10 ms·

A kernel developer plays with Home Assistant

195 points by pabs3 1y ago

readthenotes1 1y ago
The data ownership reminds me a bit of an early business ummm transaction if Dr Phil: 1. Sell the gullible public long-term memberships to a gym, with long-term subscriptions. 2. Sell the subscriptions to a 3rd party. 3. Close gym. Subscription contract still valid. https://www.celebitchy.com/8971/dr_phil_ran_a_health_club_scam_in_the_70s/ https://www.celebitchy.com/8971/dr_phil_ran_a_health_club_sc...
- riddley 1y ago
  It's very easy to be cynical. Home Assistant belongs to a non profit. While that in and of itself isn't bullet proof, it does go a long way.
hardwaresofton 1y ago
At some point a company is going to start making hackable, local connection devices (cloud optional) with published APIs and sell them at a higher price tag, and they’re going to be fabulously wealthy, commanding higher margins than the others. At least, that’s what I like to tell myself.
- balloob 1y ago
  There is Zigbee, Z-Wave and Matter. These are all smart home standards that are fully local and devices will be able to be set up and used even when the company goes out of business. You are however limited to the things that are standardized. If you want to go a step further, look for devices made for ESPHome or devices made by Shelly. Both have local APIs and are very hackable. (disclosure: I am the president of the Open Home Foundation and ESPHome is one of our projects and I am also a board member of the Z-Wave alliance)
  - hardwaresofton 1y ago
    > There is Zigbee, Z-Wave and Matter. I am not a practitioner, but instead someone that looks at the ecosystem from time to time and has been waiting for a while, because I dont see the stack + DX/UX that I want yet. Zigbee never reached critical mass and requires a hub. Z-wave seems to be the same. Thread over wifi (IIRC different protocols/transports are just fine) is what I think will be the future. IMO Thread wins out, support gets put into routers, and I can just have a thread enabled router which MAY have other I don’t want to buy an IoT hub. Many IoT devices I want to control are powerful enough to run Wifi, and I want to control them with a standard networking stack with high adoption and familiar tooling. Thread seems to fit this use case the best. Please feel free to rip apart the above opinions, they’re loosely held. I’d love to learn how wrong I am today! > If you want to go a step further, look for devices made for ESPHome or devices made by Shelly. Both have local APIs and are very hackable. Thanks for the recommendation! Appreciate the disclosure and apologize for the blast of relatively uninformed opinions. One more side question — why is it so hard to get a simple IoT button that runs local Wifi (really hoping for no base station) only and is battery chargable? Buildable with an ESP32 clearly but I just want to buy this.
    - balloob 1y ago
      Maybe not exactly what you are looking for, but check out the Shelly BLU Button1. It's a BLE button with a long battery life. It sends out BLE packets when pressed, which can be picked up by Home Assistant via a Bluetooth adapter or using a Bluetooth Proxy. You can make the latter with any ESP32 and https://esphome.io/projects/?type=bluetooth https://esphome.io/projects/?type=bluetooth
      - hardwaresofton 1y ago
        Thanks for the recommendation! This definitely makes it easier. IIRC BLE power mode + wake on BLE + wifi would probably work for easy use! Sounds like a far off weekend project
      - hardwaresofton 1y ago
        BTW, just bought a bunch of Shelly stuff. Looks like that project might happen sooner than I thought! The Shelly 1 also looked like a good option :) Thanks again for the rec.
- baby_souffle 1y ago
  The number of companies that does this _is_ growing. Shelly was early, the cheep chineese stuff was easy to hack but they eventually moved to cheaper and more esoteric chips where custom firmware is non existent or not as mature. This is changing back, though! The number of ESP-32 powered LED light controllers that I've seen on Ali that feature a USB port for reprogramming / have all the GPIO labeled ... even have a HA/ESP-Home/WLED logo on them is infinitely more than I saw in years past (a few is infinitely more than zero, right?)
  - dns_snek 1y ago
    Buyer beware - There's a mountain of products on the market that are advertised as "open source" which lures many of us in, but many of those products have poor quality hardware. My heuristic for anything operating at mains voltages is "If I can find a product that looks just like this on Temu/Aliexpress, I'm not buying it". They're probably white label products sourced from the same factories and suffer from the same quality issues. Relays found in smart plugs are often sketchy in my experience. About half of the ones I bought or set up for others make unsettling noises that made me worried about poor electrical connections and risk of fire. I only have two Shelly plugs but those don't suffer from these issues.
    - viraptor 1y ago
      Tuya and their rebranded versions fall into that area too. Their power switches die early and they actually went from easily reprogrammable to hostile firmware. They have own cloud service you can't leave, only get an access code to - and the firmware prevents downgrades. Terrible company.
      - dns_snek 1y ago
        Tuya is just an IoT platform used by many cheap devices but I agree, it's low cost and cloud based which is a terrible combination. I wouldn't touch it.
      - darkwater 1y ago
