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Founder of Home Assistant here. Let me know if anyone has any questions about the project or the Open Home Foundation (which now owns Home Assistant, ESPHome et

Founder of Home Assistant here. Let me know if anyone has any questions about the project or the Open Home Foundation (which now owns Home Assistant, ESPHome etc)

poutine 2y ago
Any plan to update the GUI for conditional logic inside of automations? It's really clumsy to do IF/THEN or switch style constructions. Too much visual space and clunky overall.
- Yossarrian22 2y ago
  Have you tried using the NodeRed plugin? That’s worked really well for me
  - ziml77 2y ago
    NodeRed is awesome. I didn't even bother with anything beyond very, very simple automations until I installed that. For me the flow design feels very natural and is easy to modify and monitor. And it's pluggable with custom nodes so if functionality is missing you can add it in. Like I installed a node that handles OAuth2 so I can have it log into a web service and check a status page.
- balloob 2y ago
  We are working on the automations UI as we speak! (this can also be seen on our roadmap update https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/11/15/roadmap-2024h2/ https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/11/15/roadmap-2024h2... )
  - poutine 2y ago
    Cool, thanks! Great work!
  - oynqr 2y ago
    Just dumping an idea here: In the past I've had issues with forgetting to add triggers for states that are used somewhere as a condition or switch. This leads to lost updates and frustation. React state hooks, which I'm deeply familiar with, will result in a linter warning if any of their dependencies are missing. I'd really like something similar for automations.
bloqs 2y ago
What brand of smart lightbulbs do you use? Thanks for all your hard work!
- luma 2y ago
  Not the fella you asked but let me offer some wisdom: smart switches are a lot easier to live with than smart lights. If you also want color control, HA can do a decent job of making smart switches work well with smart lights. The core problem with a smart light is that it very likely has a switch somewhere. If someone turns that switch off, that smart light just lost power and became dumb. Turning it back on now involves a trip to the switch. A smart switch is smart so long as utility power is running and you never find yourself in a position where the managed device is in an unknown and/or uncontrollable state.
  - BikiniPrince 2y ago
    This is my next adventure because somewhere someone had left a light on! Those esp32 relays can fit right in a work box.
  - hokumguru 2y ago
    My solution was to add Shelly relays behind all of my “dumb” switches. They keep power always on and essentially turn the switch into a smart button to dim or brighten my Lifx lights. This way I get circadian & party lighting while still maintaining the convenience of physical light switches! And to parent question: Lifx still has the best color/brightness of any smart bulb and they’re IMO the best. Just make sure your WiFi can handle it.
  - giobox 2y ago
    Even better, get smart switches that don't use wifi or IP addresses. I'm personally of opinion my homes core features should not rely on needing IP addresses, working DHCP or DNS etc just to turn a light bulb on and off. Home assistant works amazingly well with zigbee devices, and these are plentiful and cheap etc, and don't rely on working wifi/IP infrastructure. When I sell up, my zigbee switches will work just fine as plain-ole light switches even with all my Home Assistant infra ripped out, leaving no issues for next buyer. You can add zigbee support to pretty much any Home Assistant setup with a 20 buck USB adapter, Home Assistant even make an official one: https://www.home-assistant.io/connectzbt1/ https://www.home-assistant.io/connectzbt1/ The also sell Home Assistant servers with zigbee radios built in: https://www.home-assistant.io/yellow/ https://www.home-assistant.io/yellow/ The light switches are often cheaper than wifi equivalents too. Wifi bulbs should really only be considered by renters IMO - people who can't easily replace wall switches or similar.
roger_ 2y ago
Organizing devices and creating automations is still very tedious. I'd love to be able to add a device and describe it (where it is, what it does, etc.) and have HA automatically integrate it with existing automations or fuse it with other sensors. Maybe leveraging LLMs for this. e.g.: I buy a new leak sensor and add it to HA. I should just tell HA it's a leak sensor and it's in my laundry room and have it create an automation to send alerts, etc. when there's a leak. Or I add a temperature sensor in my living room and have it automatically be fused with other sensors to update my living room average temperate.
- balloob 2y ago
  You're right. Home Assistant is the best toolbox out there, but people need to build things themselves. That's something we plan to tackle, but no timeline. Leak sensors, smoke detectors, CO2 sensors, garage door openers, they can all have benefit from some built-in automations to warn when a problem is detected.
- bravoetch 2y ago
  Add to HA, and set 'area' or 'label' to the same as all your other leak sensors. Use the area or label in your automation. I find HA joyously easy to use. I have my garage door, lights all around the house, thermostats, hot water recirculation system, doorbell, lutron blinds, and ceiling fans. The automations are easy to make, and have been getting easier over the last few years with HA improvements. (and same as others in this discussion, I use zigbee smart switches. The GE brand ones are great).
  - roger_ 2y ago
    I don't think you can trigger by a label/area and also retrieve which device was the trigger (groups had that issue).
- Helmut10001 2y ago
  One trick: Add your automations.yml (and ideally, all HASS config/ymls) to a git repository, so you can track changes, organize and observe how automation changes behave.
Carrok 2y ago
Are there any plans to add automations based on People and Areas (not zones)? I found the cool project Bermuda[0] and it triggers person entered/left area events based on bluetooth devices. This works great in my testing with a phone being tracked by Shelly switches. But I can't seem to find a way to actually make these events do anything. It would be even better if I didn't have to set up area specific automations at all and just be able to say "turn on the lights in an area to 20% if someone enters it after sunset". Thanks for all your great work! [0] https://github.com/agittins/bermuda https://github.com/agittins/bermuda
- balloob 2y ago
  Not from our side. You can see our roadmap here; https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/11/15/roadmap-2024h2/ https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/11/15/roadmap-2024h2... Now the community should be able to create such things, as our automation engine is very powerful. I think the challenge in general with room presence detection is that these systems are not very common/reliable yet for us to aim to standardize.
- baq 2y ago
  Check out espresense
doctoboggan 2y ago
Hi Balloob, great project, thanks for all your work! I've been using it for over 10 years now. I am wondering if you've ever considered a change to your release rules. Monthly releases are great, but having breaking changes in every release can get to be a bit of a burden. I think it would make end users lives easier if you were able to limit breaking changes to only once (or twice) per year. I try to read the breaking changes list every time, but sometimes I don't mess with HA for a few months as it's all running smoothly. Then when I do log back in I have a large backlog of breaking changes to review. Usually at this point I just don't upgrade and the problem keeps getting worse. If instead I knew that certain upgrades do no include breaking changes I could more easily keep up to date, and only look more closely at the yearly (or bi-yearly) update that includes the breaking changes.
- balloob 2y ago
  We've actively managing our backwards incompatible changes, but sometimes it's out of our control (ie an API change). For things we deprecate in Home Assistant, it is a minimum of 6 months period where we print warnings with alternatives. Integrations set up via the UI, will only change for improvement if we can ensure there is a migration path (sometimes requiring adding some extra info). Some backwards incompatible changes like requiring a new Z-Wave JS version are also able to be managed automatically by Home Assistant. However, because of choice, there are many ways Home Assistant can be installed and we're not always responsible for the installation. I believe that we can do better in knowing what integrations you use, and mapping that against the integrations that require changes.
