression from you. I gave up on updating because the 2 times i updated the HA Core package and the OS most of my integrations broke. The first time i bothered changing the config. The second time I decided to rollback and keep everything as is.
  - oakesm9 3y ago
    Maybe the issue is that you used the "Core" installation method which isn't a fully managed installation and only really there for "advanced" use cases. It has this warning above the installation steps: > This is an advanced installation process, and some steps might differ on your system. Considering the nature of this installation type, we assume you can handle subtle differences between this document and the system configuration you are using. When in doubt, please consider one of the other installation methods, as they might be a better fit instead. I use the container installation method and it's usually as simple as updating the version number in Docker Compose and restarting. I'd imagine the full OS image is even easier and more stable.

darkwater 3y ago

I want to use this space to instead praise publicly Home Assistant, it's IMO one of the biggest and most-useful opensource project out there, it's very professional and it let you do thing that are simply unthinkable with any other "smart hub" from a proprietary vendor. I can control a wifi device with a zigbee button, use an NFC and scan it with a mobile phone to execute some action in some software that doesn't even know what NFCs are etc etc etc. It also permits you to build a real "local-first" home automation system, which is the only way a home automation system should be, ever.

jakecopp 3y ago
Seconding this. I was able to just run it with docker compose on a cheap mini PC and it chugs away happily, interfacing with all manner of devices (Phillips/Lifx/IKEA/Airpurifier/Bunnings brands). Only gets tricky to set up devices when you're dealing with some hostile cloud based gadget that doesn't want to play nice. Unbelievable it can all be controlled offline using Siri on an iPhone, or other voice assistants. It can even display your electricity consumption by counting the LED pulses on your smart electricity meter that fires every 1000th of a kw/h, only takes a cheap ESP32 and a photodiode: https://github.com/klaasnicolaas/home-assistant-glow https://github.com/klaasnicolaas/home-assistant-glow Such a wonderful project.
- PaulWaldman 3y ago
  >Unbelievable it can all be controlled offline using Siri on an iPhone, or other voice assistants. Does your iPhone need an i ternet connection for this to work?
  - Cyph0n 3y ago
    No, just WiFi. Your HA server acts as a HomeKit bridge and exposes its entities to the iOS Home app.
rj45jackattack 3y ago
Lots of negativity in here. So this is nice. I use HA at home and it's nothing short of amazing. I primarily use Zigbee devices and they all just work. I pay Nabu Casa for the external access and Google integration. I look forward to replacing my Google Homes with HA as well.

Heliosmaster 3y ago

I love Home Assistant. I only started using less than a month ago (moved into a new house). However, the two times i needed to upgrade Core (I use Home Assistant OS, their recommended installation procedure), it broke. The first time they had changed the spec of the 'correct' way of the YAML config file. Which means I didn't have an integration until i fixed the file manually (they deprecated something not gracefully). The second time I don't know: I couldn't see anymore my Viessman Heater and check everything related to my hot water / heating so I gave up and rolled back. I am a Clojure developer where there's almost never breaking changes, so this is a good reminder to not take that for granted. I think this is an aspect they have to improve a lot, if they want to cater to people who don't want a new hobby.

michaelmior 3y ago
I've been using Home Assistant for several years and I can count on hand the number of times I've had breaking upgrades. These were always pretty clearly explained in the release notes. I think the nature of the broad scope of Home Assistant is such that different users may have very different experiences depending on what integrations they use. But I don't think it's generally as bad as your comment suggests.
- wolrah 3y ago
  > I think the nature of the broad scope of Home Assistant is such that different users may have very different experiences depending on what integrations they use. I think this is a common problem with "hub" projects that intend to bridge together multiple incompatible technologies. I work in VoIP and have been using Asterisk in one way or another for over 20 years. That project is even named after the wildcard character because originally it was intended to be able to connect any kind of telecom technology from analog to TDM to all sorts of VoIP. As the world moved on and most everyone has standardized around SIP as the future those of us who run all-SIP systems and/or common analog/TDM interfaces have generally been able to upgrade willy-nilly with little to no trouble, but there's always "that one guy" who has rigged up something where a call comes in over a SIP-GSM gateway, gets sent over an H.323 trunk to another box elsewhere in the world, then rings to a SCCP phone and of course they're always having issues because no one else is doing anything close to that. HA has that problem to an exponentially larger degree because at least the telecom world theoretically has widely accepted standards that most equipment uses where home automation gear has a few competing standards alongside hundreds of vendor-specific APIs that may or may not be documented or even officially open for use. Someone who is just using HA to unify their lighting control across a few vendors using well-tested Zigbee and Z-Wave implementations is going to have a much easier time than the people who have rigged up a Rube Goldberg machine of integrations of varying quality.

