18 ms·

Home Assistant: Three years later

276 points by eamonnsullivan 3y ago

illusive4080 3y ago
I’m also cautiously optimistic about matter. I have a server I’m sending to someone else’s house, and if it crashes, I want to use a smart plug to cycle it. I have a Eufy smart plug I got for free. Is there a better alternative? This persons house has no automation and no smart hub. Unfortunately I’ll either need something cloud based or something I can statically point to my own Home Assistant running in my house. Is this cloud based Eufy plug my best choice?
- madaxe_again 3y ago
  Given that you’re planning on operating it remotely, cloud based is just fine, as if their internet is down, and it’s local, there’s nothing you can do anyway.
- soccerties 3y ago
  I use PiKVM to give the NAS I have running at a friend's house for remote backups IPMI like accessibility. https://pikvm.org/ https://pikvm.org/
- briHass 3y ago
  The TP Link Kasa plugs are well documented and have a dead simple TCP payload to turn them on/off. They also have the cloud option, but I don't see why you couldn't use a wireguard tunnel or something from their router if you wanted to avoid the cloud. Not that I'd recommend it, but you could probably just port forward an obscure port directly to the Kasa plug (DHCP to a static IP).
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > This persons house has no automation and no smart hub. There are devices with "watchdog" features that can cycle power automatically if an ICMP ping fails. https://shop.netio.eu/netio-power-sockets/powercable-2pz/ https://shop.netio.eu/netio-power-sockets/powercable-2pz/ Also, people have rolled their own watchdog solutions using Sonoff devices flashed with Tasmota. https://community.home-assistant.io/t/watchdog-device-using-sonoff-with-tasmota/83587 https://community.home-assistant.io/t/watchdog-device-using-...
  - plagiarist 3y ago
    130€? That better guarantee some uptime. I can see why people are rolling their own.
- windexh8er 3y ago
  You can do this with a $30 Sonoff S31 running ESPHome [0]. Since the Sonoff wall switch can run a ping sensor against your server you could create a watchdog automation right on the S31 to shut off the mains power to the S31 switch and turn back on after X seconds. There are other ways you could have the S31 do operational checks but ultimately ESPHome is probably an interesting consideration and supported by tons of off the shelf hardware. [0] https://esphome.io/ https://esphome.io/
- hcfman 3y ago
  Shelly plugS
- bennyp101 3y ago
  I've used things like this SMS plug[0] before for places that I needed to power cycle to bring connection back. [0] https://cpc.farnell.com/tekview/powertxtuk/gsm-power-socket-powertxt-uk/dp/TE07071 https://cpc.farnell.com/tekview/powertxtuk/gsm-power-socket-...
madaxe_again 3y ago
I switched from openhab to HA about a year ago and haven’t looked back - it’s absolutely night and day in terms of configuration and discovery. My use case is maybe a little extreme - I live off grid, and I have HA managing our picogrid (dump loads, shifting charge between battery banks, throttling the hydro, etc.), our water pumps, monitoring filters and telling me when I need to change them, and then of course all the usual climate control etc. Ironically the one use case I have no interest in is the most common one - lighting.
- nixgeek 3y ago
  Do you write about your picogrid and other MEP stuff anywhere?
  - madaxe_again 3y ago
    Not yet as it continues to be a work in progress - still a few bits around frequency shifting that I’m not thrilled with - but I actually need to do a thorough writeup of it all fairly soon just in case I have a chainsaw accident or whatnot.
- matthew-wegner 3y ago
  I guess power draw on lights is pretty low, but one thing I do with my Home Assistant setup is aggressively turn off other rooms (and I'm on grid): If office computer is used, and "home alone" mode is on, turn off all non-office rooms. If I hit play on something on the main TV, or my laptop is used and its network MAC is the couch dock, turn off all rooms except living room, etc... (I have a guest mode that disables these things, which is automatically enabled when my partner uses her door keycode)
  - madaxe_again 3y ago
    Yeah - as we’re off grid with a well managed storage system we essentially have no limit on power, usually a surplus, so lighting (all LED, of course) is just negligible - if I turn every single light in the place on we barely draw 250W. For energy saving, I do have it do stuff like turn off the underfloor heating/AC when we go out, or when we are for whatever reason low on power. Now, if they were incandescent it would be a different story entirely - it would be more like 3kW! I do actually have one small lighting project in mind - it’s about 500 meters from our house to the mill/guest house, and I’m toying with the idea of having little LoRa/solar fairy lights that turn on and off as you walk from one to the other at night, based on device presence, zone by zone, mostly because it would feel magical.
karlshea 3y ago
I'm also a Home Assistant convert: I originally installed it to record history from my Nest when the building was having some boiler issues and Homebridge was too hard to monitor. Then on install it auto-discovered a ton and I've slowly kept adding more and more smart devices. I went the same way as the OP did where all of the automations are very unobtrusive or simple, or do things like monitor some plants. Very happy with it, and I'd encourage paying for their cloud service for remote access just to throw the project some cash!
- artdigital 3y ago
  > Homebridge was too hard to monitor Curious about this. I tried HA a couple of times but kept going back to Homebridge. I find it far simpler than HA, and easy to write my own plugins for devices that don't have functionality yet For me HB was the lighter brother of HA, and HA the full-fledged thing
  - import 3y ago
    HB never be a lighter brother of HA. Hb is simpler because it only covers functionality of one HA plugin (HomeKit bridge)
  - karlshea 3y ago
    I needed some graphs and was using a pretty janky project to generate them from Homebridge, so tried HA since data collection was built in.
asveikau 3y ago
I also use the docker deployment method. I started out with the VM image, which was a good low commitment "gateway drug" to try it out and get to know it... But a big downside I witnessed is their "haos" distro handles disk failures very poorly. I hit that twice, and recovery was not fun. It basically put up an infinite spinner on the web interface, until I messed with the disk image somewhere else. Haos does not even have fsck. Now my docker setup runs out of ZFS and I'm happy. There is no update UI or addons but if you're comfortable with a little mild sysadmin style stuff it's fine.
- spockz 3y ago
  I’m also running home assistant in a docker container. The only thing I miss is support for some plugins that need to install extra by components like mqtt. It appears that can be done transparently in the Haos image and is manual in the docker flavour.
- XorNot 3y ago
  You can install HACS into the docker image FYI and it'll persist, which gets you a pretty huge chunk of the HAOS experience. *EDIT: I meant HACS, HACS is what I meant.
  - asveikau 3y ago
    Hmm, I just read about how to do it. I am already running Debian which is one of the requirements. Maybe will look into it later, but for now it seems like more work for not very much gain. Thanks for the tip.
    - karlshea 3y ago
      I have HACS[0] installed in my Docker image, I use it for exactly one integration and the initial setup seemed a little dodgy but it's been pain-free for a couple of years now. [0]: https://hacs.xyz/ https://hacs.xyz/
      - asveikau 3y ago
suyula 3y ago
I'm so grateful for what Home Assistant has done for home automation and compatibility, but its focus on dashboards and phone interfaces seems to lead everyone who uses it in exactly the wrong direction. I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of what you like about 'Home Assistant' is Node-RED and Zigbee. They are two of the big building blocks for making a home that is more convenient to live in rather than less (the third being an MQTT server.)
- pkulak 3y ago
  Exactly. If you have a “dashboard” that you have to use more than a couple times a week, you’re doing it wrong. Well, in my opinion, at least.
  - shellfishgene 3y ago
    I don't know, many installations like the one OP describes have many more functions that light switches etc., like turning on scenes and automations. You could of course have buttons lying around everywhere, or a panel on the wall, but I'm not sure that's much better than using the phone dashboard app.
- eamonnsullivan 3y ago
  Author here: Yeah, I cut that out at the last minute, but my feeling is that if you need to use the dashboard, the automation has failed. I put the app on my wife's phone, but she almost never uses it. She does use a touch screen on the wall, though, to bump up the heat, but that's about it.
  - apexalpha 3y ago
    That depends on what you want to do, though. I like the energy dashboard a lot, it has literally all data in a single view including cost and PV. There's nothing to automate: the dashboard is the point. I also don't automate my lights. I don't want to automate my lights because our life isn't run on such a tight schedule. It always ends up less useful than a light switch in the wall. What I do want is to turn off all lights in one go when we go out, and quickly glance at the status of lights all over the house. For these kinda things a dashboard is perfect.
adamtaylor_13 3y ago
My experience with Home Assistant has been quite similar to the author’s. I’m also a software engineer so the general lack of stability around device changes always makes me feel like I’ve volunteered to pick up that 8-point ticket on the last Wednesday of the sprint. But when everything works, it’s such a cool experience. I hope Matter begins to make local-first a bigger priority as well. That’s a huge concern I’ve recently begun to develop. Also I still haven’t figured out how to combine a mechanical and digital solution. Like I want light switches that match my server state for my lights. If I change the switch via my phone, I want the switches to change as well so that the physical switch is always the true state of the light.
- hughesjj 3y ago
  Can some of the push button/toggle ones work for you?
- CSSer 3y ago
  It sounds like you want Lutron Casetas.
  - xp84 3y ago
