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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 professi

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.
- asylteltine 3y ago
  I don’t understand the negativity at all. HA rivals or exceeds commercial automation systems like crestron, RTI, etc. clearly those people don’t have any industry experience. I’ve generally never had an issue with HA beyond my own fault, like a buggy integration.
  - MPSimmons 3y ago
    Home Assistant is an amazing project. I use it a ton, and I deeply appreciate what they've done. HOWEVER, Lovelace specifically is pretty terrible. Having used Grafana extensively, trying to use Lovelace to arrange a UI is so far backwards that it's constantly grating to try to create or modify dashboards. I really wish there was a way to use Grafana as the UI and embed cards as panels. The ability to drag and drop, resize, and move UI elements would be a godsend, but instead it feels like I'm writing Tk-style UI arrangement in yaml, and it's awful, so I do it as infrequently as possible.
    - darkwater 3y ago
      On that I agree, giving what's possible with opensource UIs like Grafana's, it could be probably borrowed (I mean, the whole JS code) in Lovelace as well. But I guess there is some debt from early versions that makes that more complicated.
    - asylteltine 3y ago
      That’s true. Lovelace needs js and css to look pretty. Most dashboards are terrible. I hope they dump it
    - ender341341 3y ago
XorNot 3y ago
Yep, I'm relatively new to Home Assistant but love it. Combined with ESPHome, I've got most of the lights in my house controlled (via switch changes, not smart bulbs), and my all my air conditioners via the MHI-AC-Ctrl project[1,2] (which is fantastic - ordered the boards from JLC-PCB, parts from Ali-Express (AUD$2.50 ESP8266 boards), told ESPHome to program everything and plugged them into the ports and...it all just worked!). Just got a Mitsubishi Electric (which is different to MHI) and a Daikin at my parents house to get online - but code for both exists and I suspect the MHI boards can be reprogrammed to fulfill the role without any hardware changes. It's incredible that the future we wanted in like, 2010 can be had and had without selling your soul to the cloud: I can leave the house, and turn off all my lights and AC's while walking out the door, or get notified if I've left my garage open - without a single cloud provider dependency, all open-source. EDIT: And yeah...I'm starting to eye anything which has a required cloud connection as "maybe I should just crack that open and see if we swap an ESP in..." - haven't done it yet. [1] https://github.com/absalom-muc/MHI-AC-Ctrl/ https://github.com/absalom-muc/MHI-AC-Ctrl/ [2] https://github.com/ginkage/MHI-AC-Ctrl-ESPHome https://github.com/ginkage/MHI-AC-Ctrl-ESPHome
hammock 3y ago
Is there a beginner non-coder friendly HA “getting started” guide that someone here could recommend? I’m interested in investing in an ecosystem of smart switches, blinds, thermostat and music that is future proof and I can take with me as I rent Have some experience with ecobee and smart switches and trying to get onto Airplay 2 currently
- vorpalhex 3y ago
  HomeAssistants official plug'n play solution is HomeAssistant Green: https://www.home-assistant.io/green https://www.home-assistant.io/green It's basically a mini computer (sbc) with homeassistant preinstalled and ready to go. Do expect that HA will expect some attention every few months. It's not a "set and forget" thing.
  - kkielhofner 3y ago
    One of the things I'm really surprised by about HA/Nabu Casa is the complete lack of an LTS branch/releases. Things related to homes are measured in years or decades. HA has gotten better about it but there are still occasional "cross your fingers and pray" scenarios when doing upgrades because every single release combines new functionality, fixes, breaking changes, and introduces new issues (of course). People come to rely on things like their lights working and upgrade management is a tough spot - "Oh this integration broke because something else changed an API so I need to upgrade but let's find out how much time I need to update my config and hunt down any other issues". This is one of the reasons things like Lutron are so expensive. You can have it installed and come back to the house 10 years later and everything will generally work as it did a decade ago. For things like Nabu Casa cloud and their own hardware I'm sure plenty of people would pay a fairly significant premium for a subscriber-only LTS release that balances HA power, local, and flexible with Lutron user experience. That said open source monetization is tough, and consumer monetization is as well. Combine the two and it sounds like a complete nightmare to me.
    - vorpalhex 3y ago
      I think the answer to this is generally to pin to a working version and expect to upgrade once a year unless there's a security patch. I think the answer the HA folks would give is to point out that they are still under very heavy development and "longterm stability" just isn't something that the project has reached in a way that supports LTS. I don't think this answer is wrong - HA today is amazingly different than HA from two years ago or three years ago. It is painful and it is why I do caution people that adopting HA means some regular investment in tooling around with it on occasion. There's a big gap still before it's ready for set-and-forget non-technical audiences.
deleted 3y ago
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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.