ur-whale 3y ago

Not sure why there is some much negativity in this thread towards HA. I'm a very happy user, and there simply is nothing out there that comes close in terms of ease of use and breadth of devices supported. Sure, if you're going to (and can afford to) pay 200K USD for a vendor locked-in, turnkey home automation system, you'll get something that likely will be a little smoother and more polished that HA. For a while. The day something breaks or goes out of date, you'll have to pull out the checkbook again. And good luck integrating anything in there that does not come from the vendor in the first place. The whole HASS thing is - true - a little bit unusual, but OTOH, does work fairly flawlessly as long as you don't start making outlandish customizations to it.

izacus 3y ago
Yep, I was able to replace a whole set of really really shitty IoT vendor apps with a nice dashboard in HomeAssistant. It's now accessible for everyone in the household from any device or OS without jumping through hoops by creating multiple IoT accounts in multiple clouds. It's an incredible project (and easily extensible too for a few items of hardware that didn't have official integrations yet).

xrd 3y ago

Is anyone here using repurposed Mycroft devices with HA? Is this possible and worthwhile?

awsanswers 3y ago

I will never understand the petty gripes people have about HA. This category of software requires a community keeping the integration ecosystem up to date. Software with easy to understand abstractions and no frills UI/UX makes it easy to hack on without having to grok complexity. A base project for home automation centralization free of big name companies is inherently valuable software and a public good.

walth 3y ago
I don't think you'll find much software that touches the day-to-day life of the average user as much as Home Assistant does. Living through breaking backwards compatibility and deprecations I think is the paint point- just continued paper cuts for the grumpy here. it's easy to lose sight of how great a piece of software it is
- organsnyder 3y ago
  > I don't think you'll find much software that touches the day-to-day life of the average user as much as Home Assistant does. This is very true. Whenever I mess around with my homelab cluster (the current iteration is going to be the stable one, I promise!), Home Assistant is the service that needs to work—even though I've built our home automation system to not preclude manual control.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nomel 3y ago
  My Samsung, Google, Wyze, and car charger integrations slowly stopped working. I'm replacing everything with dumb stuff again, because the breakage (not usually HA's fault) is just too annoying. This stuff needs to be an appliance, or managed by someone else, to make sense.
  - Avamander 3y ago
    I just took the ZigBee approach. A vendor can't (usually) remove or break the features available and it'll just work for years and years. Though such an approach doesn't work with many other integrations.

polivier 3y ago

I've never really been into home automation, but when I stumbled upon Philips Hue bulbs on sale for $5 at Home Depot a few years ago, I went ahead a bought a few. It turns out that they are great to wake up the kids on a schedule in the morning. I used the Philips app because it worked well enough that I couldn't be bothered to look for alternatives. Then recently I got a notification saying that the app wouldn't work without a Philips account. Yeah, no thanks. The bulbs don't directly work with Home Assistant for protocol reasons (I think). I went ahead a bought a ConBee II dongle, which is a kind of USB stick that interfaces with the Philips bulbs (and devices from other companies). Plug that into a Raspberry Pi that has Home Assistant installed and you got yourself a single app that can manage smart devices from almost all imaginable companies. It works very well for my use case. If you have devices from several different manufacturers, you should definitely look into HA to have a single app manage everything, and to future-proof your setup against shady moves by some these companies.

agloe_dreams 3y ago
> The bulbs don't directly work with Home Assistant for protocol reasons They are based on the Zigbee networking standard, that's why you had to buy the stick. It is effectively a networking adapter like a wifi usb adapter. That said, you can buy most other Zigbee devices now as well. Ikea has far cheaper Zigbee switches than Hue or almost anyone and you can configure them to also cross control other HA features.
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  Yup. I got mad at Hue for forcing an account, so I got a $20 USB zigbee hub and spent 2 hours swapping all my Hue stuff over to it with zigbee2mqtt with Home Assistant. I've never felt better about my ability as a consumer to give a vendor the middle finger. I gleefully tweeted them some pics of my Hue hub in the trash. https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/ https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/
  - smith7018 3y ago
    I recently did the same and have been thrilled with it though I'm sad that the bulbs don't transition to new colors. They immediately change which looks a little jarring.

gaganyaan 3y ago

Are they still gallivanting their way around the internet being assholes? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277 I still use HA but haven't upgraded in a good while. Partially because of the switch away from YAML, and partially because that link left a pretty sour taste in my mouth.