    The newest Casetas are called Diva, and are basically like rockers that are stateless (return to a neutral position after tappdiva, again you can't have a true state-perfect switch, unless it's motorized and to my knowledge nobody makes that.
    - karlshea 3y ago
      I have a couple of these and they're great, it feels (and looks) like a regular switch.
    - timthorn 3y ago
      There was a UK start-up a few years back that did make motorised light switches but they didn't stick around long. I'm blanking on the name, though.
ikidd 3y ago
I was a rabid Node Red automationist until they managed to get automations more WYSIWYG oriented. I could write the YAML but it was annoying to debug; NR was much more useful that way, so that's where I went. I'm loving the results of Year of the Voice, and there's a contest on now about how to best leverage the hardware and software to build voice interactions. It's a pretty exciting time to be using it.
password4321 3y ago
Related today: Zigbee and Z-Wave are the best part of my smart home https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39344786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39344786
- eamonnsullivan 3y ago
  A section I cut out of the blog before posting was my experiences with Z-Wave. Most of my smart plugs are Z-Wave, which was part of my issue with Zigbee coverage/instability (smart plugs are good routers/repeaters). I like Z-Wave, but the stuff is expensive and options (for different types of devices) are fewer, so I've generally followed the economic incentives and ended up with many more Zigbee devices (38) than Z-Wave ones (7). Also, Z-Wave is more power-hungry. I have one Z-Wave motion sensor and I need to change the battery every few months. My double-As in my Zigbee motion sensors last two years.
  - mrgaro 3y ago
    Would you mind (somehow) sharing the source of your current node-red configurations? I'm having quite the same setup, but I really liked your approach and I would love to speed run by taking a closer look what you have. Free time is especially hard to come by now with a young kid :)
hcfman 3y ago
You can mitigate the SD risk by using an in-memory overlayFS mounted OS. The original one of the pi is for the whole image. For the Jetson series I create partitions so the OS indeed is memory overlayFS but there’s also a rw data partition and a ro re-mountable configuration portion.
- bonzini 3y ago
  The SD card in my case only holds the boot partition (U-Boot, kernel, initramfs). Everything else runs off NFS.
  - hcfman 3y ago
    Indeed, another viable approach.
  - m463 3y ago
    that's a lot of points of failure. Now you depend on the SD card, the network and the nfs server... just saying. I have a home network and sometimes when power goes out, I've have strangeness when things don't come up as expected.
    - bonzini 3y ago
      It lowers the chance of failure of the most vulnerable part. The NAS existed before and had RAID and backups anyway. And if the switch fails I can't access home assistant anyway. The more important part is that all automations are just nice to have things and not needed to "run" the house. It's for stuff like "charge the car when the sun is high" or "notify me when the washing machine has finished".
Sleaker 3y ago
Also been running ha for about 3 years, but have been veerrrry slow to add devices and only had a couple automations setup around Christmas. I actually tried th smart plugs thing and found the hue bulbs to be a way better experience because I want the RGB and dimmable capabilities on those as opposed to just on/off, it's something I might look into for some of the other areas of the house though. Nice write-up!
wkat4242 3y ago
I like home assistant a lot but i do think they change too much for the sake of it. Every upgrade breaks someone something. Either some Yaml format has to be changed like from under platform to sensor, some integration I was using breaks, something I still need to use is being deprecated. Often for arbitrary reasons. I would prefer more focus on continuity. Especially the stuff that's already in there should just keep working. The problem is this disruption makes me feel really disinclined to update but when leaving it multiple months it's harder to find out what breaks beside I have to go hunt for all the intermediate changelogs.
- karlshea 3y ago
  I hear this a lot but I'm guessing it comes from more of the power-user experience. I use it a decent amount but only have 2 yaml-based integrations set up, and I haven't really run into any upgrade issues, to the point where my Docker setup is auto-updated.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Yeah but this is one of my concerns. They're trying to make it a mass market product so they can make more money with it. And the interests of the initial supporters from the time where everything had to be configured in Yaml aren't covered as well.
- eamonnsullivan 3y ago
  I keep it up-to-date religiously and rarely run into breaking issues, but I have occasionally. I keep an eye on the release notes (https://rc.home-assistant.io/blog/categories/release-notes/ https://rc.home-assistant.io/blog/categories/release-notes/), so I usually have at least a week's notice when a breaking change is coming and can adjust. I used the Met Office integration in some of my automations (setting a fan's speed based on the outside temp) and spotted that it was going to be disabled, and switched to Accuweather before this month's version came out.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Yeah but it's a lot of work to keep up with all this every month. Especially if you leave it multiple months because the info will be scattered over different release notes.
crystaln 3y ago
I have an ancient Crestron system from the 90s with a large color touch screen that came with my home. It's impressive and still works, managing an irrigation system, 3 HVACs with probably 20 damper controlled zones, lights (altho I pretty much only use Hue now), and security system. When this thing craps out, there is nobody in the world who will maintain it as far as I know. The thought of hiring someone to replace it with another Crestron seems silly and expensive given I am a software developer and should be able to hack my home automation system. OTOH I also don't want to spend my life debugging HA and don't really see myself getting around to the months of tinkering this project will require. OTOOH professional integrators for HA seem to not exist at all. HAOS yields no results on Upwork. There is little discussion of professional installers in their forums. Ideally I could hire someone to develop a system and give me a walkthrough so I can go from there. Surprisingly the HA community basically rejects the idea that professional services around the platform makes sense, basically indicating that's its too unreliable.
- jjeaff 3y ago
  the only thing unreliable about HA is that occasionally, updates can break things. Otherwise it has been rock solid for me. Put it on an Intel nuc style device with high quality SSD and you should be good for a long time.
  - jclulow 3y ago
    > occasionally, updates can break things But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the theatre?
    - Toutouxc 3y ago
      Nowadays your phone, computer, fridge and even your car get software updates that can break things. Having to keep track of one more device probably won't ruin anyone's life that much more. Also, Home Assistant updates rarely break stuff (I haven't had anything break since I started with it two years ago), and you can always not update for a few weeks.
jhoelzel 3y ago
Truth be told i installed HA on a pie about 3 years ago and have largely forgotten about it. It just works for me and what i do, all you have to do is occasionally apply updates. Granted i mainly focus on creating my own powersockets and fuses with shelly products and otherwise focus on local homekit devices. I also have some of those tuya devices and i hope to get rid of them at some point very soon. Zigbee is good for local and as long as the switch runs by clicking it too, i really have no issue nor care what its running on. I just have a secops feeling that wifi is really not what i want.
- jmacd 3y ago
  I am with you. 2.5 years running on a Pi. I also have 6 security cameras writing to a MicroSD in it which I thought was surely a recipe for disaster, but it has been rock solid. I have experienced no reliability issues and I am running everything out of Home Assistant exposed as HomeKit resources.
  - m463 3y ago
    I would back it up regularly. Alternatively you boot and run a pi off a USB stick.
iforgotpassword 3y ago
> Nothing quite disturbs your peace as sitting in a dark room, or having a light turn on in the middle of the night, because an automation has gone wrong. Hardware, in general, is also crap and I've spent too many hours trying to fix that faulty light strip, dodgy motion sensor or misbehaving sensor. This is my concern too, having started just a few months ago. A few days after switching from ZHA to z2m, suddenly one of my zigbee TRVs stayed at 22°C. I thought it was better thermostat acting up, every time I tried to lower it directly via Home assistant it would snap right back to 22. So I opened the z2m webif and was greeted with "no network route (205)" every time I tried to set a new target temp on the trv. You see, with ZHA any zigbee errors would show a popup in HA directly, but since now HA just talks to z2m via mqtt, HA never knows anything went wrong. And to add insult to injury, the trv was still sending updates of the measured ambient temperature just fine, so I didn't immediately think of a network issue.
- stinos 3y ago
  This is the thing, and the main reason I only played around with HA but never fully implemented it. Ideally for things which are controlled in 'absolute mode' you need a watchdog. Like something implemented in hardware to keep it from misbehaving. On the other hand many crucial devices have this built in. But obviously plain lights don't. What I mean is e.g.: - having HA control your heating's on/off hours, where the watchdog is the heating's thermostat making it stop heating when it's warm enough or forces heating if it gets too cold. So HA crashing and leaving the heating in heat mode might be just a waste but not a serious issue. - having HA control the wanted temperature on the other hand is more problematic, because for all I know it could misbehave and make the heating want to go to 30 degrees Celcius or to a value so low that there's no frost protection anymore, then crash and never get it out of that state anymore. And there's no watchdog anymore correcting for it. Potentially this can cause issues. Chances are small, but I don't like the idea that AFAIK these chances are much larger than standalone heating acting up like this. Likewise we can now opt for a dynamic electricy tarrif, basic idea being that for instance when you now the prices are going to drop below a certain threshold during the night you're going to tell your home battery to charge at that time. Of course the thing acts like a watchdog for itself in that it stops charging when full, but there is no watchdog keeping it from charging continuously. In other words: if it's put into charging mode and HA crashes and leaves it in charging mode then it will happily continue charging during peak hours. Not 'serious' per se but pretty stupid.