Rooster61 2y ago
First, thank you. Home Assistant is an outstanding example of having control of our electronics rather than giving money to data harvesting companies. Second, I'm curious, how often do you guys have to deal with negative actions taken towards you by those same data harvesting giants? I'd imagine they aren't huge fans of this technology. Any Cease and Desist or other fun examples you guys have had to defend yourselves from?
- balloob 2y ago
  We have very good relationships across the industry, especially the bigger companies. I literally just came back from a meeting with Google Home :) Where we see the most pushback is from industries adjacent to the smart home, as they don't appreciate the openness. Think garage doors, cars, or cloud data providers for info that can be useful in the home. When someone complains, like Mazda [1], we pull their integration and communicate their stance to our shared users, and people considering buying into their products. We don't fight for access, as a manufacturer with a cloud service will always be able to find a way. If it is a local device though, our community tends to find a way[2] [1]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/10/mazdas-dmca-takedown-kills-a-hobbyists-smart-car-api-tool/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/10/mazdas-dmca-takedown-ki... [2]: 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...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - adamtaylor_13 2y ago
    It’s interesting how some of these actions backfire. I will literally never purchase a chamberlain product ever again because of how overtly money-grabbing they are. I suppose in some ways, it’s a good thing. It shows me what companies I should support, and which I shouldn’t.
    - esperent 2y ago
      > It shows me what companies I should support, and which I shouldn’t. I used to think that way too. Now, I think that all it takes is one bad quarterly report leading to a new CEO, and even the most open of companies can instantly switch to being closed, lock off all their APIs, stop working with open source projects like HA. I don't know any solution to this, and if I'm honest, being bitten a couple of times has stopped me from experimenting with anything like home automation that requires me to buy physical hardware.
vpicone 2y ago
Putting things under the Open Home Foundation seems like interesting choice. Can you speak more on that and about the foundation generally?
- balloob 2y ago
  Our launch post covers a lot of the original intentions and a good starting point: https://www.openhomefoundation.org/blog/announcing-the-open-home-foundation/ https://www.openhomefoundation.org/blog/announcing-the-open-... The way the world works, you need to be either a company or a non-profit to be able to partner with the industry. Just being an open source project is not enough. Since the launch of the foundation, we see a large uptick in companies and universities reaching out to partner with Home Assistant. A lot of manufacturers are very happy to see that an independent platform is being established as alternative to the big tech platforms. Universities want to collaborate on energy and privacy research for the smart home. We've also seen some industry donations (ie DuckDuckGo) to support our work.
echoangle 2y ago
One question about remote access: Currently, it looks like there are 3 methods (https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/configuration/remote/ https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/configuration/remote/): - Home Assistant Cloud (paid) - VPN - Port forwarding Is there any plan to make something like Home Assistant Cloud available for self hosting? Like a simple docker container to put on a VPS? I don't want to deal with DynDNS to expose my home network but would prefer a Server component on a VPS with a static IP which connects to my home server and allows remote control. Or is there already a way to do this?
- bananapub 2y ago
  seems completely out of scope for HA? if you want to proxy it from the internet then you can just do that using any of the tools used for this - NGINX, wireguard, rathole, etc etc etc.
  - echoangle 2y ago
    But this functionality already exists in HA. There’s a simple login page where I can connect to the HA cloud. The idea would be to start a docker container, set up a domain name where it’s reachable, enter the domain name on the HA cloud screen and connect to it. It would be much simpler than setting up everything yourself. What would be the correct way to DIY it? You would need a VPN to connect you home network to the Proxy and then expose the web interface on the proxy, right?
    - OvidNaso 2y ago
      There is a tailscale addon. Simple install it, then install on any device you want to connect, phone, etc. Could not be easier.
- bmicraft 2y ago
  Proxying home assistant is no different from any other http based service. You set up a reverse proxy (including websocket proxying) for your HA subdomain on your VPS and you're done.
whalesalad 2y ago
Just wanna say thanks for leading such a strong and comprehensive open source project. A lot of open source tools are wonderful in and of themselves (being that they are free) but might not always live up to expectations or offer a whole lot. With Home Assistant, I feel like it is the opposite and the capability/power of the tool (particularly out of the box) is really quite impressive. So keep it up and thank you again!
swyx 2y ago
much respect to you for driving this, but home assistant was unusable to me fyi https://github.com/swyxio/swyxdotio/issues/525 https://github.com/swyxio/swyxdotio/issues/525 this is my friciton log. i am left with a $60 brick. hope your folks can use this to improve the experience.
- zxvkhkxvdvbdxz 2y ago
  seems your issues started from the beginning. you bought a HA voice believing it was a home assistant server. it says right on their sales page it is a "voice assistant" and that it is "built for home assistant". [1] then you didnt want to buy the HA green that is a home assistant appliance with HAOS already setup for people who don't want to diy it (like you didnt). next you downloaded a .vdi and didnt research what it is or how to install it. then you complain about docker images, although it is absolutely possible to run in docker as long as you understand the limitations [2]. did you even read this? > hmm. new macs dont have apt-get anymore. they never did. why dont you read whats in all of your screenshots? it says right above "if your OS don't have that, look for alternatives". > Installing Virtualbox and double clicking the .vdi file i downloaded from earlier gives.... nothing well, what do you expect? it's a disk image, not a executable. again, the installation instructions for macOS can help you here, you should read it [3] > anyway, it looks like the default vdi ships with some well known bugs but ALSO its now just straight up missing the \EFI\BOOT\BOOTx64.efi file it expects to load. I found one you can download here and learned that you can import them into the vm via shared folders. you found a post from 2021, it is not relevant today. then you started replacing files... oh man! your actual issue is that you didn't configure the vm like the installation guide showed you. next you got it running in docker. advice to you: don't. you will not be able to use addons and thus no hacs. > of course it just expects the networking to work when of course it wont fucking work > i tried ngrok to setup a tunnel but it just resulted in a bunch of bad 400 bad request errors you must learn how docker networks work to progress here. docker only listen locally by default and you need to instruct it otherwise if that's what you want. TLDR: you should have just started by reading the installation instructions, it explains to you: > Home Assistant offers four different installation methods. We recommend using Home Assistant Operating System. then you should follow the recommendation and be done long ago. you seem frustrated and not keen on reading or learning. not sure who you expect to take action based on that rant. 1: https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/ https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/ 2: https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/#advanced-installation-methods https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/#advanced-install... 3: https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/macos https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/macos