asylteltine 3y ago
I don’t understand the negativity at all. HA rivals or exceeds commercial automation systems like crestron, RTI, etc. clearly those people don’t have any industry experience. I’ve generally never had an issue with HA beyond my own fault, like a buggy integration.
- MPSimmons 3y ago
  Home Assistant is an amazing project. I use it a ton, and I deeply appreciate what they've done. HOWEVER, Lovelace specifically is pretty terrible. Having used Grafana extensively, trying to use Lovelace to arrange a UI is so far backwards that it's constantly grating to try to create or modify dashboards. I really wish there was a way to use Grafana as the UI and embed cards as panels. The ability to drag and drop, resize, and move UI elements would be a godsend, but instead it feels like I'm writing Tk-style UI arrangement in yaml, and it's awful, so I do it as infrequently as possible.
  - darkwater 3y ago
    On that I agree, giving what's possible with opensource UIs like Grafana's, it could be probably borrowed (I mean, the whole JS code) in Lovelace as well. But I guess there is some debt from early versions that makes that more complicated.
  - asylteltine 3y ago
    That’s true. Lovelace needs js and css to look pretty. Most dashboards are terrible. I hope they dump it
  - ender341341 3y ago

XorNot 3y ago

Yep, I'm relatively new to Home Assistant but love it. Combined with ESPHome, I've got most of the lights in my house controlled (via switch changes, not smart bulbs), and my all my air conditioners via the MHI-AC-Ctrl project[1,2] (which is fantastic - ordered the boards from JLC-PCB, parts from Ali-Express (AUD$2.50 ESP8266 boards), told ESPHome to program everything and plugged them into the ports and...it all just worked!). Just got a Mitsubishi Electric (which is different to MHI) and a Daikin at my parents house to get online - but code for both exists and I suspect the MHI boards can be reprogrammed to fulfill the role without any hardware changes. It's incredible that the future we wanted in like, 2010 can be had and had without selling your soul to the cloud: I can leave the house, and turn off all my lights and AC's while walking out the door, or get notified if I've left my garage open - without a single cloud provider dependency, all open-source. EDIT: And yeah...I'm starting to eye anything which has a required cloud connection as "maybe I should just crack that open and see if we swap an ESP in..." - haven't done it yet. [1] https://github.com/absalom-muc/MHI-AC-Ctrl/ https://github.com/absalom-muc/MHI-AC-Ctrl/ [2] https://github.com/ginkage/MHI-AC-Ctrl-ESPHome https://github.com/ginkage/MHI-AC-Ctrl-ESPHome

hammock 3y ago

Is there a beginner non-coder friendly HA “getting started” guide that someone here could recommend? I’m interested in investing in an ecosystem of smart switches, blinds, thermostat and music that is future proof and I can take with me as I rent Have some experience with ecobee and smart switches and trying to get onto Airplay 2 currently

vorpalhex 3y ago
HomeAssistants official plug'n play solution is HomeAssistant Green: https://www.home-assistant.io/green https://www.home-assistant.io/green It's basically a mini computer (sbc) with homeassistant preinstalled and ready to go. Do expect that HA will expect some attention every few months. It's not a "set and forget" thing.
- kkielhofner 3y ago
  One of the things I'm really surprised by about HA/Nabu Casa is the complete lack of an LTS branch/releases. Things related to homes are measured in years or decades. HA has gotten better about it but there are still occasional "cross your fingers and pray" scenarios when doing upgrades because every single release combines new functionality, fixes, breaking changes, and introduces new issues (of course). People come to rely on things like their lights working and upgrade management is a tough spot - "Oh this integration broke because something else changed an API so I need to upgrade but let's find out how much time I need to update my config and hunt down any other issues". This is one of the reasons things like Lutron are so expensive. You can have it installed and come back to the house 10 years later and everything will generally work as it did a decade ago. For things like Nabu Casa cloud and their own hardware I'm sure plenty of people would pay a fairly significant premium for a subscriber-only LTS release that balances HA power, local, and flexible with Lutron user experience. That said open source monetization is tough, and consumer monetization is as well. Combine the two and it sounds like a complete nightmare to me.
  - vorpalhex 3y ago
    I think the answer to this is generally to pin to a working version and expect to upgrade once a year unless there's a security patch. I think the answer the HA folks would give is to point out that they are still under very heavy development and "longterm stability" just isn't something that the project has reached in a way that supports LTS. I don't think this answer is wrong - HA today is amazingly different than HA from two years ago or three years ago. It is painful and it is why I do caution people that adopting HA means some regular investment in tooling around with it on occasion. There's a big gap still before it's ready for set-and-forget non-technical audiences.

deleted 3y ago

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