dbrgn 3y ago
For Zigbee, I can recommend using the Zigbee2MQTT (https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/ https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/) integration instead of HomeAssistant's built-in ZHA system. It might be a bit more complex to set up, but it's very powerful and works fantastically. (User "simon42" on YouTube has some good videos about the topic, but they're in German.)
- DavideNL 3y ago
  > "but it's very powerful and works fantastically" I wonder what the exact differences are. As i'm currently using ZHA and it's running fine... (mostly using Ikea devices and a few HUE bulbs.)
  - DavideNL 3y ago
    ... the only real advantage seems "more supported devices". https://youtu.be/PR-ugz1uLWc?list=PLnQ5CgUMCvdbb8UHaY3Qy12NYDkY16A6_&t=153 https://youtu.be/PR-ugz1uLWc?list=PLnQ5CgUMCvdbb8UHaY3Qy12NY... (German video)
lkdfjlkdfjlg 3y ago
This seems like hell to me. Every time something unexpected happens your mind will go into overdrive following code paths. No thank you, my mind time is too valuable for this. I want my appliances dumb.
- smt88 3y ago
  It has lots of logging. I've been using HA for months and never think about it at all.
  - lkdfjlkdfjlg 3y ago
    [flagged]
- cybrox 3y ago
  Really depends on how you use it. In my experience, the smarter you want to make your home, the more it will just get in your way, no matter how good or bad the technology is. If you use a system like HA to automate a lot of simple things, it just works™. I've been running HA for years now and I'm incredibly happy with it. Most rooms I don't spend a lot of time in have motion activated lights that sill allow me to override that with a simple wall switch, some lights turn off when I stream something on my TV and I have temperature and moisture monitoring with alerting in case something goes wrong like my washing machine blowing up.
- driverdan 3y ago
  If you set it up well it's rare for things to go wrong. The only issues I've had with automation were my own fault, such as using the wrong time. I can't remember any of my automation failing. The key is to keep it as simple as possible.
  - lkdfjlkdfjlg 3y ago
    Obviously the vast majority of the issues are my own mistakes. In no way does that detract from my point.
octodog 3y ago
Why do none of these long articles on HA ever provide proper examples of their automations?
- deely3 3y ago
  I believe because it will be a really lot of work. You will have to go step by step to review every setup and it can be not so trivial because of different devices versions, different software versions, differents in setups, etc. Like writting a program.
apexalpha 3y ago
I really wish Home Assistant had some default good dashboards. I have HA for a few years now and the Energy dashboard they made is by far the most polished one I have. The rest are basically just buttons I randomly put into it. Native floorplan would be great, too. HA is fantastic, but it has a steep learning curve on the frontend part.
- greggsy 3y ago
  The 3D floor plan component is based on SweetHome3D, and requires the dolls house to be create offline and uploaded, but there’s discussion afoot to have the JS version of the editor baked directly into the console so watch this space. As for default dashboards, I think the only real way to do this properly would be to create a wizard to help get things off the from ground. It really does need a fair understanding of (or at least the existence of) entities, devices, HACS, and the developer tools pane. And that’s just the foundational stuff you need to know about before you can even consider tinkering with platforms and entities in yaml files. Some jargon-free steps like ‘Select all of your outlets’ > ‘Select the properties you want to display’ etc. A ChatGPT configurator would be interesting, similar to the one in Pirtainer (which I admin I’ve never used).
  - apexalpha 3y ago
    A wizard would help, I think. But what's most important for me is that I don't want to setup home assistant. I want home assistant, I want the end result, but I don't want to have to build it brick by brick. I just don't have the time for that (anymore). I also think a floorplan where you can click a room and see the lights and everything is much more intuitive than a website. But also I think many things can just be assumed. Everyone has lights, for example. So why not have this be a native solution in stead of having to set it up manually. Setting up the Energy dashboard, including all the graphs, data and history etc... took less time and effort than it would take to automate a single light bulb.
    - greggsy 3y ago
      My nirvana is to be able to create a dollhouse using the LiDAR Scanner on my phone, and simply tap where device is. No modelling, just let me tap somewhere in a digital twin.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
My experience is similar to GP, if only about a year long. There's a clear point when my Home Assistant setup graduated from tinkering into serious, almost critical infrastructure at home: the moment I got A/C controls working with it. Hear the tale of the two apps: 1. Haier hOn: takes between 5 and 15 seconds to start up. Assuming it didn't randomly log you out, it takes a minute of tapping through bullshit multi-level screens, with multi-second delay between each, to get to the point when you can control a single aircon unit. Switching between units is 2-5 seconds - and you need to be careful, because if you press the phone's "back" button, it'll shut down the app, so the whole 1-minute ordeal restarts. Every 5-10 control interactions, it'll go "oops, something went wrong", and then to get state and control over units, you need to restart the app. You look at it sideways, believe it or not, restart the app. Total time to set three aircon units: some two minutes, maybe more, and a lot of frustration. My wife flat-out refused to do it, instead always asked me (as I have much more experience in quickly navigating buggy software). Myself, I hated it every time. 2. Home Assistant app: takes 2-5 seconds to cold-start into the app, less than that for warm start. The default dashboard shows all three A/Cs, with controls, temperature graphs - everything at a glance, on a single screen. And then below there are controls for floor heating and other stuff. Zero crashes. Total time to set three aircon units: 3-10 seconds. I sometimes race to see how fast can I do it. My wife loves it, I never get asked to do anything with A/C for her anymore. I'm only beginning to integrate and automate more things. Recently I upgraded a bunch of cheap (but stylish, and importantly, well-built) IKEA PM2.5 sensors with ESP8266 (decade-old NodeMCUs I had in a box), and through a bunch of graphs quickly added to another Home Assistant dashboard, we've learned a lot about what does and does not affect air quality around the house. I've also started to set up automated notifications for bad air in different rooms, because it's stupid easy to do. Another stupid easy thing to do was to make my washing machine notify both of us when it's done. Or auto-dimming that one Hue bulb my kids are using as night light. Etc. If my setup died today, nothing would stop working - a few things would become less convenient, aircon would become stupidly annoying to operate again - but we would feel it, so I'm now trying to beef the hardware durability up a bit. And yes, I ain't buying anything "smart" that can't talk well with Home Assistant anymore.
blastro 3y ago
My story: Spent weeks / months setting up a fairly sophisticated home automation set up running on a Mac Mini. Worked great for 3-4 years, occasionally I would have to re-pair all of the Z-Wave devices after a power outage, but nothing too serious. Then one day the Mac Mini died and I thought about the days/weeks of work to replace it and just decided not too. In the end, it didn't provide a ton of value beyond the shiny UI and charting abilities. It was fun but I don't think I would do it again, unless I was retired or something.
- Coloranotio 3y ago
  I have a very unsophisticated setup, would love to have a more integrated one but i also see the issue with complexity etc. In worst case i don't need it. But controling heating remotly is great to have. Being able to collect the humidity to prevent mold is also great. I hope that all of this tinkering and pushing for it, will make a much more stable and fun experience in the long term. I might have a chance to rebuild a old house, i'm still not sure if i want to put cable (some bus system, 12v or PoE/Ethernet) everywere or just using some radio based components. The biggest annoyance is defintily the energy usage of bigger things like heating valves or potentially a window or a door.
rkagerer 3y ago
The gem of wisdom at the end: And I could have saved myself a lot of heartache by avoiding cloud services. Thank you. I do not want the functionality of my home dependant on someone else's infrastructure. Or my house to stop working just 'cause the Internet is down. It's the epitome of stupid when something as simple as turning on a lightswitch has to send a message miles across the Internet and back to get the job done. John Henry Holmes is rolling in his grave laughing at us.
- plagiarist 3y ago
  I have zero idea how the demographic of people excited about Home Assistant and automation are not also, to a person, savvy enough to reject cloud services for controlling their homes. Not only for the partition hardiness, but also to avoid contract changes, being banned over ToS violations, or the company just deciding to close up shop. There was an article on HN a bit ago where Amazon dumped a customer, which deactivated a good chunk of their house. The author wrote something like, "I may consider removing Amazon from the equation over this." Fucking "consider"??? It's perplexing trying to figure out that perspective.