FloatArtifact 2y ago
> Founder of Home Assistant here. Let me know if anyone has any questions about the project or the Open Home Foundation (which now owns Home Assistant, ESPHome etc) Every time I visit the big box stores, I see Wi-Fi as the primary means of connecting to the smart home ecosystem. Do you see this trend changing in the future, why from the average consumer prospective? Especially with thread?
sneak 2y ago
Why can’t I install and use it without internet access? The whole point of self hosting is privacy and control; this thing is neither.
- ncallaway 2y ago
  You can use it without internet access? I regularly test disconnecting my HA server from the network and make sure nothing home critical stops working. I do have a few internet integrations (weather, upcoming sports events, etc) and those all stop when I do a “no internet” test, but Home Assistant runs just fine without any network access.
  - sneak 2y ago
    You can’t install it without internet, and tons of the web UI loads external resources.
    - ianburrell 2y ago
      I ran the UI and didn't load anything from external source. The Internet should only needed to download the image. You could download and flash it manually. The setup shouldn't require the Internet. What needed the Internet?
      - farawayea 2y ago
        As I've written in the other comment, the Home Assistant Operating System is useless without an Internet connection. It has to pull the Docker images since it doesn't have any version of the images at all. Yes, there are resources loaded from the Internet. The map tiles are loaded from a third party in the initial setup and every time you view the map. Icons are loaded from https://brands.home-assistant.io/ https://brands.home-assistant.io/. https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549 https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549 is the issue. This thing isn't as private and as local as it is claimed to be. It's very tied to services provided by Nabu Casa, including the very visible cloud integration of theirs. They've expanded it now to backups.
zzyzxd 2y ago
What's the HA community's attitude towards FOSS nowadays? Comparing to 3.5 years ago?[1] 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277
- Semaphor 2y ago
  Wow, one active contributor is now "the community"?
  - farawayea 2y ago
    This isn't some regular contributor. They appear to be one of the most important Home Assistant maintainers and a Nabu casa employee. This contributor is also the author of many release note blog posts such as this one https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2025/01/03/release-20251/ https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2025/01/03/release-20251/ Home Assistant may be developed with financing from Nabu Casa. Nabu Casa receives money from partners, from people who buy their products and from those who pay for their cloud subscription. They also rely heavily on countless other Python packages developed and maintained by people they don't pay. Other people make significant contributions to Home Assistant and to its web UI. I'd expect them to run this project as an open source project and handle such situations with a bit more grace, even more so for someone with such a high profile such as frenck. They'd have the right to get angry if someone distributed a paid product which didn't include FOSS code from third party contributors or FOSS dependencies. This isn't the case. They use a lot of FOSS code from countless people already for the Home Assistant core, for the frontend and for the Home Assistant OS. All of the time spent dealing with such needless drama could be better spent living one's life and doing something more meaningful for everyone.
  - zzyzxd 2y ago
    I only linked to the HN thread, but there you can find links to discussions in HA community, for example: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/consider-to-avoid-adding-library-dependencies-from-frenck/315185 https://community.home-assistant.io/t/consider-to-avoid-addi... , which includes responses from forum admins and founders.
brikym 2y ago
According to the post HA uses sqlite for sensor data. Why not use a temporal database like InfluxDB, Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics etc?
- mvip 2y ago
  Author here. You can use influx. That’s what I’m doing. It’s just that HA doesn’t use thet by default (which is sensible for most use cases tbh).
- dengolius 2y ago
  +1 I also cteated homeassistant-addon-victorialogs[1] as well as homeassistant-addon-victoriametrics[2]. [1]: https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics-Community/homeassistant-addon-victorialogs https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics-Community/homeassistant-a... [2]: https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics-Community/homeassistant-addon-victoriametrics https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics-Community/homeassistant-a...
XorNot 2y ago
Do you think there is any hope of convincing Tuya to make their devices easily flashable? They'd be the unquestioned king of the space if us local only people could reliably convert them to ESPhome, and they're the way a lot of brands end up making things "smart".
- eternityforest 2y ago
  I just wish they had a proper local protocol that didn't involve some dev account thing that might or might not expire and need manual fussing...
- farawayea 2y ago
  Tuya's entire business model is about getting their customers' data and getting them to pay for their services through vendor lock-in. They're not going to give up on all that juicy data collection and on the money they currently charge.
farawayea 2y ago
I've been using Home Assistant for about three years. I was very glad it exists. I wanted to make the most out of it. It has numerous problems and regressions are very frequent. The disappointment lies in it not being as it's described and in the fact that its development process doesn't appear to improve, nor does its overall quality appear to improve. It still gains new features in spite of all of these issues. Home Assistant's dashboards and UI have regressions in every single release. Many such regressions aren't fixed quickly or remain that way permanently. Github issues get closed by the bot. New features ship in every release without fixing these bugs. This gave me the impression that the developers employed by Nabu Casa have very little time to focus on bugs and that there's no pre-release QA. The graphs and their history had plenty of bugs in the 2025.1 release. Are there plans to improve the development process to improve quality? Home Assistant is described on its home page as "Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first.". A Home Assistant OS download is useless offline and without the Nabu Casa infrastructure. A download of a Home Assistant OS image obtained today would be completely useless in 5 years for now. These are completely useless if Nabu Casa's infrastructure goes away for any reason. Do you have plans to address this? Another point related to Home Assistant being local and making privacy a priority, Home Assistant downloads all icons from [1]. The GitHub issue [2] has been open for a while without any involvement from the developers. The Home Assistant container image doesn't include all the assets required for it to provide a Home Assistant deployment in a container. Is this something you plan to address or should it be handled in a fork of Home Assistant meant to be run completely locally? Home Assistant bundles numerous dependencies [3]. The Home Assistant container bundles and has all of these available. Are there any plans to let users disable all cloud only integrations? What's done to assess the security of these numerous packages? This matters because people allow Home Assistant to access their indoor cameras, door locks and other potentially sensitive devices. Some malicious code run from one compromised dependency's __init__.py could have serious consequences. Home Assistant is a Python monolith. Adding something as simple as a shell command to my configuration requires a restart of Home Assistant. Are there any plans to split this up or to improve the architecture to not