        Just buy the ZigBee versions, they work beautifully with HA
- rstuart4133 1y ago
  The article does mention https://refoss.net/ https://refoss.net/, quote: There is a crucial difference here, though: the Home-Assistant integration for Refoss devices, which interfaces directly with the monitor and needs no cloud connectivity, is written and provided by Refoss itself. Home-Assistant compatibility is the first bullet item on the above-linked product page.
- 05 1y ago
  Lots of “smart” products come with BK7231x chips that are flashable to esphome, nobody needs another custom protocol (even if open) since esphome currently supports local encrypted transport that’s going to be better than 99% of what the Chinese (or even western) companies are going to design for local communication. Oh, and hobbyists mostly aren’t going to pay premium for those either, unless those come preflashed with esphome and sponsor hass project, and even then 90% people are still going to buy the cheapest option on the market:)
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > hackable, local connection devices (cloud optional) with published APIs and sell them at a higher price This business model doesn’t work. Many have had this idea. They all run into the same problem: The target audience for hackable home automation devices doesn’t like paying a premium for anything they think they could DIY. If you have a $70 nicely designed, documented IoT sensor but the DIY home automation people think they can put ESPHome on a $10 Amazon device and accomplish nearly the same thing, which one do are they going to buy? If you go through the forums you can already find some semi-premium devices that are a little better constructed and might have better feature sets. They’re always followed by comments from people recommending a cheaper option.
  - umbra07 1y ago
    Isn't that kind of what GL.inet does? They seem pretty successful.
  - hardwaresofton 1y ago
    > If you have a $70 nicely designed, documented IoT sensor but the DIY home automation people think they can put ESPHome on a $10 Amazon device and accomplish nearly the same thing, which one do are they going to buy? I agree with you that targeting devs/people with an under-developed sense of buy/build doesn't work! I'm hoping that the devs with money/slightly more accomplished who don't have time to mess with stuff would pick it up. A bit of a jump but I think this was one of the big strategic mistakes of products like FirefoxOS -- aiming for the dev with money who can afford a $600 I-support-foss-and-mozilla signaling device that also happens to be a phone they can hack on may have worked better than targeting $60 feature phones. > If you go through the forums you can already find some semi-premium devices that are a little better constructed and might have better feature sets. They’re always followed by comments from people recommending a cheaper option. I think that's OK! It's similar to HN dropbox effect. IMO you actually want those people to find the cheaper option, those are bad customers for a premium brand. The product has to actually be noticably better/more consistent/etc than the cheaper option though. And IMO there is a large subset of nerds that don't actually want to write 5 files and flash an OS to do smart home stuff -- they want to play at the application layer. A good counter example might be the NAS industry. This is all theoretical of course, so... We're just armchairing at this point.
- russdill 1y ago
  How is that not exactly zigbee and matter?
pabs3 1y ago
A link for the first article in this series: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1017720/7155ecb9602e9ef2/ https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1017720/7155ecb9602e9ef2/
- tomhow 1y ago
  We changed the URL to this from https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1017720/7155ecb9602e9ef2/ https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1017720/7155ecb9602e9ef2/ and posted this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44014505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44014505, to avoid splitting the discussion between the two parts.
  - pabs3 1y ago
    They are two different articles, I don't think that was correct.
    - tomhow 1y ago
      As if to illustrate the difficulty of the situation, I posted a reply to the other copy of your comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44020047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44020047
NewJazz 1y ago
Is there a way to contribute to LWN without creating an account or having an ongoing thing? Does nobody use crypto?
- pabs3 1y ago
  Looks like they don't accept donations, sounds like it is much harder to accept them. https://lwn.net/Articles/828428/ https://lwn.net/Articles/828428/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1019619/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1019619/
- shellwizard 1y ago
  You can wait for around two weeks for the article to be free to read, if you don't want to subscribe
  - NewJazz 1y ago
    I just want to support. I guess they have prepaid subscriptions and I can just pay for x months a year that I think is fair. I don't read it a ton but wanted to contribute.
jsmo 1y ago
Thanks! Check out Lars' channel for some interesting insights into Home Assistant with remote sensors: https://www.youtube.com/@LarsKlintTech/search?query=home%20assistant https://www.youtube.com/@LarsKlintTech/search?query=home%20a...
KillenBoek 1y ago