  - m463 3y ago
    It's hard for a "reasonable" person to follow this advice. They get something home, and it is useful, and their spouse or kids like it... but it has to be hooked to the internet. maybe it needs an account to activate. or many of the other convenient/inconvenient tricks. But I'm happy that we have home assistant and tasmota and esphome and all these other wonderful projects that route around lots of these problems.
  - marcus0x62 3y ago
    I started using HA tech at a time in my life when I had more money than time, the DIY stuff was very rough around the edges, and the cloud services I used mostly met my needs with a minimum of effort. I figured if something stopped working, I’d just go out and buy a replacement that did work. Now, a decade later, I have more time than money, the cloud services aren’t so reliable, and I’m increasingly uneasy with the implications of relying on something that can disappear (or change for the worse) at a moment’s notice. So I’m ripping all of that crap out of my digital life. That’s at least one example of how someone can be savvy enough to set up something like Home Assistant but end up with a bunch of clown crap in their house.
rsolva 3y ago
I have ran Home Assistant in my house for about 6 years, and for a tinkerer who likes to keep things local, is has been great fun! A few quick suggestions: - Do NOT use a device with a micro SDcard as the main storage! - Play around with devices, but be picky about what you use long term - Communicate with your spouse/other people in the house before experimenting :) After some crashes and hard lessons, I now run HA on a Proxmox that has two boot drives and regular snapshots/backups of the VM. This adds enough redundancy to keep things running and avoid a dark house if a disk breaks down. With great power comes great responsibility!
- thebruce87m 3y ago
  > - Do NOT use a device with a micro SDcard as the main storage! You should post why. It could be that you don’t know to buy endurance cards for wear levelling? Or you do and that’s still not good enough? Or something else entirely. Basically I can’t tell if you know more or less than I do from just the statement.
  - xolox 3y ago
    I suspect they are referring to using a Raspberry Pi and using a micro SD card as the main storage mechanism. This is known to be a bad combination that will fail at an unfortunate time, sooner rather than later. Personally I boot my Raspberry's using netboot (DHCP via dnsmasq) and NFS. However I don't run Home Assistant on a Raspberry, it runs on the "server" (headless machine) that's serving NFS .
  - rsolva 3y ago
    Sorry, I'll expound: I used a high quality endurance card, and it worked fine for a few years, until it didn't :) The SDcard started failing when I was on a prolonged Christmas holiday – and Home Assistant was responsible for keeping my house above freezing temps when it was below -10℃ outside. Luckily I have nice neighbors who helped me out! Anyway, I had planed to move HA away from the rPi3 for a while, but you know how it is, more important things keep happening, so this crash forced my hand. SDcards are a gamble, especially in a device you want to keep running for years and years. I feel much better having it running om my Proxmox with dual boot disks and regular backups, so WHEN a disk is calling quits, it still keeps on working and I have time to replace the broken disk.
highdeserthackr 3y ago
Absolutely love HA, it's been deployed for 6 years now. I try and run as much as possible through a mosquitto server to keep things decoupled. The biggest pain has been ZWave devices. I've had multiple in wall switches croak for no obvious reason. Also devices dropping out, intermittent problems receiving commands. Recently installed a whole house surge protector in the main panel...we'll see if that helps. The biggest hit with the household is the random family photo on the dashboard, updated every few minutes from the NAS archive. Zero dependencies on cloud services. Wherever there are no good choices, instead I make custom ESP8266 devices, all integrated to mqtt. Have deployed one to listen to my weather station, one to control outdoor lighting, a roof snow melt system, even one to control the sprinklers intelligently.
dosman33 3y ago
I've been watching the Home Assistant scene for a few years now waiting for a time to dip my toe into the water. I'm fairly selective about what I would possibly even want to automate. During the stone age I was a user of X10 devices, I had most lights in my apartment wired up with it. Also diddled some with X10 scripting automation at my hackerspace using the fire cracker X10 serial interface. However X10 taught you one thing: it worked when it wanted to. It worked great for me for years and then suddenly it'd quit for a few weeks, then start working again. Even wiring in a phase-coupler couldn't guarantee reliability and I finally gave up on it after it mostly refused to work in my first house. Listening to all these stories seems to reinforce HA is just as reliable as X10 was back in the day, lol. After moving on from X10 I found another poorly known "automation system" called Home Heartbeat as I was away from home a lot. Having some reassurances the doors were closed and the basement was not flooding was good at that time. Seems like the main thing this system was intended to do was to allow remote water main shutoff and then provide sensors (although the water shutoff valve was unobtanium, lol). I picked up the system and a bunch of sensors on clearance as it went discontinued. This was a system that was just a few years too early to market, it had some features that would be considered hokey today, but could be repurposed into a useful tool. It used an early Zigbee wireless mesh for sensors (door open/close, overhead door tilt sensor, water sensors, motion sensors, etc). The base station had an integrated modem, but also had a USB port for computer integration. I wrote some perl to digest the USB status output and that made its sensor network entirely accessible the way I wanted, I had status updates viewable on my phone from there. I was considering integrating it into HA at some point, but another problem the system had was that the sensors were AVR based rather than ti MSP430 with low-power features, the sensors ate CR123's like candy. At this point I'd just like a page to view all the wireless temp sensors around my house in one place. I don't need another light-switch-with-more-steps. On another note, any users of Mr. House here? (Pst, hey kid... you like perl AND home automation? I got just the thing for you!).
Bloating 3y ago
When I built my house years ago (well before Thread/Matter), I went through the dog & pony show with the local lutron, creston, vantage dealers. There are a few others around also, like centralite and loxone. It always came down to 1) I didn't want to be beholden to a dealer to change the timing on a light 2) those systems (other than loxone) were/are antiqued. Ended-up building a PLC based system. Its been rock solid reliable & I can do pretty much anything I can imagine with it. Its a little risky, in that if I ever need to sell I've limited potentional buyers. But, I think thats the case with just about any centralized system. Not long after I looked at a lutron system, the local lutron tech passed away. One house under construction using lutron was brought to a dead standstill. AFAIK, there are no nearby lutron programmers to this day. However, PLCs are easy to obtain, relatively easy to learn (if you're technical) and just about any small+ city is likely to have control engineers that might be willing to support as a side hussle.
sowbug 3y ago
My HA breakthrough, to borrow a basketball term, was switching from a man-to-man defense to a zone defense. I used to think, "I want this motion sensor to turn on that light," and added equipment to do exactly that. Reconfiguration was a physical chore. Once I changed my mindset, I counted the number of rooms in my house and bought that many motion sensors. Same with door sensors: every door and closet got one. (I had already replaced all light switches with Lutron Caseta.) After a weekend of attaching and configuring sensors, the physical part was done, and it was all software after that. Now, if we want a different behavior, we pull out a phone and change an automation, rather than getting out a stepstool and VHB tape. The house feels more like a platform than a bunch of temporary hacks.
dalex00 3y ago
Using Habitat because no internet connection is needed and zigbee, matter and z wave and Google home etc can also be integrated https://hubitat.com/ https://hubitat.com/ Good developer community and helpful forum UI could be better but really powerful.
tlavoie 3y ago
One thing that strikes me a bit odd about HA is that it seems to really, really want to be its own install. Make it a Docker container, or a VM, or a full-on OS install. Can it be installed nicely on top of something else? While I have a few Raspberry Pi and Odroid devices kicking around, they mostly have jobs already. I would like to be able to run something as a package on top, rather than replace what it does now.
- p1mrx 3y ago
  To run Home Assistant on Gentoo, I previously used HomeAssistantRepository but it was constantly breaking. A couple years ago I gave up and switched to pip in a venv, and it's been fine ever since. This should work on any distro: $ python -m venv hass.env $ source hass.env/bin/activate (hass.env) $ pip install homeassistant The remaining puzzle piece is an init.d script; mine is a hacked-up remnant of the one from HomeAssistantRepository.
  - tlavoie 3y ago
    Awesome thanks, will give this a go! This makes much more sense to me than dedicating yet another, mostly-idle little system.
    - xolox 3y ago
      I run Home Assistant from a "manually managed" Python virtual environment as well, and have been doing so for years. It works fine. The developers are quite aggressive in insisting on recent Python releases, so upgrading is always a bit of work, but it's manageable. I'm using supervisord to keep Home Assistant (and AppDaemon) running, but you could use systemd as well.
      - tlavoie 3y ago
        Sounds good, thanks. Running manually for the time being, I did see the deprecation warning for Python 3.9, meaning I should get around to updating this Raspberry Pi to Bookworm. (Or NixOS, like my laptops, then I can manage things with more granularity.)

