3 ms·

Oh man. I love Home Assistant. But I think of it as a really fun hobby. Maintaining, getting dashboards working, integrating with wireless local network standar

Oh man. I love Home Assistant. But I think of it as a really fun hobby. Maintaining, getting dashboards working, integrating with wireless local network standards… It ends up very technical, very quickly, as Mr. Petersson so ably demonstrates. That said, using it has put me hard on the side of preferring home devices with open management platforms. I keep feeling there’s a chance my smart home could stay off the cloud and have good automation if only I buy the right nerd tech..

baby_souffle 2y ago
I have been using Home Assistant since before "Lovelace" UI was available. It has come a long way but there's still an ongoing maintenance demand. It's less than it used to be... but it's still not zero. > That said, using it has put me hard on the side of preferring home devices with open management platforms. I feel like this is the true purpose of HA and the ecosystem around it. Similar to how matter is forcing IPv6 adoption on micro-controllers, really. Every holiday season, I go looking for a bunch of cheap stuff on Ali express to tear down. Every year there's new LED light controllers and 2024 was the first year where the manufacturers were almost _bragging_ about how they label the GPIO pins and expose the programming interface so you can throw your own firmware on there if you want. Seriously, never before have I seen these controllers BRAG about how they support WLED natively. The FOSS / DIY / I'm not using _your_ cloud, I have one at home, already movement is ... actually being catered to!? That's _new_.
alias_neo 2y ago
"Offline" has been my number one rule for home automation since I started using HA about a decade ago. I have a couple of hundred devices connected to it now, and the _only_ cloud integration I use is Spotify, for obvious reasons; I have been careful when buying smart things that they're completely offline, and anything I buy that _is_ smart but isn't offline-only gets hobbled into a "dumb" appliance; e.g. my new dishwasher has "smart" stuff, if I connect it to Wi-Fi, I found the maintenance menu and disabled the network interface entirely and it's just a regular dishwasher now, which is how I like it.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  I try to avoid all smart devices, but I moved into a house that already had "smart" garage door openers installed, so I thought I'd try the smartness. It is indeed ridiculous in that it requires an Internet connection to work. Here I am, with a remote control device (my phone) that is on my LAN and a garage door opener that is on my LAN, but I need to do a round trip to the Internet to communicate with it? What idiot designs these things?
  - alias_neo 2y ago
    There has been some uproar lately about a particular manufacturer shutting down access to the API used for their garage door openers to HA, I forget the name but there was a Q in it I believe. The solution, as I understand it, is a little device which talks the protocol of the door opener that gives you fully local access the way it should be. I'll try and dig out the link now in case it's of use to you. EDIT: Here you go https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/11/06/removal-of-myq-integration/ https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/11/06/removal-of-myq... Hopefully that can point you towards a solution for your opener (and the state of affairs).
    - ryandrake 2y ago
      Yea, that's the kind I've got. I solved the problem by simply not using or caring about the "smart" feature, since it's pretty pointless. Why would I even need to open or close my garage with an "app" when the button is right there by the door?
      - echoangle 2y ago
        You could open your garage when coming home by pressing a button on your phone.
      - fullstop 2y ago
        I like knowing if the door is opened or closed from remote. Kids sometimes forget to close the door, and it's reversed direction before because the tracks needed lubricated and it raised the door again after I had pressed the button.
philjohn 2y ago
I worked around this by exposing most HA entities to HomeKit using the built-in HomeKit bridge. That way you get all the "this is just integrated with Siri and it's easy for non technical people to control" as well as much more powerful automations. For example, my home presence detection is actually powered by HomeKit automations which flip binary sensors I've exposed from HA.

baby_souffle 2y ago

I have been using Home Assistant since before "Lovelace" UI was available. It has come a long way but there's still an ongoing maintenance demand. It's less than it used to be... but it's still not zero. > That said, using it has put me hard on the side of preferring home devices with open management platforms. I feel like this is the true purpose of HA and the ecosystem around it. Similar to how matter is forcing IPv6 adoption on micro-controllers, really. Every holiday season, I go looking for a bunch of cheap stuff on Ali express to tear down. Every year there's new LED light controllers and 2024 was the first year where the manufacturers were almost _bragging_ about how they label the GPIO pins and expose the programming interface so you can throw your own firmware on there if you want. Seriously, never before have I seen these controllers BRAG about how they support WLED natively. The FOSS / DIY / I'm not using _your_ cloud, I have one at home, already movement is ... actually being catered to!? That's _new_.

alias_neo 2y ago

"Offline" has been my number one rule for home automation since I started using HA about a decade ago. I have a couple of hundred devices connected to it now, and the _only_ cloud integration I use is Spotify, for obvious reasons; I have been careful when buying smart things that they're completely offline, and anything I buy that _is_ smart but isn't offline-only gets hobbled into a "dumb" appliance; e.g. my new dishwasher has "smart" stuff, if I connect it to Wi-Fi, I found the maintenance menu and disabled the network interface entirely and it's just a regular dishwasher now, which is how I like it.

ryandrake 2y ago
I try to avoid all smart devices, but I moved into a house that already had "smart" garage door openers installed, so I thought I'd try the smartness. It is indeed ridiculous in that it requires an Internet connection to work. Here I am, with a remote control device (my phone) that is on my LAN and a garage door opener that is on my LAN, but I need to do a round trip to the Internet to communicate with it? What idiot designs these things?
- alias_neo 2y ago
  There has been some uproar lately about a particular manufacturer shutting down access to the API used for their garage door openers to HA, I forget the name but there was a Q in it I believe. The solution, as I understand it, is a little device which talks the protocol of the door opener that gives you fully local access the way it should be. I'll try and dig out the link now in case it's of use to you. EDIT: Here you go https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/11/06/removal-of-myq-integration/ https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/11/06/removal-of-myq... Hopefully that can point you towards a solution for your opener (and the state of affairs).
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    Yea, that's the kind I've got. I solved the problem by simply not using or caring about the "smart" feature, since it's pretty pointless. Why would I even need to open or close my garage with an "app" when the button is right there by the door?
    - echoangle 2y ago
      You could open your garage when coming home by pressing a button on your phone.
    - fullstop 2y ago
      I like knowing if the door is opened or closed from remote. Kids sometimes forget to close the door, and it's reversed direction before because the tracks needed lubricated and it raised the door again after I had pressed the button.

philjohn 2y ago

I worked around this by exposing most HA entities to HomeKit using the built-in HomeKit bridge. That way you get all the "this is just integrated with Siri and it's easy for non technical people to control" as well as much more powerful automations. For example, my home presence detection is actually powered by HomeKit automations which flip binary sensors I've exposed from HA.