Semaphor 3y ago
The company does not come off as an asshole at all, unlike the nixos person who came to their forums.
anonymous_sorry 3y ago
Wild. I recognise that I'm starting to become more dependent on Home Assistant. It offers me a lot of value, but this makes me rather worried.
asylteltine 3y ago
Who cares and there was no such switch away from yaml
- gaganyaan 3y ago
  https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/04/14/the-future-of-yaml/ https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/04/14/the-future-of-... Just one relevant quote: > Any new integration that communicates with devices and/or services, must use configuration via the UI. Configuration via YAML is only allowed in very rare cases, which will be determined on a case by case basis.
  - asylteltine 3y ago
    It’s misleading at best. You can configure literally everything via yaml including your dashboard. Mine runs custom js and css for crying out loud. Even if they changed some options that can’t be configured via yaml which I haven’t encountered, what’s the actual damage to you?

spandextwins 3y ago

Fragile but great work!

viccuad 3y ago

I wonder how a home assistant built with an Entity Component System architecture would look like.

Mashimo 3y ago

Oh neat Today I learned that if you have residency in Denmark can just log into eloverblik.dk and see yearly, monthly, daily and up to hourly statistics about your energy consumption. Going back to 2021 for me. And it has an API, for which there is an HA plugin. No special hardware or account required. Fantastic.

8fingerlouie 3y ago
It goes even further back. Mine goes back to 2013, though "recent" changes with heat pump and EVs makes the data points kinda moot. As for the HA plugin, sadly the data is delayed by ~48 hours, so you can't use it for the energy monitor plugin.

goodlinks 3y ago

I love HA and will persist with it. Main complaint is that it (and more so its docker containers) want access to the things that are not documented or configurable. E.g. it tries to contact DNS other than the configured one and i cannot figure out what exactly it needs access to to allow updates to work. This is especially important for home automation tools as i want them as far from the internet as possible

onedr0p 3y ago
If you want to try, I build and maintain a rootless home-assistant container (which they refuse to support) that shouldn't have the issue. Container: https://github.com/onedr0p/containers/pkgs/container/home-assistant https://github.com/onedr0p/containers/pkgs/container/home-as... Source: https://github.com/onedr0p/containers https://github.com/onedr0p/containers

nunez 3y ago

I love HA but hate how manufacturers are going all-in on preventing people from integrating their devices into the platform without an alternative. Chamberlain MyQ did this by turning on CloudFlare Super Bot Fight and 429'ing anything that doesn't look like it came from their app. That's fine and reasonable, but I can't even pay to create an OAuth client, even though I am paying for their Tesla integration, and they provide no pathways for integrating with Apple HomeKit or Alexa. I don't want to use a billion apps to control my house. HomeKit was supposed to solve this, but companies just won't let up.

404mm 3y ago
MyQ was my reason for trying HA. When I saw that the plug-in keeps hitting their API over and over, my excitement faded. I know Chamberlain are the ones causing this issue to begin with (missing HomeKit integration) but DDOSing somebody’s API is not a solution. My experience with HA came to an end when my gate unexpectedly opened on its own - and based on the log in the phone app, it came from HA.
- tbyehl 3y ago
  MyQ had a HomeKit bridge... which they cancelled [1]. My experience with it was that, aside from eliminating the Internet/cloud dependency, it didn't make the MyQ experience any more reliable overall and I'm much happier with ATHOM's ESPHome-based kit. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/23/23318157/chamberlain-myq-home-bridge-hub-discontinued-homekit https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/23/23318157/chamberlain-myq-...
  - 404mm 3y ago
    I have a Meross garage door opener and it has been rock solid for 2 years. Not a single hiccup or miss. The issue I’d like to solve is my driveway gate. It’s too far from WiFi and I don’t want to run any cables. It’s Homelink and MyQ compatible but that’s about it. I suppose I could take one wireless remote and replace the switch with a HomeKit compatible relay. lol

nirav72 3y ago

I switched from Samsung's Smarthub to HASS - been really happy with the move. Took me a while to wrap my head around some of the manual configuration. Regardless, due to strong community support, HASS plays nice with devices that I could never get to work with Samsung's HA.

stvsu 3y ago

HA is so great. It can be used for much more than "home automation/IoT", and I find myself using it as a piece of infrastructure for other self hosted stuff. For example, rather than sending SMTP email logs for backup jobs, I just push that data to a HA webhook. I also use it for scraping alerts: once the scraper fires a trigger, it pushes a webhook to Home Assistant, which sends me a push notification on my iPhone. Great all around tool -- for the house, but for a bunch of other random stuff too!

tibbon 3y ago

The only negative thing I can say about HASS is that getting it running in Kubernetes with a USB Zigbee/Zwave adapter is a real pain. I've got a local cluster and had it working once, but had to rebuild everything for some unrelated reason, and haven't been able to get it consistently working since. There are too many in-built assumptions about how you're running it and the USB access. Documentation assumes that _maybe_ you're using an old version with some Helm chart. I'm normally pretty good at getting anything running in k8s quickly, but this is difficult! I'm going to say "screw it" and just run it bare on a Pi soon instead.