have such issues anymore? The energy dashboard is extremely limited. Are there plans to make this more flexible? Why are you forcing people to use encryption since 2025.1? I was including these backups in my encrypted backups anyway. The voice functionality for Home Assistant and voice PE require a cloud service or a local machine with a GPU for good performance. Are there any plans to address this to provide higher performance local voice control? The old Rhasspy (the version released before Nabu Casa hired its developer) seemed to work a lot better with defined sentences and was faster. I've seen Home Assistant become faster over the last three years. My YAML had to be updated a few times. New features have been introduced to the dashboards. Old issues and limitations are still there. The dashboards gain new features while the number of bugs and regressions also increases. The custom resources for custom cards don't always load in the mobile app. The UI still loads all the icons from the Nabu Casa icons site [1]. Home Assistant frequently stops updating my location (home vs away) and requires deletion of the device from HA to get it to work again. Entities don't update in the dashboard sometimes. Home Assistant is described as being an open source project which has been donated or moved to the Open Home Foundation. Why does it still require a CLA to be signed, just like corporate open source projects? Setting up Home Assistant for someone who's non-technical is a terrible idea. This is an even bigger issue if they want it set up and left alone without updates/maintenance. The mobile app would probably stop working properly with this installation or they'd break it at some point by installing updates. I'll wait for a bit longer while I prepare to migrate away from Home Assistant and Home Assistant OS. I'm considering a setup which uses Home Assistant core to trigger automations and to display a dashboard. All the automations and device integrations would be done with other tools. This would reduce exposure to Home Assistant's regressions and avoid Home Assistant OS's limitations. [1] the Nabu Casa run icons site - https://brands.home-assistant.io https://brands.home-assistant.io [2] https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549 https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549 [3] Home Assistant Python requirements https://github.com/home-assistant/core/blob/dev/requirements_all.txt https://github.com/home-assistant/core/blob/dev/requirements...
ulrischa 2y ago
The old automation in YAML is very cluncky as the author also mentioned. The new UI guided creation is not powerful and can become confusing for complex cases on the other side. I do all my automation with the node-red Integration. But the combination of the node-red flows with the Homeassistant dashboards is not very good. Do you plan to change the automation to something like node-red but better integrated? Or change the yaml to sonething less declarative and more code centric?
goodpoint 2y ago
Why is Home Assistant not provided by popular Linux distributions? It has access to security cameras and having to trust a ton of code downloaded with Docker is a no go.
- mvip 2y ago
  There’s an official docker image, which is what I’ve been using forever a long time.
- farawayea 2y ago
  https://github.com/home-assistant/core/blob/dev/requirements_all.txt https://github.com/home-assistant/core/blob/dev/requirements... lists all the direct dependencies installed in the container. It's enough for just a single direct or indirect dependency to be compromised to have a botnet or turn it into something used for surveillance against the users. Preventing it from exfiltrating data by isolating it from the network with Internet access is the only option if you want to run it. This requires local only devices. Accessing it through the web UI or through the mobile app will still load icons from https://brands.home-assistant.io https://brands.home-assistant.io. The details are in this ticket https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549 https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549
  - goodpoint 2y ago
    omg one THOUSAND dependencies.
    - farawayea 2y ago
      Those are just the direct dependencies as far as I can tell. The frontend has its own dependencies.
mvip 2y ago
@balloob -- author of post here. Would love to have you on my podcast to nerd out about Home Assistant (https://vpetersson.com/podcast/ https://vpetersson.com/podcast/).
kkfx 2y ago
Not much a question, but a RANT. As an user I'm grateful for HA slick UI and functionality but while the best on the market is... A damn hell. YAML instead of pure Python is a hell. Trying to push things to be configured via WebUI is a big discomfort because well... Generic users do like clicking around, but generic users will not use HA simply because it's not and will not be possible in future to create a no-code usable IoT. All low-code/no-code stuff COMPLICATE life instead of simplify. External deps like InfluxDB to just prune past data and keep them as I wish it not much nice, having a built-in option to state how to prune and for how long to keep each specific sensor or default policy would be very nice. Essentially the RANT could be condensed in: please consider designing for people who know how to code, because they will anyway be the most common users. IoT OEMs will only be hostile for most because they still fails to understand how to makes business in an open world, so professional integrator will not much choose HA anyway since it's way too time consuming to really customize and keep it up. A pure code approach with NO energy wasted in config WebUIs/low code/no code on contrary could makes HA an interesting "base for system integrators" in a much broader sense. NanoKVM PCIe, JetKVM show the start of a feature-rich light-out management for anything, they will be the bridge between home IoT and classic homelabs/IT. HA could play a very nice role there, essentially offering a platform to bridge the not-really-IT-ready world of ModBUS and co appliances to the TCP-enabled and digitally controlled stuff. A future where small devices could be fitted in most appliances to "makes them smart" like being in the middle of a washing machine control panel connected to home p.v. system to start programmatically depending on available p.v., a connected oven pre-loaded with food the user start when he/she knows the time he/she will be at home. This is a potentially nice niche market who could explode in the relatively near future. It's not possible as low code/no code/pre-packaged black box stuff. Being a component anyone could easily plug in a larger system is needed. YAML might be ok if we limit HA to some smart bulb, just having a Victron battery inverter with some 40+ sensors demanding a significant load of YAML it's nightmarish. In python native it's HYPER quick.
- farawayea 2y ago
  It's a major pain to write YAML for Home Assistant. Some parts of Home Assistant lack complete examples which are up to date. The documentation doesn't include examples for every single thing. Part of writing some automations was just a lot of trial and error, looking things up on the Internet, validating the configuration, and restarting Home Assistant. It's just not a great experience. Discovering what has to be selected to use as an action in the automation GUI is another nuisance. The most recent example is with a light I wanted to set to 20% brightness. I had no means to find something with the keyword "brightness" or anything similar. It turned out that this was exposed as turn light on. Breaking changes are their own source of friction. My only advantage has been that many of my automations are now just GUI automations with some custom YAML where it can't be avoided. All of these things are far beyond what a non-technical user could be able to do. It can be difficult even for someone who knows how to look things up, read documentation and update everything when breaking changes are made. Home Assistant isn't the kind of tool one can put in someone else's hands to use it without additional maintenance or supervision. It's also not the tool to use in any commercial setting due to its countless problems.
10729287 2y ago
Hi @balloob. No question but I moved yesterday night from a Home Assistant Supervised on Raspi 3 to an HAOS on Raspi 4 + SSD and the migration had been flawless. Thank you very much to you, the team, and all the contributors for making such a great and fair piece of software and building such a great community.