Just wondering why anyone would go through the hassle of installing home assistant on Linux when the fantastic hassOS exists which will run perfectly virtualized.
- edejong 1y ago
  Because we want to run more than just Home Assistant on the same OS? Because traditionally OS and application layers were separated? Because we trust mature Linux distros more when it comes to LTS and security patches? Because we already know our way around Debian/Ubuntu/Nix/etc.?
  - theK 1y ago
    Absolutely this. Once you get into the game of running apps at home with certain quality assumptions you end up having to bolt on various things (VPN, DNS, log aggregation etc) that are better wrapped around the application instead of having them run within it. And having an AppOS typically just gets in the way of all that plus what edejong said that you already know how to do it on the typical production OSes and learning to do it for every AppOS is just cumbersome.
  - ramy_d 1y ago
    Seconded. My home server does many things, one of which is homeassistant.
  - SparkyMcUnicorn 1y ago
    Proxmox adds very little overhead. I'm running dozens of things alongside HAOS. The OS is the path of least resistance and gives you the best experience for low maintenance. https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=haos-vm https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=hao...
    - chneu 1y ago
      I'm also running dozens of things alongside HA and I don't have to use proxmox. It's not hard to run HA in unsupported mode. The only real difference is an annoying reminder that you're unsupported. Everything else works, including plugins/add-ons. I've run HA a bunch of ways. It doesn't really matter all that much. Use HACS to fill any gaps.
rurban 1y ago
I tried to install it on a raspi 4 with touchscreen for my wife. The raspi worked fine with Debian, esp. it's installer asks for the wifi and ssh keys, and therefore you can trivially connect to it. Not so with the homeassistant installer. No wifi setup, no ssh access at all. You really need to cable it, nmap the new IP, and then I got stuck because the web server doesn't show up. Attaching the keyboard brought me into a restricted ha> prompt, where I cannot fix anything. So far it's horrible
- madaxe_again 1y ago
  I’d suggest that you use a docker instance. The setup is trivial. Not having HAAS has made little difference to me being able to do all sorts of stuff - and HACS gives you access to a whole bunch of additional stuff, and works in docker.
  - shermantanktop 1y ago
    +1. I know the parent reads like “do it my way” but ha in docker really is simpler.
- SparkyMcUnicorn 1y ago
  I did this a few months ago for a test home assistant setup and had the opposite experience. I forget exactly what I did, but it involved editing a file with the wifi settings and dropping my public ssh key on the SD card before installation. If you use ethernet, no editing required. Web interface goes into setup mode automatically. Worth noting that ha cli[0] (ha>) does have a `network` command to configure this as well. [0] https://github.com/home-assistant/cli https://github.com/home-assistant/cli
- archi42 1y ago
  Mind that you should not use a Pi with SD card for HA. I'm not sure what the official stance is, but: In my peer group failing SD cards were responsible for a vast majority of issues. Causes are probably a mixture of heavy logging and power outages; either from the grid, or user error not shutting down the Pi before disconnecting power. At our house I run HAOS in a VM (on a beefy server). My wife uses the app on her phone (as do I), and we have a cheap tablet with the app for guests. On the laptops/desktops we also have access to the web UI. As the article points out, remote access for the phones can be done via the commercial offering or a VPN (as in our case: wireguard on the OpnSense).
pmlnr 1y ago
Home Assistant is a toy when it comes to automation reliability. It's a good toy though. I'll stick to my domoticz for the "if it ain't broken..." approach.
- SparkyMcUnicorn 1y ago
  If you choose your hardware wisely, it's incredibly reliable. Most of my house is automated and I all I've done with it in the past year is add a few devices. I will admit that low (or zero) maintenance is easier to accomplish if you know your way around a little bit.
- O5vYtytb 1y ago
  I've never had HA itself fail. I've had it installed for 10 years and the only true failures were hardware (server, iot devices) or my own config mistakes.
- Gud 1y ago
  I used HA for about a decade without so much as a hiccup. What makes you think it’s a toy?
apexalpha 1y ago
I have HA running for years (in Docker) and it’s very reliable. It has integrations with allmost all devices or apps I use and the support for DSMR (Smart Electrical Meters) is first class I plugged a cable into my meter, the usb end into the server and it just works. It does have a steep learning curve, though. It really seems “by IT people for IT people”
- tails4e 1y ago
  I have it in docker a d use supervised mode (which seems discouraged, but I want my machine for other uses also). The one thing I struggle with is updating, I'm concerned if I update it'll break. Is there a way to fully snapshot a container state and it's disk state, so I can 100% restore to it if something goes wrong ? I'm still running HA from 2020 because of this. The other think I'm not a huge fan of is it's template language, it's clunky to say the least, but overall it's a great amd flexible system
  - apexalpha 1y ago