I’m also cautiously optimistic about matter. I have a server I’m sending to someone else’s house, and if it crashes, I want to use a smart plug to cycle it. I have a Eufy smart plug I got for free. Is there a better alternative? This persons house has no automation and no smart hub. Unfortunately I’ll either need something cloud based or something I can statically point to my own Home Assistant running in my house. Is this cloud based Eufy plug my best choice?

madaxe_again 3y ago
Given that you’re planning on operating it remotely, cloud based is just fine, as if their internet is down, and it’s local, there’s nothing you can do anyway.
soccerties 3y ago
I use PiKVM to give the NAS I have running at a friend's house for remote backups IPMI like accessibility. https://pikvm.org/ https://pikvm.org/
briHass 3y ago
The TP Link Kasa plugs are well documented and have a dead simple TCP payload to turn them on/off. They also have the cloud option, but I don't see why you couldn't use a wireguard tunnel or something from their router if you wanted to avoid the cloud. Not that I'd recommend it, but you could probably just port forward an obscure port directly to the Kasa plug (DHCP to a static IP).
CharlesW 3y ago
> This persons house has no automation and no smart hub. There are devices with "watchdog" features that can cycle power automatically if an ICMP ping fails. https://shop.netio.eu/netio-power-sockets/powercable-2pz/ https://shop.netio.eu/netio-power-sockets/powercable-2pz/ Also, people have rolled their own watchdog solutions using Sonoff devices flashed with Tasmota. https://community.home-assistant.io/t/watchdog-device-using-sonoff-with-tasmota/83587 https://community.home-assistant.io/t/watchdog-device-using-...
- plagiarist 3y ago
  130€? That better guarantee some uptime. I can see why people are rolling their own.
windexh8er 3y ago
You can do this with a $30 Sonoff S31 running ESPHome [0]. Since the Sonoff wall switch can run a ping sensor against your server you could create a watchdog automation right on the S31 to shut off the mains power to the S31 switch and turn back on after X seconds. There are other ways you could have the S31 do operational checks but ultimately ESPHome is probably an interesting consideration and supported by tons of off the shelf hardware. [0] https://esphome.io/ https://esphome.io/
hcfman 3y ago
Shelly plugS
bennyp101 3y ago
I've used things like this SMS plug[0] before for places that I needed to power cycle to bring connection back. [0] https://cpc.farnell.com/tekview/powertxtuk/gsm-power-socket-powertxt-uk/dp/TE07071 https://cpc.farnell.com/tekview/powertxtuk/gsm-power-socket-...

madaxe_again 3y ago

I switched from openhab to HA about a year ago and haven’t looked back - it’s absolutely night and day in terms of configuration and discovery. My use case is maybe a little extreme - I live off grid, and I have HA managing our picogrid (dump loads, shifting charge between battery banks, throttling the hydro, etc.), our water pumps, monitoring filters and telling me when I need to change them, and then of course all the usual climate control etc. Ironically the one use case I have no interest in is the most common one - lighting.

nixgeek 3y ago
Do you write about your picogrid and other MEP stuff anywhere?
- madaxe_again 3y ago
  Not yet as it continues to be a work in progress - still a few bits around frequency shifting that I’m not thrilled with - but I actually need to do a thorough writeup of it all fairly soon just in case I have a chainsaw accident or whatnot.
matthew-wegner 3y ago
I guess power draw on lights is pretty low, but one thing I do with my Home Assistant setup is aggressively turn off other rooms (and I'm on grid): If office computer is used, and "home alone" mode is on, turn off all non-office rooms. If I hit play on something on the main TV, or my laptop is used and its network MAC is the couch dock, turn off all rooms except living room, etc... (I have a guest mode that disables these things, which is automatically enabled when my partner uses her door keycode)
- madaxe_again 3y ago
  Yeah - as we’re off grid with a well managed storage system we essentially have no limit on power, usually a surplus, so lighting (all LED, of course) is just negligible - if I turn every single light in the place on we barely draw 250W. For energy saving, I do have it do stuff like turn off the underfloor heating/AC when we go out, or when we are for whatever reason low on power. Now, if they were incandescent it would be a different story entirely - it would be more like 3kW! I do actually have one small lighting project in mind - it’s about 500 meters from our house to the mill/guest house, and I’m toying with the idea of having little LoRa/solar fairy lights that turn on and off as you walk from one to the other at night, based on device presence, zone by zone, mostly because it would feel magical.

karlshea 3y ago

I'm also a Home Assistant convert: I originally installed it to record history from my Nest when the building was having some boiler issues and Homebridge was too hard to monitor. Then on install it auto-discovered a ton and I've slowly kept adding more and more smart devices. I went the same way as the OP did where all of the automations are very unobtrusive or simple, or do things like monitor some plants. Very happy with it, and I'd encourage paying for their cloud service for remote access just to throw the project some cash!

artdigital 3y ago
> Homebridge was too hard to monitor Curious about this. I tried HA a couple of times but kept going back to Homebridge. I find it far simpler than HA, and easy to write my own plugins for devices that don't have functionality yet For me HB was the lighter brother of HA, and HA the full-fledged thing
- import 3y ago
  HB never be a lighter brother of HA. Hb is simpler because it only covers functionality of one HA plugin (HomeKit bridge)
- karlshea 3y ago
  I needed some graphs and was using a pretty janky project to generate them from Homebridge, so tried HA since data collection was built in.

asveikau 3y ago

I also use the docker deployment method. I started out with the VM image, which was a good low commitment "gateway drug" to try it out and get to know it... But a big downside I witnessed is their "haos" distro handles disk failures very poorly. I hit that twice, and recovery was not fun. It basically put up an infinite spinner on the web interface, until I messed with the disk image somewhere else. Haos does not even have fsck. Now my docker setup runs out of ZFS and I'm happy. There is no update UI or addons but if you're comfortable with a little mild sysadmin style stuff it's fine.

spockz 3y ago
I’m also running home assistant in a docker container. The only thing I miss is support for some plugins that need to install extra by components like mqtt. It appears that can be done transparently in the Haos image and is manual in the docker flavour.
XorNot 3y ago
You can install HACS into the docker image FYI and it'll persist, which gets you a pretty huge chunk of the HAOS experience. *EDIT: I meant HACS, HACS is what I meant.
- asveikau 3y ago
  Hmm, I just read about how to do it. I am already running Debian which is one of the requirements. Maybe will look into it later, but for now it seems like more work for not very much gain. Thanks for the tip.
  - karlshea 3y ago
    I have HACS[0] installed in my Docker image, I use it for exactly one integration and the initial setup seemed a little dodgy but it's been pain-free for a couple of years now. [0]: https://hacs.xyz/ https://hacs.xyz/
    - asveikau 3y ago

suyula 3y ago

I'm so grateful for what Home Assistant has done for home automation and compatibility, but its focus on dashboards and phone interfaces seems to lead everyone who uses it in exactly the wrong direction. I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of what you like about 'Home Assistant' is Node-RED and Zigbee. They are two of the big building blocks for making a home that is more convenient to live in rather than less (the third being an MQTT server.)

pkulak 3y ago
Exactly. If you have a “dashboard” that you have to use more than a couple times a week, you’re doing it wrong. Well, in my opinion, at least.
- shellfishgene 3y ago
  I don't know, many installations like the one OP describes have many more functions that light switches etc., like turning on scenes and automations. You could of course have buttons lying around everywhere, or a panel on the wall, but I'm not sure that's much better than using the phone dashboard app.
eamonnsullivan 3y ago
Author here: Yeah, I cut that out at the last minute, but my feeling is that if you need to use the dashboard, the automation has failed. I put the app on my wife's phone, but she almost never uses it. She does use a touch screen on the wall, though, to bump up the heat, but that's about it.
- apexalpha 3y ago
  That depends on what you want to do, though. I like the energy dashboard a lot, it has literally all data in a single view including cost and PV. There's nothing to automate: the dashboard is the point. I also don't automate my lights. I don't want to automate my lights because our life isn't run on such a tight schedule. It always ends up less useful than a light switch in the wall. What I do want is to turn off all lights in one go when we go out, and quickly glance at the status of lights all over the house. For these kinda things a dashboard is perfect.

adamtaylor_13 3y ago

My experience with Home Assistant has been quite similar to the author’s. I’m also a software engineer so the general lack of stability around device changes always makes me feel like I’ve volunteered to pick up that 8-point ticket on the last Wednesday of the sprint. But when everything works, it’s such a cool experience. I hope Matter begins to make local-first a bigger priority as well. That’s a huge concern I’ve recently begun to develop. Also I still haven’t figured out how to combine a mechanical and digital solution. Like I want light switches that match my server state for my lights. If I change the switch via my phone, I want the switches to change as well so that the physical switch is always the true state of the light.