Founder of Home Assistant here. Let me know if anyone has any questions about the project or the Open Home Foundation (which now owns Home Assistant, ESPHome etc)

poutine 2y ago

Any plan to update the GUI for conditional logic inside of automations? It's really clumsy to do IF/THEN or switch style constructions. Too much visual space and clunky overall.

Yossarrian22 2y ago
Have you tried using the NodeRed plugin? That’s worked really well for me
- ziml77 2y ago
  NodeRed is awesome. I didn't even bother with anything beyond very, very simple automations until I installed that. For me the flow design feels very natural and is easy to modify and monitor. And it's pluggable with custom nodes so if functionality is missing you can add it in. Like I installed a node that handles OAuth2 so I can have it log into a web service and check a status page.
balloob 2y ago
We are working on the automations UI as we speak! (this can also be seen on our roadmap update https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/11/15/roadmap-2024h2/ https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/11/15/roadmap-2024h2... )
- poutine 2y ago
  Cool, thanks! Great work!
- oynqr 2y ago
  Just dumping an idea here: In the past I've had issues with forgetting to add triggers for states that are used somewhere as a condition or switch. This leads to lost updates and frustation. React state hooks, which I'm deeply familiar with, will result in a linter warning if any of their dependencies are missing. I'd really like something similar for automations.

bloqs 2y ago

What brand of smart lightbulbs do you use? Thanks for all your hard work!

luma 2y ago
Not the fella you asked but let me offer some wisdom: smart switches are a lot easier to live with than smart lights. If you also want color control, HA can do a decent job of making smart switches work well with smart lights. The core problem with a smart light is that it very likely has a switch somewhere. If someone turns that switch off, that smart light just lost power and became dumb. Turning it back on now involves a trip to the switch. A smart switch is smart so long as utility power is running and you never find yourself in a position where the managed device is in an unknown and/or uncontrollable state.
- BikiniPrince 2y ago
  This is my next adventure because somewhere someone had left a light on! Those esp32 relays can fit right in a work box.
- hokumguru 2y ago
  My solution was to add Shelly relays behind all of my “dumb” switches. They keep power always on and essentially turn the switch into a smart button to dim or brighten my Lifx lights. This way I get circadian & party lighting while still maintaining the convenience of physical light switches! And to parent question: Lifx still has the best color/brightness of any smart bulb and they’re IMO the best. Just make sure your WiFi can handle it.
- giobox 2y ago
  Even better, get smart switches that don't use wifi or IP addresses. I'm personally of opinion my homes core features should not rely on needing IP addresses, working DHCP or DNS etc just to turn a light bulb on and off. Home assistant works amazingly well with zigbee devices, and these are plentiful and cheap etc, and don't rely on working wifi/IP infrastructure. When I sell up, my zigbee switches will work just fine as plain-ole light switches even with all my Home Assistant infra ripped out, leaving no issues for next buyer. You can add zigbee support to pretty much any Home Assistant setup with a 20 buck USB adapter, Home Assistant even make an official one: https://www.home-assistant.io/connectzbt1/ https://www.home-assistant.io/connectzbt1/ The also sell Home Assistant servers with zigbee radios built in: https://www.home-assistant.io/yellow/ https://www.home-assistant.io/yellow/ The light switches are often cheaper than wifi equivalents too. Wifi bulbs should really only be considered by renters IMO - people who can't easily replace wall switches or similar.

roger_ 2y ago

Organizing devices and creating automations is still very tedious. I'd love to be able to add a device and describe it (where it is, what it does, etc.) and have HA automatically integrate it with existing automations or fuse it with other sensors. Maybe leveraging LLMs for this. e.g.: I buy a new leak sensor and add it to HA. I should just tell HA it's a leak sensor and it's in my laundry room and have it create an automation to send alerts, etc. when there's a leak. Or I add a temperature sensor in my living room and have it automatically be fused with other sensors to update my living room average temperate.

balloob 2y ago
You're right. Home Assistant is the best toolbox out there, but people need to build things themselves. That's something we plan to tackle, but no timeline. Leak sensors, smoke detectors, CO2 sensors, garage door openers, they can all have benefit from some built-in automations to warn when a problem is detected.
bravoetch 2y ago
Add to HA, and set 'area' or 'label' to the same as all your other leak sensors. Use the area or label in your automation. I find HA joyously easy to use. I have my garage door, lights all around the house, thermostats, hot water recirculation system, doorbell, lutron blinds, and ceiling fans. The automations are easy to make, and have been getting easier over the last few years with HA improvements. (and same as others in this discussion, I use zigbee smart switches. The GE brand ones are great).
- roger_ 2y ago
  I don't think you can trigger by a label/area and also retrieve which device was the trigger (groups had that issue).
Helmut10001 2y ago
One trick: Add your automations.yml (and ideally, all HASS config/ymls) to a git repository, so you can track changes, organize and observe how automation changes behave.

Carrok 2y ago

Are there any plans to add automations based on People and Areas (not zones)? I found the cool project Bermuda[0] and it triggers person entered/left area events based on bluetooth devices. This works great in my testing with a phone being tracked by Shelly switches. But I can't seem to find a way to actually make these events do anything. It would be even better if I didn't have to set up area specific automations at all and just be able to say "turn on the lights in an area to 20% if someone enters it after sunset". Thanks for all your great work! [0] https://github.com/agittins/bermuda https://github.com/agittins/bermuda

balloob 2y ago
Not from our side. You can see our roadmap here; https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/11/15/roadmap-2024h2/ https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/11/15/roadmap-2024h2... Now the community should be able to create such things, as our automation engine is very powerful. I think the challenge in general with room presence detection is that these systems are not very common/reliable yet for us to aim to standardize.
baq 2y ago
Check out espresense

doctoboggan 2y ago

Hi Balloob, great project, thanks for all your work! I've been using it for over 10 years now. I am wondering if you've ever considered a change to your release rules. Monthly releases are great, but having breaking changes in every release can get to be a bit of a burden. I think it would make end users lives easier if you were able to limit breaking changes to only once (or twice) per year. I try to read the breaking changes list every time, but sometimes I don't mess with HA for a few months as it's all running smoothly. Then when I do log back in I have a large backlog of breaking changes to review. Usually at this point I just don't upgrade and the problem keeps getting worse. If instead I knew that certain upgrades do no include breaking changes I could more easily keep up to date, and only look more closely at the yearly (or bi-yearly) update that includes the breaking changes.

balloob 2y ago
We've actively managing our backwards incompatible changes, but sometimes it's out of our control (ie an API change). For things we deprecate in Home Assistant, it is a minimum of 6 months period where we print warnings with alternatives. Integrations set up via the UI, will only change for improvement if we can ensure there is a migration path (sometimes requiring adding some extra info). Some backwards incompatible changes like requiring a new Z-Wave JS version are also able to be managed automatically by Home Assistant. However, because of choice, there are many ways Home Assistant can be installed and we're not always responsible for the installation. I believe that we can do better in knowing what integrations you use, and mapping that against the integrations that require changes.