    I just backup the folder (volume) and that’s it. If I should ever need to rollback I can change the Docker image tag from ‘latest’ to a specific one I guess. I’ve never had to do it but I do know people sometimes complain about updates breaking things.
  - baq 1y ago
    I’m running it with docker compose for the same reason and it never failed an update, but there was an occasional config tweak required. For the most part it’s compose pull, compose up, check back in a couple weeks for the point release. Updating from that far is probably risky but you don’t need to backup everything, just the config directory. Automated backups to Google drive are worth the upgrade alone.
  - acidburnNSA 1y ago
    In the last few releases they've polished the built in backup and restore features, which are available in the setting menu now. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/backup/ https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/backup/
deleted 1y ago
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Abishek_Muthian 1y ago
For a long time I was running home automation using individual scripts and was happy with it. Then I found myself in a remote place where the ISP gave a shitty modem which hangs when there's no heavy usage ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I had to automate restarting the modem when the Internet is down by power cycling a smart plug[1], Home Assistant turned out to be extremely useful for that. Official HW integrations and Node-RED was very straightforward to solve my problem. Since then I'm managing and monitoring various hardware devices in my home through HA. What's interesting is that there are manufacturers who are not only fine with HA but work with developers of HA integrations which enable offline usage of their IoT products even though their official apps are completely enshittified. Nowadays I checkout HA compatibility before I buy a IoT device. [1] https://abishekmuthian.com/restart-modem-automatically-when-internet-is-down/ https://abishekmuthian.com/restart-modem-automatically-when-...
brbcompiling 1y ago
Feels like building my own smart Jarvis at home — kinda tricky, but super fun!
- russdill 1y ago
  There's an excellent thread with someone doing just that, but Friday. https://community.home-assistant.io/t/fridays-party-creating-a-private-agentic-ai-using-voice-assistant-tools/855862 https://community.home-assistant.io/t/fridays-party-creating...
Havoc 1y ago
The real magic is in my opinion in ESPHome. The fact that you can amateur solder some aliexpress $2 sensors together and have that actually work in HA with no coding except some yaml that you found on the internet is wild. >It would be interesting to see what would happen to a pull request adding support for, say, OpenThings Cloud as an alternative. The fate of that request would say a lot about how open the project really is. I kinda hope nobody tries. Their attempts at monetization have been pretty friendly and tame thus far & if something spooks them that could change.
- oakesm9 1y ago
  > I kinda hope nobody tries. Their attempts at monetization have been pretty friendly and tame thus far & if something spooks them that could change. To be fair to them they've been making a big push on adding backup support recently. Their Nabu Casa subscription has built in support for this and was a major selling point for me getting the subscription (I have Wireguard for remote access already). At the same time they implemented first class support for their own subscription, they added the hooks for other integrations to provide the same level of backup support. Now you can easily choose to use Google Drive, S3, BackBlaze and others just as easily as Nabu Casa. In some ways it's "better" as Nabu Casa only supports a single latest backup. From this they seem pretty friendly and not too interested in lock-in.
  - mook 1y ago
    Unfortunately their new backup support forces encryption; that makes sense for cloud-based backups but not for local (NAS etc.) ones. Requests for that just get replies to do it with manual backups the old way.
    - tw04 1y ago
      Why is that unfortunate? Encrypting backups is just a good best practice in general.
      - mook 1y ago
dengolius 1y ago
My friend uses self-hosted open-source software to monitor all his home IoT devices[1] and copies important information to the cloud. I'm using StarFive VisionFive 2 to host my database for monitoring, but also have a copy of the data of a chip hetzner arm vps, as well as hosting backups on the two different clouds. I know users who are running[2] for years to monitor Solar panels, lawn watering and vegetable garden watering. My question is: is it really convenient to use only SaaS now if there is always the possibility of losing your data? I am referring to the case described in the article. [1]: https://vrutkovs.eu/posts/home-infra/ https://vrutkovs.eu/posts/home-infra/ [2]: https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics-Community/homeassistant-addon-victoriametrics https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics-Community/homeassistant-a... PS: I'm working at VictoriaMetrics company
- CoolCold 1y ago
  in recent podcast episode with the found of your company ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xkCykuJwKs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xkCykuJwKs , От стартапа до международного бизнеса: история VictoriaMetrics и её уроки | Александр Валялкин | #36) he explicitly described the path VictoriaMetrics has come and one of the early steps was trying to sell SaaS, while quite a lot of users/customers want to have on premise/own setup for such tooling. So, answering your question: > My question is: is it really convenient to use only SaaS now no, it's not