hughesjj 3y ago
Can some of the push button/toggle ones work for you?
CSSer 3y ago
It sounds like you want Lutron Casetas.
- xp84 3y ago
  The newest Casetas are called Diva, and are basically like rockers that are stateless (return to a neutral position after tappdiva, again you can't have a true state-perfect switch, unless it's motorized and to my knowledge nobody makes that.
  - karlshea 3y ago
    I have a couple of these and they're great, it feels (and looks) like a regular switch.
  - timthorn 3y ago
    There was a UK start-up a few years back that did make motorised light switches but they didn't stick around long. I'm blanking on the name, though.

ikidd 3y ago

I was a rabid Node Red automationist until they managed to get automations more WYSIWYG oriented. I could write the YAML but it was annoying to debug; NR was much more useful that way, so that's where I went. I'm loving the results of Year of the Voice, and there's a contest on now about how to best leverage the hardware and software to build voice interactions. It's a pretty exciting time to be using it.

password4321 3y ago

Related today: Zigbee and Z-Wave are the best part of my smart home https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39344786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39344786

eamonnsullivan 3y ago
A section I cut out of the blog before posting was my experiences with Z-Wave. Most of my smart plugs are Z-Wave, which was part of my issue with Zigbee coverage/instability (smart plugs are good routers/repeaters). I like Z-Wave, but the stuff is expensive and options (for different types of devices) are fewer, so I've generally followed the economic incentives and ended up with many more Zigbee devices (38) than Z-Wave ones (7). Also, Z-Wave is more power-hungry. I have one Z-Wave motion sensor and I need to change the battery every few months. My double-As in my Zigbee motion sensors last two years.
- mrgaro 3y ago
  Would you mind (somehow) sharing the source of your current node-red configurations? I'm having quite the same setup, but I really liked your approach and I would love to speed run by taking a closer look what you have. Free time is especially hard to come by now with a young kid :)

hcfman 3y ago

You can mitigate the SD risk by using an in-memory overlayFS mounted OS. The original one of the pi is for the whole image. For the Jetson series I create partitions so the OS indeed is memory overlayFS but there’s also a rw data partition and a ro re-mountable configuration portion.

bonzini 3y ago
The SD card in my case only holds the boot partition (U-Boot, kernel, initramfs). Everything else runs off NFS.
- hcfman 3y ago
  Indeed, another viable approach.
- m463 3y ago
  that's a lot of points of failure. Now you depend on the SD card, the network and the nfs server... just saying. I have a home network and sometimes when power goes out, I've have strangeness when things don't come up as expected.
  - bonzini 3y ago
    It lowers the chance of failure of the most vulnerable part. The NAS existed before and had RAID and backups anyway. And if the switch fails I can't access home assistant anyway. The more important part is that all automations are just nice to have things and not needed to "run" the house. It's for stuff like "charge the car when the sun is high" or "notify me when the washing machine has finished".

Sleaker 3y ago

Also been running ha for about 3 years, but have been veerrrry slow to add devices and only had a couple automations setup around Christmas. I actually tried th smart plugs thing and found the hue bulbs to be a way better experience because I want the RGB and dimmable capabilities on those as opposed to just on/off, it's something I might look into for some of the other areas of the house though. Nice write-up!

wkat4242 3y ago

I like home assistant a lot but i do think they change too much for the sake of it. Every upgrade breaks someone something. Either some Yaml format has to be changed like from under platform to sensor, some integration I was using breaks, something I still need to use is being deprecated. Often for arbitrary reasons. I would prefer more focus on continuity. Especially the stuff that's already in there should just keep working. The problem is this disruption makes me feel really disinclined to update but when leaving it multiple months it's harder to find out what breaks beside I have to go hunt for all the intermediate changelogs.

karlshea 3y ago
I hear this a lot but I'm guessing it comes from more of the power-user experience. I use it a decent amount but only have 2 yaml-based integrations set up, and I haven't really run into any upgrade issues, to the point where my Docker setup is auto-updated.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Yeah but this is one of my concerns. They're trying to make it a mass market product so they can make more money with it. And the interests of the initial supporters from the time where everything had to be configured in Yaml aren't covered as well.
eamonnsullivan 3y ago
I keep it up-to-date religiously and rarely run into breaking issues, but I have occasionally. I keep an eye on the release notes (https://rc.home-assistant.io/blog/categories/release-notes/ https://rc.home-assistant.io/blog/categories/release-notes/), so I usually have at least a week's notice when a breaking change is coming and can adjust. I used the Met Office integration in some of my automations (setting a fan's speed based on the outside temp) and spotted that it was going to be disabled, and switched to Accuweather before this month's version came out.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Yeah but it's a lot of work to keep up with all this every month. Especially if you leave it multiple months because the info will be scattered over different release notes.

crystaln 3y ago

I have an ancient Crestron system from the 90s with a large color touch screen that came with my home. It's impressive and still works, managing an irrigation system, 3 HVACs with probably 20 damper controlled zones, lights (altho I pretty much only use Hue now), and security system. When this thing craps out, there is nobody in the world who will maintain it as far as I know. The thought of hiring someone to replace it with another Crestron seems silly and expensive given I am a software developer and should be able to hack my home automation system. OTOH I also don't want to spend my life debugging HA and don't really see myself getting around to the months of tinkering this project will require. OTOOH professional integrators for HA seem to not exist at all. HAOS yields no results on Upwork. There is little discussion of professional installers in their forums. Ideally I could hire someone to develop a system and give me a walkthrough so I can go from there. Surprisingly the HA community basically rejects the idea that professional services around the platform makes sense, basically indicating that's its too unreliable.

jjeaff 3y ago
the only thing unreliable about HA is that occasionally, updates can break things. Otherwise it has been rock solid for me. Put it on an Intel nuc style device with high quality SSD and you should be good for a long time.
- jclulow 3y ago
  > occasionally, updates can break things But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the theatre?
  - Toutouxc 3y ago
    Nowadays your phone, computer, fridge and even your car get software updates that can break things. Having to keep track of one more device probably won't ruin anyone's life that much more. Also, Home Assistant updates rarely break stuff (I haven't had anything break since I started with it two years ago), and you can always not update for a few weeks.

jhoelzel 3y ago

Truth be told i installed HA on a pie about 3 years ago and have largely forgotten about it. It just works for me and what i do, all you have to do is occasionally apply updates. Granted i mainly focus on creating my own powersockets and fuses with shelly products and otherwise focus on local homekit devices. I also have some of those tuya devices and i hope to get rid of them at some point very soon. Zigbee is good for local and as long as the switch runs by clicking it too, i really have no issue nor care what its running on. I just have a secops feeling that wifi is really not what i want.

jmacd 3y ago
I am with you. 2.5 years running on a Pi. I also have 6 security cameras writing to a MicroSD in it which I thought was surely a recipe for disaster, but it has been rock solid. I have experienced no reliability issues and I am running everything out of Home Assistant exposed as HomeKit resources.
- m463 3y ago
  I would back it up regularly. Alternatively you boot and run a pi off a USB stick.

iforgotpassword 3y ago

> Nothing quite disturbs your peace as sitting in a dark room, or having a light turn on in the middle of the night, because an automation has gone wrong. Hardware, in general, is also crap and I've spent too many hours trying to fix that faulty light strip, dodgy motion sensor or misbehaving sensor. This is my concern too, having started just a few months ago. A few days after switching from ZHA to z2m, suddenly one of my zigbee TRVs stayed at 22°C. I thought it was better thermostat acting up, every time I tried to lower it directly via Home assistant it would snap right back to 22. So I opened the z2m webif and was greeted with "no network route (205)" every time I tried to set a new target temp on the trv. You see, with ZHA any zigbee errors would show a popup in HA directly, but since now HA just talks to z2m via mqtt, HA never knows anything went wrong. And to add insult to injury, the trv was still sending updates of the measured ambient temperature just fine, so I didn't immediately think of a network issue.

stinos 3y ago
This is the thing, and the main reason I only played around with HA but never fully implemented it. Ideally for things which are controlled in 'absolute mode' you need a watchdog. Like something implemented in hardware to keep it from misbehaving. On the other hand many crucial devices have this built in. But obviously plain lights don't. What I mean is e.g.: - having HA control your heating's on/off hours, where the watchdog is the heating's thermostat making it stop heating when it's warm enough or forces heating if it gets too cold. So HA crashing and leaving the heating in heat mode might be just a waste but not a serious issue. - having HA control the wanted temperature on the other hand is more problematic, because for all I know it could misbehave and make the heating want to go to 30 degrees Celcius or to a value so low that there's no frost protection anymore, then crash and never get it out of that state anymore. And there's no watchdog anymore correcting for it. Potentially this can cause issues. Chances are small, but I don't like the idea that AFAIK these chances are much larger than standalone heating acting up like this. Likewise we can now opt for a dynamic electricy tarrif, basic idea being that for instance when you now the prices are going to drop below a certain threshold during the night you're going to tell your home battery to charge at that time. Of course the thing acts like a watchdog for itself in that it stops charging when full, but there is no watchdog keeping it from charging continuously. In other words: if it's put into charging mode and HA crashes and leaves it in charging mode then it will happily continue charging during peak hours. Not 'serious' per se but pretty stupid.

dbrgn 3y ago

For Zigbee, I can recommend using the Zigbee2MQTT (https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/ https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/) integration instead of HomeAssistant's built-in ZHA system. It might be a bit more complex to set up, but it's very powerful and works fantastically. (User "simon42" on YouTube has some good videos about the topic, but they're in German.)