Rooster61 2y ago

First, thank you. Home Assistant is an outstanding example of having control of our electronics rather than giving money to data harvesting companies. Second, I'm curious, how often do you guys have to deal with negative actions taken towards you by those same data harvesting giants? I'd imagine they aren't huge fans of this technology. Any Cease and Desist or other fun examples you guys have had to defend yourselves from?

balloob 2y ago
We have very good relationships across the industry, especially the bigger companies. I literally just came back from a meeting with Google Home :) Where we see the most pushback is from industries adjacent to the smart home, as they don't appreciate the openness. Think garage doors, cars, or cloud data providers for info that can be useful in the home. When someone complains, like Mazda [1], we pull their integration and communicate their stance to our shared users, and people considering buying into their products. We don't fight for access, as a manufacturer with a cloud service will always be able to find a way. If it is a local device though, our community tends to find a way[2] [1]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/10/mazdas-dmca-takedown-kills-a-hobbyists-smart-car-api-tool/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/10/mazdas-dmca-takedown-ki... [2]: 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...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- adamtaylor_13 2y ago
  It’s interesting how some of these actions backfire. I will literally never purchase a chamberlain product ever again because of how overtly money-grabbing they are. I suppose in some ways, it’s a good thing. It shows me what companies I should support, and which I shouldn’t.
  - esperent 2y ago
    > It shows me what companies I should support, and which I shouldn’t. I used to think that way too. Now, I think that all it takes is one bad quarterly report leading to a new CEO, and even the most open of companies can instantly switch to being closed, lock off all their APIs, stop working with open source projects like HA. I don't know any solution to this, and if I'm honest, being bitten a couple of times has stopped me from experimenting with anything like home automation that requires me to buy physical hardware.

vpicone 2y ago

Putting things under the Open Home Foundation seems like interesting choice. Can you speak more on that and about the foundation generally?

balloob 2y ago
Our launch post covers a lot of the original intentions and a good starting point: https://www.openhomefoundation.org/blog/announcing-the-open-home-foundation/ https://www.openhomefoundation.org/blog/announcing-the-open-... The way the world works, you need to be either a company or a non-profit to be able to partner with the industry. Just being an open source project is not enough. Since the launch of the foundation, we see a large uptick in companies and universities reaching out to partner with Home Assistant. A lot of manufacturers are very happy to see that an independent platform is being established as alternative to the big tech platforms. Universities want to collaborate on energy and privacy research for the smart home. We've also seen some industry donations (ie DuckDuckGo) to support our work.

echoangle 2y ago

One question about remote access: Currently, it looks like there are 3 methods (https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/configuration/remote/ https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/configuration/remote/): - Home Assistant Cloud (paid) - VPN - Port forwarding Is there any plan to make something like Home Assistant Cloud available for self hosting? Like a simple docker container to put on a VPS? I don't want to deal with DynDNS to expose my home network but would prefer a Server component on a VPS with a static IP which connects to my home server and allows remote control. Or is there already a way to do this?

bananapub 2y ago
seems completely out of scope for HA? if you want to proxy it from the internet then you can just do that using any of the tools used for this - NGINX, wireguard, rathole, etc etc etc.
- echoangle 2y ago
  But this functionality already exists in HA. There’s a simple login page where I can connect to the HA cloud. The idea would be to start a docker container, set up a domain name where it’s reachable, enter the domain name on the HA cloud screen and connect to it. It would be much simpler than setting up everything yourself. What would be the correct way to DIY it? You would need a VPN to connect you home network to the Proxy and then expose the web interface on the proxy, right?
  - OvidNaso 2y ago
    There is a tailscale addon. Simple install it, then install on any device you want to connect, phone, etc. Could not be easier.
bmicraft 2y ago
Proxying home assistant is no different from any other http based service. You set up a reverse proxy (including websocket proxying) for your HA subdomain on your VPS and you're done.

whalesalad 2y ago

Just wanna say thanks for leading such a strong and comprehensive open source project. A lot of open source tools are wonderful in and of themselves (being that they are free) but might not always live up to expectations or offer a whole lot. With Home Assistant, I feel like it is the opposite and the capability/power of the tool (particularly out of the box) is really quite impressive. So keep it up and thank you again!

swyx 2y ago

much respect to you for driving this, but home assistant was unusable to me fyi https://github.com/swyxio/swyxdotio/issues/525 https://github.com/swyxio/swyxdotio/issues/525 this is my friciton log. i am left with a $60 brick. hope your folks can use this to improve the experience.

zxvkhkxvdvbdxz 2y ago
seems your issues started from the beginning. you bought a HA voice believing it was a home assistant server. it says right on their sales page it is a "voice assistant" and that it is "built for home assistant". [1] then you didnt want to buy the HA green that is a home assistant appliance with HAOS already setup for people who don't want to diy it (like you didnt). next you downloaded a .vdi and didnt research what it is or how to install it. then you complain about docker images, although it is absolutely possible to run in docker as long as you understand the limitations [2]. did you even read this? > hmm. new macs dont have apt-get anymore. they never did. why dont you read whats in all of your screenshots? it says right above "if your OS don't have that, look for alternatives". > Installing Virtualbox and double clicking the .vdi file i downloaded from earlier gives.... nothing well, what do you expect? it's a disk image, not a executable. again, the installation instructions for macOS can help you here, you should read it [3] > anyway, it looks like the default vdi ships with some well known bugs but ALSO its now just straight up missing the \EFI\BOOT\BOOTx64.efi file it expects to load. I found one you can download here and learned that you can import them into the vm via shared folders. you found a post from 2021, it is not relevant today. then you started replacing files... oh man! your actual issue is that you didn't configure the vm like the installation guide showed you. next you got it running in docker. advice to you: don't. you will not be able to use addons and thus no hacs. > of course it just expects the networking to work when of course it wont fucking work > i tried ngrok to setup a tunnel but it just resulted in a bunch of bad 400 bad request errors you must learn how docker networks work to progress here. docker only listen locally by default and you need to instruct it otherwise if that's what you want. TLDR: you should have just started by reading the installation instructions, it explains to you: > Home Assistant offers four different installation methods. We recommend using Home Assistant Operating System. then you should follow the recommendation and be done long ago. you seem frustrated and not keen on reading or learning. not sure who you expect to take action based on that rant. 1: https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/ https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/ 2: https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/#advanced-installation-methods https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/#advanced-install... 3: https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/macos https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/macos