farawayea 1y ago
[flagged]
- sfeldma 1y ago
  I'm concerned about privacy also, especially with Home Assistant integrations that "dial home" to vendor's clouds. Your data is not private. Check out my project that puts privacy as a main feature: https://merliot.io https://merliot.io.
protocolture 1y ago
Home Assistant is great, I have been able to push it to do things I wasnt expecting it to permit. Just running Python within a container arbitrarily interacting with the network and sensors. I used it to backend my own home web application. I believe a lot of people who are upset with the product have radically incorrect expectations.
balloob 1y ago
Founder Home Assistant here. Want to chime in that I always love to see write ups like these to see the great things what people achieve with Home Assistant. Not everyone might know, but last year we started the Open Home Foundation as a non-profit in Switzerland and I donated Home Assistant to it[1]. It's fully funded by users. There are no investors involved. We are fully committed to building out a smart home that focuses on local control and privacy. Yes there are rough edges, but we're actively working on it in the open, with progress being released every month. ~Paulus, Founder Home Assistant & President Open Home Foundation https://github.com/balloob https://github.com/balloob [1]: https://www.openhomefoundation.org/blog/announcing-the-open-home-foundation/ https://www.openhomefoundation.org/blog/announcing-the-open-...
- cyberax 1y ago
  Is it possible to donate to your foundation via some kind of a subscription? I have a Nabu Casa subscription, but I don't really need it.
  - baby_souffle 1y ago
    > I have a Nabu Casa subscription, but I don't really need it. Shame there’s no way to donate it.
    - lolinder 1y ago
      I mean, if you're paying for the subscription but never use it that's effectively a donation, right? OP explains their motivation for not accepting small donations in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44014822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44014822
      - pabs3 1y ago
        I think baby_souffle might have meant a way to donate the subscription to someone else.
gitroom 1y ago
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bluGill 1y ago
I got frusterated with HA's attempts to make is hard to run outside of their distro and installed openHAB. I find that works good enough for me.
- liotier 1y ago
  Funnily, I had the opposite journey: I got plainly frustrated with everything OpenHab and was delighted with the versatile integrations and ease of setup with Home Assistant...
  - bluGill 1y ago
    If you use openhab as they want it is easier. However if you don't want it it on a dedicated computer it becomes much harder.
    - MaximilianEmel 1y ago
      I assume you meant to write "Home Assistant".
linker3000 1y ago
I tried HA back in the day and got YAML-bound trying to get various sensors and controllers to integrate and work reliably. I revisited HA a couple of times over the years, but by then had become cosy with Node-RED and saw no strong reason to change. I understand HA's now more configurable through the front-end GUI, which is nice. I've just integrated an office UPS with the Node-RED stock dashboard to log status, mains voltage and battery charge state - it took all of 5 mins, including the time to install the UPS NUT plugin for Node-RED via the GUI. I love the ease of the visual, block-based configuration, and the ability to add codable function blocks to process and modify data. The only things that are not so great in Node-RED are the dashboard look and feel, and the dashboard setup tools.
mkoubaa 1y ago
Looking forward to the day we might have home appliances without on board cpus, they will just be LAN wifi firmware devices. Something like HA could be used to make them as smart or as dumb as the user wants without giving the manufacturer any control over the UX
- baq 1y ago
  That’s literally Zigbee.
tomhow 1y ago
Please note this is a two-part series. The second part can be read here: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1017945/93d12d28178b372e/ https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1017945/93d12d28178b372e/ Someone posted that URL as a separate submission shortly after this was submitted, but rather than splitting the discussion, we've merged the comments here so it can all be discussed as one topic.
homedespot 1y ago
I started using home assistant when it first came out, found it too clumsy, returned years later, and found it too bloated. A lot of volunteer work has gone into it but it lacks overall coordination of efforts and a usage model that is simple and consistent. That’s one of the downsides of open source: too many cooks and you get mediocrity, but accidentally when everyone is good hearted about it. I had to do so much research on appliances I was adding that it was easier to just roll my own gateway and cloud. Now it is a vastly smaller code base that I control and can easily debug issues. Maybe HA could refactor into a smaller set of modules that doesn’t require a huge set of assets from the get go?
MostlyStable 1y ago
Is there anywhere that compiles a database of local control capable smart home devices? I tried briefly to search and I found databases of smart devices but none seemed to have that as a filter.
- gempir 1y ago