DavideNL 3y ago
> "but it's very powerful and works fantastically" I wonder what the exact differences are. As i'm currently using ZHA and it's running fine... (mostly using Ikea devices and a few HUE bulbs.)
- DavideNL 3y ago
  ... the only real advantage seems "more supported devices". https://youtu.be/PR-ugz1uLWc?list=PLnQ5CgUMCvdbb8UHaY3Qy12NYDkY16A6_&t=153 https://youtu.be/PR-ugz1uLWc?list=PLnQ5CgUMCvdbb8UHaY3Qy12NY... (German video)

lkdfjlkdfjlg 3y ago

This seems like hell to me. Every time something unexpected happens your mind will go into overdrive following code paths. No thank you, my mind time is too valuable for this. I want my appliances dumb.

smt88 3y ago
It has lots of logging. I've been using HA for months and never think about it at all.
- lkdfjlkdfjlg 3y ago
  [flagged]
cybrox 3y ago
Really depends on how you use it. In my experience, the smarter you want to make your home, the more it will just get in your way, no matter how good or bad the technology is. If you use a system like HA to automate a lot of simple things, it just works™. I've been running HA for years now and I'm incredibly happy with it. Most rooms I don't spend a lot of time in have motion activated lights that sill allow me to override that with a simple wall switch, some lights turn off when I stream something on my TV and I have temperature and moisture monitoring with alerting in case something goes wrong like my washing machine blowing up.
driverdan 3y ago
If you set it up well it's rare for things to go wrong. The only issues I've had with automation were my own fault, such as using the wrong time. I can't remember any of my automation failing. The key is to keep it as simple as possible.
- lkdfjlkdfjlg 3y ago
  Obviously the vast majority of the issues are my own mistakes. In no way does that detract from my point.

octodog 3y ago

Why do none of these long articles on HA ever provide proper examples of their automations?

deely3 3y ago
I believe because it will be a really lot of work. You will have to go step by step to review every setup and it can be not so trivial because of different devices versions, different software versions, differents in setups, etc. Like writting a program.

apexalpha 3y ago

I really wish Home Assistant had some default good dashboards. I have HA for a few years now and the Energy dashboard they made is by far the most polished one I have. The rest are basically just buttons I randomly put into it. Native floorplan would be great, too. HA is fantastic, but it has a steep learning curve on the frontend part.

greggsy 3y ago
The 3D floor plan component is based on SweetHome3D, and requires the dolls house to be create offline and uploaded, but there’s discussion afoot to have the JS version of the editor baked directly into the console so watch this space. As for default dashboards, I think the only real way to do this properly would be to create a wizard to help get things off the from ground. It really does need a fair understanding of (or at least the existence of) entities, devices, HACS, and the developer tools pane. And that’s just the foundational stuff you need to know about before you can even consider tinkering with platforms and entities in yaml files. Some jargon-free steps like ‘Select all of your outlets’ > ‘Select the properties you want to display’ etc. A ChatGPT configurator would be interesting, similar to the one in Pirtainer (which I admin I’ve never used).
- apexalpha 3y ago
  A wizard would help, I think. But what's most important for me is that I don't want to setup home assistant. I want home assistant, I want the end result, but I don't want to have to build it brick by brick. I just don't have the time for that (anymore). I also think a floorplan where you can click a room and see the lights and everything is much more intuitive than a website. But also I think many things can just be assumed. Everyone has lights, for example. So why not have this be a native solution in stead of having to set it up manually. Setting up the Energy dashboard, including all the graphs, data and history etc... took less time and effort than it would take to automate a single light bulb.
  - greggsy 3y ago
    My nirvana is to be able to create a dollhouse using the LiDAR Scanner on my phone, and simply tap where device is. No modelling, just let me tap somewhere in a digital twin.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

My experience is similar to GP, if only about a year long. There's a clear point when my Home Assistant setup graduated from tinkering into serious, almost critical infrastructure at home: the moment I got A/C controls working with it. Hear the tale of the two apps: 1. Haier hOn: takes between 5 and 15 seconds to start up. Assuming it didn't randomly log you out, it takes a minute of tapping through bullshit multi-level screens, with multi-second delay between each, to get to the point when you can control a single aircon unit. Switching between units is 2-5 seconds - and you need to be careful, because if you press the phone's "back" button, it'll shut down the app, so the whole 1-minute ordeal restarts. Every 5-10 control interactions, it'll go "oops, something went wrong", and then to get state and control over units, you need to restart the app. You look at it sideways, believe it or not, restart the app. Total time to set three aircon units: some two minutes, maybe more, and a lot of frustration. My wife flat-out refused to do it, instead always asked me (as I have much more experience in quickly navigating buggy software). Myself, I hated it every time. 2. Home Assistant app: takes 2-5 seconds to cold-start into the app, less than that for warm start. The default dashboard shows all three A/Cs, with controls, temperature graphs - everything at a glance, on a single screen. And then below there are controls for floor heating and other stuff. Zero crashes. Total time to set three aircon units: 3-10 seconds. I sometimes race to see how fast can I do it. My wife loves it, I never get asked to do anything with A/C for her anymore. I'm only beginning to integrate and automate more things. Recently I upgraded a bunch of cheap (but stylish, and importantly, well-built) IKEA PM2.5 sensors with ESP8266 (decade-old NodeMCUs I had in a box), and through a bunch of graphs quickly added to another Home Assistant dashboard, we've learned a lot about what does and does not affect air quality around the house. I've also started to set up automated notifications for bad air in different rooms, because it's stupid easy to do. Another stupid easy thing to do was to make my washing machine notify both of us when it's done. Or auto-dimming that one Hue bulb my kids are using as night light. Etc. If my setup died today, nothing would stop working - a few things would become less convenient, aircon would become stupidly annoying to operate again - but we would feel it, so I'm now trying to beef the hardware durability up a bit. And yes, I ain't buying anything "smart" that can't talk well with Home Assistant anymore.

blastro 3y ago

My story: Spent weeks / months setting up a fairly sophisticated home automation set up running on a Mac Mini. Worked great for 3-4 years, occasionally I would have to re-pair all of the Z-Wave devices after a power outage, but nothing too serious. Then one day the Mac Mini died and I thought about the days/weeks of work to replace it and just decided not too. In the end, it didn't provide a ton of value beyond the shiny UI and charting abilities. It was fun but I don't think I would do it again, unless I was retired or something.

Coloranotio 3y ago
I have a very unsophisticated setup, would love to have a more integrated one but i also see the issue with complexity etc. In worst case i don't need it. But controling heating remotly is great to have. Being able to collect the humidity to prevent mold is also great. I hope that all of this tinkering and pushing for it, will make a much more stable and fun experience in the long term. I might have a chance to rebuild a old house, i'm still not sure if i want to put cable (some bus system, 12v or PoE/Ethernet) everywere or just using some radio based components. The biggest annoyance is defintily the energy usage of bigger things like heating valves or potentially a window or a door.

rkagerer 3y ago

The gem of wisdom at the end: And I could have saved myself a lot of heartache by avoiding cloud services. Thank you. I do not want the functionality of my home dependant on someone else's infrastructure. Or my house to stop working just 'cause the Internet is down. It's the epitome of stupid when something as simple as turning on a lightswitch has to send a message miles across the Internet and back to get the job done. John Henry Holmes is rolling in his grave laughing at us.