FloatArtifact 2y ago

> Founder of Home Assistant here. Let me know if anyone has any questions about the project or the Open Home Foundation (which now owns Home Assistant, ESPHome etc) Every time I visit the big box stores, I see Wi-Fi as the primary means of connecting to the smart home ecosystem. Do you see this trend changing in the future, why from the average consumer prospective? Especially with thread?

sneak 2y ago

Why can’t I install and use it without internet access? The whole point of self hosting is privacy and control; this thing is neither.

ncallaway 2y ago
You can use it without internet access? I regularly test disconnecting my HA server from the network and make sure nothing home critical stops working. I do have a few internet integrations (weather, upcoming sports events, etc) and those all stop when I do a “no internet” test, but Home Assistant runs just fine without any network access.
- sneak 2y ago
  You can’t install it without internet, and tons of the web UI loads external resources.
  - ianburrell 2y ago
    I ran the UI and didn't load anything from external source. The Internet should only needed to download the image. You could download and flash it manually. The setup shouldn't require the Internet. What needed the Internet?
    - farawayea 2y ago
      As I've written in the other comment, the Home Assistant Operating System is useless without an Internet connection. It has to pull the Docker images since it doesn't have any version of the images at all. Yes, there are resources loaded from the Internet. The map tiles are loaded from a third party in the initial setup and every time you view the map. Icons are loaded from https://brands.home-assistant.io/ https://brands.home-assistant.io/. https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549 https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549 is the issue. This thing isn't as private and as local as it is claimed to be. It's very tied to services provided by Nabu Casa, including the very visible cloud integration of theirs. They've expanded it now to backups.

zzyzxd 2y ago

What's the HA community's attitude towards FOSS nowadays? Comparing to 3.5 years ago?[1] 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277

Semaphor 2y ago
Wow, one active contributor is now "the community"?
- farawayea 2y ago
  This isn't some regular contributor. They appear to be one of the most important Home Assistant maintainers and a Nabu casa employee. This contributor is also the author of many release note blog posts such as this one https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2025/01/03/release-20251/ https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2025/01/03/release-20251/ Home Assistant may be developed with financing from Nabu Casa. Nabu Casa receives money from partners, from people who buy their products and from those who pay for their cloud subscription. They also rely heavily on countless other Python packages developed and maintained by people they don't pay. Other people make significant contributions to Home Assistant and to its web UI. I'd expect them to run this project as an open source project and handle such situations with a bit more grace, even more so for someone with such a high profile such as frenck. They'd have the right to get angry if someone distributed a paid product which didn't include FOSS code from third party contributors or FOSS dependencies. This isn't the case. They use a lot of FOSS code from countless people already for the Home Assistant core, for the frontend and for the Home Assistant OS. All of the time spent dealing with such needless drama could be better spent living one's life and doing something more meaningful for everyone.
- zzyzxd 2y ago
  I only linked to the HN thread, but there you can find links to discussions in HA community, for example: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/consider-to-avoid-adding-library-dependencies-from-frenck/315185 https://community.home-assistant.io/t/consider-to-avoid-addi... , which includes responses from forum admins and founders.

brikym 2y ago

According to the post HA uses sqlite for sensor data. Why not use a temporal database like InfluxDB, Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics etc?

mvip 2y ago
Author here. You can use influx. That’s what I’m doing. It’s just that HA doesn’t use thet by default (which is sensible for most use cases tbh).
dengolius 2y ago
+1 I also cteated homeassistant-addon-victorialogs[1] as well as homeassistant-addon-victoriametrics[2]. [1]: https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics-Community/homeassistant-addon-victorialogs https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics-Community/homeassistant-a... [2]: https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics-Community/homeassistant-addon-victoriametrics https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics-Community/homeassistant-a...

XorNot 2y ago

Do you think there is any hope of convincing Tuya to make their devices easily flashable? They'd be the unquestioned king of the space if us local only people could reliably convert them to ESPhome, and they're the way a lot of brands end up making things "smart".

eternityforest 2y ago
I just wish they had a proper local protocol that didn't involve some dev account thing that might or might not expire and need manual fussing...
farawayea 2y ago
Tuya's entire business model is about getting their customers' data and getting them to pay for their services through vendor lock-in. They're not going to give up on all that juicy data collection and on the money they currently charge.