  The Home Assistant docs at least document how the integration works by "IoT Class" https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/12/classifying-the-internet-of-things/#classifiers https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/12/classifying-th... For example Tado: cloud polling https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/tado/ https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/tado/
ldng 1y ago
Well clearly he did not look under the hood ... I did. A few technical decisions are ... questionable. But it's prohibited to ask why in the forum. HA could do well in cleaning up its community that can be particularly toxic, especially toward advanced user and start accepting critics. The hostility one face when they don't want to follow the "dumb down version, do as we say" installation process is really off-putting.
- dfc 1y ago
  Its not prohibited here. What technical decisions are questionable?
  - billfor 1y ago
    Yes it's prohibited I posted a few corrections (one positive , one negative) to his technical review, and it got downvoted, as will this probably....
    - jolmg 1y ago
      I wouldn't consider downvotes to mean something is prohibited. I did in the past because that's what I limited myself to downvoting, but people just downvote what they don't like for whatever reason. All you can do is to not let it get to you.
    - Bjartr 1y ago
      "prohihited" implies an official rule enforced by the community organizers. Downvotes are an expression of opinion by community members.
  - traverseda 1y ago
    Home assistant supervisor is not very friendly. It's designed so that it must be kept up to date, and handles it's own auto-update features. It also won't run nicely in a docker container with some significant hacks. This means that the only deployment option if you want a complete home assistant install is to use their "Home Assistant OS" or specific debian versions. Generally it feels like they're making deploying it as hard as possible, doing stuff like checking if supervisor is running in a docker container and just not working if it is. This is presumably born out of frustrations with users deploying it incorrectly, but there really is no reason a supervisor based HA install can't run in a docker container. I've got a some private hacks doing just that, that I'm hesitant to post publicly in case they find some way to break it. No idea what the obsession is with keeping a full home assistant install from running in a container, but it's very strange. Trying to add more friction so they can sell more of their dedicated hardware? Their hardware is nice and stands on it's own, the only reason I don't use it is because I want to run on an old touch screen chromebook for very low power usage.
billfor 1y ago
> Home Assistant has support for that remote option, and no others. The openHAB Cloud Connector allows connecting the local openHAB runtime to a remote openHAB Cloud instance, such as myopenHAB.org, which is an instance of the openHAB Cloud service hosted by the openHAB Foundation (https://www.openhab.org/addons/integrations/openhabcloud/ https://www.openhab.org/addons/integrations/openhabcloud/) > There is also a container-based method that can run on another distribution, but this installation does not support the add-ons feature. You can use the add-ons with the containerized version. This has been discussed elsewhere.
MacNCheese23 1y ago
I don't really get HA. It seems oversized for what most people need for their own home automation. Maybe I'm just jaded because my house is fully KNX wired, but the only "addon" I need is NodeRed for some Dashboard and Integrations of ESPs that are just for additional monitoring. It runs in a lonely docker container just fine and does not need a million dependencies. Then again, I also don't understand why people buy every "smart"/cloud based device and try to glue everything together - when the hardware fails most likely the vendor does not exist or no longer supports it anymore and then you start all over again.
- pkulak 1y ago
  So, this comment boils down to: “this free software project has too much capability, and there exists hardware that is reliant on cloud servers.”
- cbull 1y ago
  Your house is wired with an alternative and you can't imagine people who DON'T have that infrastructure are looking for a way of doing smart automations? I have been using HA for years and I love it, it does what I need it to do while operating quietly in the background. I don't have any devices that are "cloud based" so I don't care if the vendor goes out of business or not. My stuff is a mix of wifi, z-wave, and my cameras are ethernet cabled but can be integrated with onvif. My house was also built in 1958, there's no chance I'm running KNX cabling anywhere, much less all the places I have devices.
jillyboel3 1y ago
> Home Assistant has support for that remote option, and no others. It's literally just a reverse proxy. Set up any you like. Wireguard, cloudflare tunnel, caddy with a security plugin, the options are limitless.
greatgib 1y ago
Something that annoys me a lot with recent versions of HA is that it does not play well anymore with yaml file configs. Your are mostly forced to configure things through the interface, that is ok but might be annoying and painful to do when you have a few devices with a little bit more complicated setup. For example, I wanted to replace a light bulb by another one that has a different Mac address to replace another one exactly. Before it was as simple as changing the Mac in the config file. No it is more complicated. Also it was very easy to review and backup the config files. Now it is less obvious.