plagiarist 3y ago
I have zero idea how the demographic of people excited about Home Assistant and automation are not also, to a person, savvy enough to reject cloud services for controlling their homes. Not only for the partition hardiness, but also to avoid contract changes, being banned over ToS violations, or the company just deciding to close up shop. There was an article on HN a bit ago where Amazon dumped a customer, which deactivated a good chunk of their house. The author wrote something like, "I may consider removing Amazon from the equation over this." Fucking "consider"??? It's perplexing trying to figure out that perspective.
- m463 3y ago
  It's hard for a "reasonable" person to follow this advice. They get something home, and it is useful, and their spouse or kids like it... but it has to be hooked to the internet. maybe it needs an account to activate. or many of the other convenient/inconvenient tricks. But I'm happy that we have home assistant and tasmota and esphome and all these other wonderful projects that route around lots of these problems.
- marcus0x62 3y ago
  I started using HA tech at a time in my life when I had more money than time, the DIY stuff was very rough around the edges, and the cloud services I used mostly met my needs with a minimum of effort. I figured if something stopped working, I’d just go out and buy a replacement that did work. Now, a decade later, I have more time than money, the cloud services aren’t so reliable, and I’m increasingly uneasy with the implications of relying on something that can disappear (or change for the worse) at a moment’s notice. So I’m ripping all of that crap out of my digital life. That’s at least one example of how someone can be savvy enough to set up something like Home Assistant but end up with a bunch of clown crap in their house.

rsolva 3y ago

I have ran Home Assistant in my house for about 6 years, and for a tinkerer who likes to keep things local, is has been great fun! A few quick suggestions: - Do NOT use a device with a micro SDcard as the main storage! - Play around with devices, but be picky about what you use long term - Communicate with your spouse/other people in the house before experimenting :) After some crashes and hard lessons, I now run HA on a Proxmox that has two boot drives and regular snapshots/backups of the VM. This adds enough redundancy to keep things running and avoid a dark house if a disk breaks down. With great power comes great responsibility!

thebruce87m 3y ago
> - Do NOT use a device with a micro SDcard as the main storage! You should post why. It could be that you don’t know to buy endurance cards for wear levelling? Or you do and that’s still not good enough? Or something else entirely. Basically I can’t tell if you know more or less than I do from just the statement.
- xolox 3y ago
  I suspect they are referring to using a Raspberry Pi and using a micro SD card as the main storage mechanism. This is known to be a bad combination that will fail at an unfortunate time, sooner rather than later. Personally I boot my Raspberry's using netboot (DHCP via dnsmasq) and NFS. However I don't run Home Assistant on a Raspberry, it runs on the "server" (headless machine) that's serving NFS .
- rsolva 3y ago
  Sorry, I'll expound: I used a high quality endurance card, and it worked fine for a few years, until it didn't :) The SDcard started failing when I was on a prolonged Christmas holiday – and Home Assistant was responsible for keeping my house above freezing temps when it was below -10℃ outside. Luckily I have nice neighbors who helped me out! Anyway, I had planed to move HA away from the rPi3 for a while, but you know how it is, more important things keep happening, so this crash forced my hand. SDcards are a gamble, especially in a device you want to keep running for years and years. I feel much better having it running om my Proxmox with dual boot disks and regular backups, so WHEN a disk is calling quits, it still keeps on working and I have time to replace the broken disk.

highdeserthackr 3y ago

Absolutely love HA, it's been deployed for 6 years now. I try and run as much as possible through a mosquitto server to keep things decoupled. The biggest pain has been ZWave devices. I've had multiple in wall switches croak for no obvious reason. Also devices dropping out, intermittent problems receiving commands. Recently installed a whole house surge protector in the main panel...we'll see if that helps. The biggest hit with the household is the random family photo on the dashboard, updated every few minutes from the NAS archive. Zero dependencies on cloud services. Wherever there are no good choices, instead I make custom ESP8266 devices, all integrated to mqtt. Have deployed one to listen to my weather station, one to control outdoor lighting, a roof snow melt system, even one to control the sprinklers intelligently.

dosman33 3y ago

I've been watching the Home Assistant scene for a few years now waiting for a time to dip my toe into the water. I'm fairly selective about what I would possibly even want to automate. During the stone age I was a user of X10 devices, I had most lights in my apartment wired up with it. Also diddled some with X10 scripting automation at my hackerspace using the fire cracker X10 serial interface. However X10 taught you one thing: it worked when it wanted to. It worked great for me for years and then suddenly it'd quit for a few weeks, then start working again. Even wiring in a phase-coupler couldn't guarantee reliability and I finally gave up on it after it mostly refused to work in my first house. Listening to all these stories seems to reinforce HA is just as reliable as X10 was back in the day, lol. After moving on from X10 I found another poorly known "automation system" called Home Heartbeat as I was away from home a lot. Having some reassurances the doors were closed and the basement was not flooding was good at that time. Seems like the main thing this system was intended to do was to allow remote water main shutoff and then provide sensors (although the water shutoff valve was unobtanium, lol). I picked up the system and a bunch of sensors on clearance as it went discontinued. This was a system that was just a few years too early to market, it had some features that would be considered hokey today, but could be repurposed into a useful tool. It used an early Zigbee wireless mesh for sensors (door open/close, overhead door tilt sensor, water sensors, motion sensors, etc). The base station had an integrated modem, but also had a USB port for computer integration. I wrote some perl to digest the USB status output and that made its sensor network entirely accessible the way I wanted, I had status updates viewable on my phone from there. I was considering integrating it into HA at some point, but another problem the system had was that the sensors were AVR based rather than ti MSP430 with low-power features, the sensors ate CR123's like candy. At this point I'd just like a page to view all the wireless temp sensors around my house in one place. I don't need another light-switch-with-more-steps. On another note, any users of Mr. House here? (Pst, hey kid... you like perl AND home automation? I got just the thing for you!).

Bloating 3y ago

When I built my house years ago (well before Thread/Matter), I went through the dog & pony show with the local lutron, creston, vantage dealers. There are a few others around also, like centralite and loxone. It always came down to 1) I didn't want to be beholden to a dealer to change the timing on a light 2) those systems (other than loxone) were/are antiqued. Ended-up building a PLC based system. Its been rock solid reliable & I can do pretty much anything I can imagine with it. Its a little risky, in that if I ever need to sell I've limited potentional buyers. But, I think thats the case with just about any centralized system. Not long after I looked at a lutron system, the local lutron tech passed away. One house under construction using lutron was brought to a dead standstill. AFAIK, there are no nearby lutron programmers to this day. However, PLCs are easy to obtain, relatively easy to learn (if you're technical) and just about any small+ city is likely to have control engineers that might be willing to support as a side hussle.

sowbug 3y ago

My HA breakthrough, to borrow a basketball term, was switching from a man-to-man defense to a zone defense. I used to think, "I want this motion sensor to turn on that light," and added equipment to do exactly that. Reconfiguration was a physical chore. Once I changed my mindset, I counted the number of rooms in my house and bought that many motion sensors. Same with door sensors: every door and closet got one. (I had already replaced all light switches with Lutron Caseta.) After a weekend of attaching and configuring sensors, the physical part was done, and it was all software after that. Now, if we want a different behavior, we pull out a phone and change an automation, rather than getting out a stepstool and VHB tape. The house feels more like a platform than a bunch of temporary hacks.

dalex00 3y ago

Using Habitat because no internet connection is needed and zigbee, matter and z wave and Google home etc can also be integrated https://hubitat.com/ https://hubitat.com/ Good developer community and helpful forum UI could be better but really powerful.

tlavoie 3y ago

One thing that strikes me a bit odd about HA is that it seems to really, really want to be its own install. Make it a Docker container, or a VM, or a full-on OS install. Can it be installed nicely on top of something else? While I have a few Raspberry Pi and Odroid devices kicking around, they mostly have jobs already. I would like to be able to run something as a package on top, rather than replace what it does now.

p1mrx 3y ago
To run Home Assistant on Gentoo, I previously used HomeAssistantRepository but it was constantly breaking. A couple years ago I gave up and switched to pip in a venv, and it's been fine ever since. This should work on any distro: $ python -m venv hass.env $ source hass.env/bin/activate (hass.env) $ pip install homeassistant The remaining puzzle piece is an init.d script; mine is a hacked-up remnant of the one from HomeAssistantRepository.
- tlavoie 3y ago
  Awesome thanks, will give this a go! This makes much more sense to me than dedicating yet another, mostly-idle little system.
  - xolox 3y ago
    I run Home Assistant from a "manually managed" Python virtual environment as well, and have been doing so for years. It works fine. The developers are quite aggressive in insisting on recent Python releases, so upgrading is always a bit of work, but it's manageable. I'm using supervisord to keep Home Assistant (and AppDaemon) running, but you could use systemd as well.
    - tlavoie 3y ago
      Sounds good, thanks. Running manually for the time being, I did see the deprecation warning for Python 3.9, meaning I should get around to updating this Raspberry Pi to Bookworm. (Or NixOS, like my laptops, then I can manage things with more granularity.)