fnordpiglet 3y ago
What benefit would running it in k8s have? I’ve been running it on a bare pi for years without issue and have never once thought I needed abstractions upon abstractions… is this more a “because I can” sort of thing?
- NortySpock 3y ago
  High availability, I assume. I'm running HA in docker-compose (no USB device needs in my use case) , but being able to have docker-compose be the default tool that handles all of the external settings means I get something pretty close to Infrastructure-as-code, and that is nice for piece of mind and simplifying how the backup-and-restore process will work. Plus I can be very deliberate about the pace at which I upgrade HA versions.
- tibbon 3y ago
  Having one way to deploy software is great. If I want to run 10 different home services (Pihole, Minecraft server, Plex, whatever), I'd prefer to not need different ways of updating/backing up/provisioning each. Ideally K8s w/Flux is pretty great for this, as I can just make a change in SCM and then let it rip. Hardware dies? Drop in a new one and keep going. Backups handled by the larger system, instead of individual computers. Additionally, my VPN/DNS and other networking setups with CloudFlare zero trust and MetalLB make it really easy to securely access it from anywhere for whatever service I need, with minimal fuss. But... getting the USB parts working with K8s is so annoying, as their assumptions around using Docker or Containderd are pretty fixed. Obviously I need to set an affinity/requirement of the node having the USB device, but even after that it just doesn't seem happy. I can see the device in HA, but it never connects.

samldev 3y ago

Shameless plug of my Go library for writing Home Assistant automations - for any HA users out there that want to be able to just write code instead of fussing with UI (built-in automations, Node Red, etc) https://github.com/saml-dev/gome-assistant https://github.com/saml-dev/gome-assistant

nusl 3y ago

I’m looking for reasons to use Home Assistant. I know a few folks using it actively in their lives for very many things. Someday I’ll have a good use case but maybe for now I can have it turn the lights off.

shepherdjerred 3y ago
One really cool thing it can do is adjust the color temperature based on the position of the sun in the sky. The lights throughout my house are cool during the day, and warm at night. It's quite nice! https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting

psyclobe 3y ago

These updates keep breaking my seemingly very brittle series of automations and glue holding my house together. As much as I love ha it still it pretty high maintenance

BrandoElFollito 3y ago

This thread is very interesting as it shows how difficult it is to provide a solution for everyday use, but that also requires some head scratching. With this in mind, I am surprised by the fact that people complain about HA. Software that uses words such as YAML, Integration etc. is obviously not a TV that requires a remote with 5 buttons. I would not complain about my TV not making coffee. I use HA for many years now and I had it breaking exactly once, at a key change. I had automated updates at that time and it just taught me to upgrade manually and read the release notes. This is the "price" you pay for a dynamic, complex system. I found it getting simpler (and more obscure) with time and overall I think it is a good thing. I used to have everything in YAML files and getting frustrated by the UI. Now I changed my mind and do not care anymore about renaming a device directly in the UI, even though I do not know where the change is (actually I know but this is not the place you want to dig in). It just works and I like home automation but it is not my full time job either. The learning curve is not smooth. It starts pretty much flat and then there are cliffs you climb through "eureka!" moments when you understand what is what and how it is connected. It takes some time. The automations went a great way (very great) from the time they were completely crazy all in YAML to today where you can do most of the things in th eUI. I used the YAML version for a short time, wrote my own, discovered AppDaemon, discovered pyscript and finally (the trip above lasted a few years) I am back to the built-in solution. Nothing beats a toggle switch to disable an automation at 4am in the morning from your bed. The documentation is a bit weird. It is very complete, but quite difficult to master. There are still things I do not understand, I see them in the documentation but still do not understand after reading it. Fortunately there is the community which is awesome. I think all the questions I ever had were answered. There is a big "but" though: it is very helpful when you are a beginner or an intermediate user, but you are mostly on your own for more advanced things. It is not that someone does not want to help, it is rather that there are so many possibilities with HA that you are likely to hit unchartered territory at some point if you want to become an advanced user. Otherise you will be fine. In conclusion: THANK YOU VERY MUCH HOME ASSISTANT (but my wife hates you because everything works only 90% of the time, but when it works it is awesome :))

khaki54 3y ago

Home assistant is really awesome. You can do a lot of crazy stuff with it and it's reliable. The best thing is you can build custom views in the PWA (I think per user as well) and you can make WAF and KAF go through the roof! I used it initially because when my kids were toddlers they would get up and turn on the lights in the middle of the night and play or leave them on. I set up some rules so it would block turning on the light between 8 and 6 but let the bathroom come on for 5 minutes at a dim level. WAF = Wife acceptance factor KAF = Kid acceptance factor