195 points by pabs3 1y ago

The data ownership reminds me a bit of an early business ummm transaction if Dr Phil: 1. Sell the gullible public long-term memberships to a gym, with long-term subscriptions. 2. Sell the subscriptions to a 3rd party. 3. Close gym. Subscription contract still valid. https://www.celebitchy.com/8971/dr_phil_ran_a_health_club_scam_in_the_70s/ https://www.celebitchy.com/8971/dr_phil_ran_a_health_club_sc...

riddley 1y ago
It's very easy to be cynical. Home Assistant belongs to a non profit. While that in and of itself isn't bullet proof, it does go a long way.

hardwaresofton 1y ago

At some point a company is going to start making hackable, local connection devices (cloud optional) with published APIs and sell them at a higher price tag, and they’re going to be fabulously wealthy, commanding higher margins than the others. At least, that’s what I like to tell myself.

balloob 1y ago
There is Zigbee, Z-Wave and Matter. These are all smart home standards that are fully local and devices will be able to be set up and used even when the company goes out of business. You are however limited to the things that are standardized. If you want to go a step further, look for devices made for ESPHome or devices made by Shelly. Both have local APIs and are very hackable. (disclosure: I am the president of the Open Home Foundation and ESPHome is one of our projects and I am also a board member of the Z-Wave alliance)
- hardwaresofton 1y ago
  > There is Zigbee, Z-Wave and Matter. I am not a practitioner, but instead someone that looks at the ecosystem from time to time and has been waiting for a while, because I dont see the stack + DX/UX that I want yet. Zigbee never reached critical mass and requires a hub. Z-wave seems to be the same. Thread over wifi (IIRC different protocols/transports are just fine) is what I think will be the future. IMO Thread wins out, support gets put into routers, and I can just have a thread enabled router which MAY have other I don’t want to buy an IoT hub. Many IoT devices I want to control are powerful enough to run Wifi, and I want to control them with a standard networking stack with high adoption and familiar tooling. Thread seems to fit this use case the best. Please feel free to rip apart the above opinions, they’re loosely held. I’d love to learn how wrong I am today! > If you want to go a step further, look for devices made for ESPHome or devices made by Shelly. Both have local APIs and are very hackable. Thanks for the recommendation! Appreciate the disclosure and apologize for the blast of relatively uninformed opinions. One more side question — why is it so hard to get a simple IoT button that runs local Wifi (really hoping for no base station) only and is battery chargable? Buildable with an ESP32 clearly but I just want to buy this.
  - balloob 1y ago
    Maybe not exactly what you are looking for, but check out the Shelly BLU Button1. It's a BLE button with a long battery life. It sends out BLE packets when pressed, which can be picked up by Home Assistant via a Bluetooth adapter or using a Bluetooth Proxy. You can make the latter with any ESP32 and https://esphome.io/projects/?type=bluetooth https://esphome.io/projects/?type=bluetooth
    - hardwaresofton 1y ago
      Thanks for the recommendation! This definitely makes it easier. IIRC BLE power mode + wake on BLE + wifi would probably work for easy use! Sounds like a far off weekend project
    - hardwaresofton 1y ago
      BTW, just bought a bunch of Shelly stuff. Looks like that project might happen sooner than I thought! The Shelly 1 also looked like a good option :) Thanks again for the rec.
baby_souffle 1y ago
The number of companies that does this _is_ growing. Shelly was early, the cheep chineese stuff was easy to hack but they eventually moved to cheaper and more esoteric chips where custom firmware is non existent or not as mature. This is changing back, though! The number of ESP-32 powered LED light controllers that I've seen on Ali that feature a USB port for reprogramming / have all the GPIO labeled ... even have a HA/ESP-Home/WLED logo on them is infinitely more than I saw in years past (a few is infinitely more than zero, right?)
- dns_snek 1y ago
  Buyer beware - There's a mountain of products on the market that are advertised as "open source" which lures many of us in, but many of those products have poor quality hardware. My heuristic for anything operating at mains voltages is "If I can find a product that looks just like this on Temu/Aliexpress, I'm not buying it". They're probably white label products sourced from the same factories and suffer from the same quality issues. Relays found in smart plugs are often sketchy in my experience. About half of the ones I bought or set up for others make unsettling noises that made me worried about poor electrical connections and risk of fire. I only have two Shelly plugs but those don't suffer from these issues.
  - viraptor 1y ago
    Tuya and their rebranded versions fall into that area too. Their power switches die early and they actually went from easily reprogrammable to hostile firmware. They have own cloud service you can't leave, only get an access code to - and the firmware prevents downgrades. Terrible company.
    - dns_snek 1y ago
      Tuya is just an IoT platform used by many cheap devices but I agree, it's low cost and cloud based which is a terrible combination. I wouldn't touch it.
    - darkwater 1y ago
      Just buy the ZigBee versions, they work beautifully with HA
rstuart4133 1y ago
The article does mention https://refoss.net/ https://refoss.net/, quote: There is a crucial difference here, though: the Home-Assistant integration for Refoss devices, which interfaces directly with the monitor and needs no cloud connectivity, is written and provided by Refoss itself. Home-Assistant compatibility is the first bullet item on the above-linked product page.
05 1y ago
Lots of “smart” products come with BK7231x chips that are flashable to esphome, nobody needs another custom protocol (even if open) since esphome currently supports local encrypted transport that’s going to be better than 99% of what the Chinese (or even western) companies are going to design for local communication. Oh, and hobbyists mostly aren’t going to pay premium for those either, unless those come preflashed with esphome and sponsor hass project, and even then 90% people are still going to buy the cheapest option on the market:)
Aurornis 1y ago
> hackable, local connection devices (cloud optional) with published APIs and sell them at a higher price This business model doesn’t work. Many have had this idea. They all run into the same problem: The target audience for hackable home automation devices doesn’t like paying a premium for anything they think they could DIY. If you have a $70 nicely designed, documented IoT sensor but the DIY home automation people think they can put ESPHome on a $10 Amazon device and accomplish nearly the same thing, which one do are they going to buy? If you go through the forums you can already find some semi-premium devices that are a little better constructed and might have better feature sets. They’re always followed by comments from people recommending a cheaper option.
- umbra07 1y ago
  Isn't that kind of what GL.inet does? They seem pretty successful.
- hardwaresofton 1y ago
  > If you have a $70 nicely designed, documented IoT sensor but the DIY home automation people think they can put ESPHome on a $10 Amazon device and accomplish nearly the same thing, which one do are they going to buy? I agree with you that targeting devs/people with an under-developed sense of buy/build doesn't work! I'm hoping that the devs with money/slightly more accomplished who don't have time to mess with stuff would pick it up. A bit of a jump but I think this was one of the big strategic mistakes of products like FirefoxOS -- aiming for the dev with money who can afford a $600 I-support-foss-and-mozilla signaling device that also happens to be a phone they can hack on may have worked better than targeting $60 feature phones. > If you go through the forums you can already find some semi-premium devices that are a little better constructed and might have better feature sets. They’re always followed by comments from people recommending a cheaper option. I think that's OK! It's similar to HN dropbox effect. IMO you actually want those people to find the cheaper option, those are bad customers for a premium brand. The product has to actually be noticably better/more consistent/etc than the cheaper option though. And IMO there is a large subset of nerds that don't actually want to write 5 files and flash an OS to do smart home stuff -- they want to play at the application layer. A good counter example might be the NAS industry. This is all theoretical of course, so... We're just armchairing at this point.
russdill 1y ago
How is that not exactly zigbee and matter?