farawayea 2y ago

I've been using Home Assistant for about three years. I was very glad it exists. I wanted to make the most out of it. It has numerous problems and regressions are very frequent. The disappointment lies in it not being as it's described and in the fact that its development process doesn't appear to improve, nor does its overall quality appear to improve. It still gains new features in spite of all of these issues. Home Assistant's dashboards and UI have regressions in every single release. Many such regressions aren't fixed quickly or remain that way permanently. Github issues get closed by the bot. New features ship in every release without fixing these bugs. This gave me the impression that the developers employed by Nabu Casa have very little time to focus on bugs and that there's no pre-release QA. The graphs and their history had plenty of bugs in the 2025.1 release. Are there plans to improve the development process to improve quality? Home Assistant is described on its home page as "Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first.". A Home Assistant OS download is useless offline and without the Nabu Casa infrastructure. A download of a Home Assistant OS image obtained today would be completely useless in 5 years for now. These are completely useless if Nabu Casa's infrastructure goes away for any reason. Do you have plans to address this? Another point related to Home Assistant being local and making privacy a priority, Home Assistant downloads all icons from [1]. The GitHub issue [2] has been open for a while without any involvement from the developers. The Home Assistant container image doesn't include all the assets required for it to provide a Home Assistant deployment in a container. Is this something you plan to address or should it be handled in a fork of Home Assistant meant to be run completely locally? Home Assistant bundles numerous dependencies [3]. The Home Assistant container bundles and has all of these available. Are there any plans to let users disable all cloud only integrations? What's done to assess the security of these numerous packages? This matters because people allow Home Assistant to access their indoor cameras, door locks and other potentially sensitive devices. Some malicious code run from one compromised dependency's __init__.py could have serious consequences. Home Assistant is a Python monolith. Adding something as simple as a shell command to my configuration requires a restart of Home Assistant. Are there any plans to split this up or to improve the architecture to not have such issues anymore? The energy dashboard is extremely limited. Are there plans to make this more flexible? Why are you forcing people to use encryption since 2025.1? I was including these backups in my encrypted backups anyway. The voice functionality for Home Assistant and voice PE require a cloud service or a local machine with a GPU for good performance. Are there any plans to address this to provide higher performance local voice control? The old Rhasspy (the version released before Nabu Casa hired its developer) seemed to work a lot better with defined sentences and was faster. I've seen Home Assistant become faster over the last three years. My YAML had to be updated a few times. New features have been introduced to the dashboards. Old issues and limitations are still there. The dashboards gain new features while the number of bugs and regressions also increases. The custom resources for custom cards don't always load in the mobile app. The UI still loads all the icons from the Nabu Casa icons site [1]. Home Assistant frequently stops updating my location (home vs away) and requires deletion of the device from HA to get it to work again. Entities don't update in the dashboard sometimes. Home Assistant is described as being an open source project which has been donated or moved to the Open Home Foundation. Why does it still require a CLA to be signed, just like corporate open source projects? Setting up Home Assistant for someone who's non-technical is a terrible idea. This is an even bigger issue if they want it set up and left alone without updates/maintenance. The mobile app would probably stop working properly with this installation or they'd break it at some point by installing updates. I'll wait for a bit longer while I prepare to migrate away from Home Assistant and Home Assistant OS. I'm considering a setup which uses Home Assistant core to trigger automations and to display a dashboard. All the automations and device integrations would be done with other tools. This would reduce exposure to Home Assistant's regressions and avoid Home Assistant OS's limitations. [1] the Nabu Casa run icons site - https://brands.home-assistant.io https://brands.home-assistant.io [2] https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549 https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549 [3] Home Assistant Python requirements https://github.com/home-assistant/core/blob/dev/requirements_all.txt https://github.com/home-assistant/core/blob/dev/requirements...

ulrischa 2y ago

The old automation in YAML is very cluncky as the author also mentioned. The new UI guided creation is not powerful and can become confusing for complex cases on the other side. I do all my automation with the node-red Integration. But the combination of the node-red flows with the Homeassistant dashboards is not very good. Do you plan to change the automation to something like node-red but better integrated? Or change the yaml to sonething less declarative and more code centric?

goodpoint 2y ago

Why is Home Assistant not provided by popular Linux distributions? It has access to security cameras and having to trust a ton of code downloaded with Docker is a no go.

mvip 2y ago
There’s an official docker image, which is what I’ve been using forever a long time.
farawayea 2y ago
https://github.com/home-assistant/core/blob/dev/requirements_all.txt https://github.com/home-assistant/core/blob/dev/requirements... lists all the direct dependencies installed in the container. It's enough for just a single direct or indirect dependency to be compromised to have a botnet or turn it into something used for surveillance against the users. Preventing it from exfiltrating data by isolating it from the network with Internet access is the only option if you want to run it. This requires local only devices. Accessing it through the web UI or through the mobile app will still load icons from https://brands.home-assistant.io https://brands.home-assistant.io. The details are in this ticket https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549 https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549
- goodpoint 2y ago
  omg one THOUSAND dependencies.
  - farawayea 2y ago
    Those are just the direct dependencies as far as I can tell. The frontend has its own dependencies.

mvip 2y ago

@balloob -- author of post here. Would love to have you on my podcast to nerd out about Home Assistant (https://vpetersson.com/podcast/ https://vpetersson.com/podcast/).

kkfx 2y ago

Not much a question, but a RANT. As an user I'm grateful for HA slick UI and functionality but while the best on the market is... A damn hell. YAML instead of pure Python is a hell. Trying to push things to be configured via WebUI is a big discomfort because well... Generic users do like clicking around, but generic users will not use HA simply because it's not and will not be possible in future to create a no-code usable IoT. All low-code/no-code stuff COMPLICATE life instead of simplify. External deps like InfluxDB to just prune past data and keep them as I wish it not much nice, having a built-in option to state how to prune and for how long to keep each specific sensor or default policy would be very nice. Essentially the RANT could be condensed in: please consider designing for people who know how to code, because they will anyway be the most common users. IoT OEMs will only be hostile for most because they still fails to understand how to makes business in an open world, so professional integrator will not much choose HA anyway since it's way too time consuming to really customize and keep it up. A pure code approach with NO energy wasted in config WebUIs/low code/no code on contrary could makes HA an interesting "base for system integrators" in a much broader sense. NanoKVM PCIe, JetKVM show the start of a feature-rich light-out management for anything, they will be the bridge between home IoT and classic homelabs/IT. HA could play a very nice role there, essentially offering a platform to bridge the not-really-IT-ready world of ModBUS and co appliances to the TCP-enabled and digitally controlled stuff. A future where small devices could be fitted in most appliances to "makes them smart" like being in the middle of a washing machine control panel connected to home p.v. system to start programmatically depending on available p.v., a connected oven pre-loaded with food the user start when he/she knows the time he/she will be at home. This is a potentially nice niche market who could explode in the relatively near future. It's not possible as low code/no code/pre-packaged black box stuff. Being a component anyone could easily plug in a larger system is needed. YAML might be ok if we limit HA to some smart bulb, just having a Victron battery inverter with some 40+ sensors demanding a significant load of YAML it's nightmarish. In python native it's HYPER quick.

farawayea 2y ago
It's a major pain to write YAML for Home Assistant. Some parts of Home Assistant lack complete examples which are up to date. The documentation doesn't include examples for every single thing. Part of writing some automations was just a lot of trial and error, looking things up on the Internet, validating the configuration, and restarting Home Assistant. It's just not a great experience. Discovering what has to be selected to use as an action in the automation GUI is another nuisance. The most recent example is with a light I wanted to set to 20% brightness. I had no means to find something with the keyword "brightness" or anything similar. It turned out that this was exposed as turn light on. Breaking changes are their own source of friction. My only advantage has been that many of my automations are now just GUI automations with some custom YAML where it can't be avoided. All of these things are far beyond what a non-technical user could be able to do. It can be difficult even for someone who knows how to look things up, read documentation and update everything when breaking changes are made. Home Assistant isn't the kind of tool one can put in someone else's hands to use it without additional maintenance or supervision. It's also not the tool to use in any commercial setting due to its countless problems.

10729287 2y ago

Hi @balloob. No question but I moved yesterday night from a Home Assistant Supervised on Raspi 3 to an HAOS on Raspi 4 + SSD and the migration had been flawless. Thank you very much to you, the team, and all the contributors for making such a great and fair piece of software and building such a great community.