pabs3 1y ago

A link for the first article in this series: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1017720/7155ecb9602e9ef2/ https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1017720/7155ecb9602e9ef2/

tomhow 1y ago
We changed the URL to this from https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1017720/7155ecb9602e9ef2/ https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1017720/7155ecb9602e9ef2/ and posted this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44014505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44014505, to avoid splitting the discussion between the two parts.
- pabs3 1y ago
  They are two different articles, I don't think that was correct.
  - tomhow 1y ago
    As if to illustrate the difficulty of the situation, I posted a reply to the other copy of your comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44020047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44020047

NewJazz 1y ago

Is there a way to contribute to LWN without creating an account or having an ongoing thing? Does nobody use crypto?

pabs3 1y ago
Looks like they don't accept donations, sounds like it is much harder to accept them. https://lwn.net/Articles/828428/ https://lwn.net/Articles/828428/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1019619/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1019619/
shellwizard 1y ago
You can wait for around two weeks for the article to be free to read, if you don't want to subscribe
- NewJazz 1y ago
  I just want to support. I guess they have prepaid subscriptions and I can just pay for x months a year that I think is fair. I don't read it a ton but wanted to contribute.

jsmo 1y ago

Thanks! Check out Lars' channel for some interesting insights into Home Assistant with remote sensors: https://www.youtube.com/@LarsKlintTech/search?query=home%20assistant https://www.youtube.com/@LarsKlintTech/search?query=home%20a...

KillenBoek 1y ago

Just wondering why anyone would go through the hassle of installing home assistant on Linux when the fantastic hassOS exists which will run perfectly virtualized.

edejong 1y ago
Because we want to run more than just Home Assistant on the same OS? Because traditionally OS and application layers were separated? Because we trust mature Linux distros more when it comes to LTS and security patches? Because we already know our way around Debian/Ubuntu/Nix/etc.?
- theK 1y ago
  Absolutely this. Once you get into the game of running apps at home with certain quality assumptions you end up having to bolt on various things (VPN, DNS, log aggregation etc) that are better wrapped around the application instead of having them run within it. And having an AppOS typically just gets in the way of all that plus what edejong said that you already know how to do it on the typical production OSes and learning to do it for every AppOS is just cumbersome.
- ramy_d 1y ago
  Seconded. My home server does many things, one of which is homeassistant.
- SparkyMcUnicorn 1y ago
  Proxmox adds very little overhead. I'm running dozens of things alongside HAOS. The OS is the path of least resistance and gives you the best experience for low maintenance. https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=haos-vm https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=hao...
  - chneu 1y ago
    I'm also running dozens of things alongside HA and I don't have to use proxmox. It's not hard to run HA in unsupported mode. The only real difference is an annoying reminder that you're unsupported. Everything else works, including plugins/add-ons. I've run HA a bunch of ways. It doesn't really matter all that much. Use HACS to fill any gaps.

rurban 1y ago

I tried to install it on a raspi 4 with touchscreen for my wife. The raspi worked fine with Debian, esp. it's installer asks for the wifi and ssh keys, and therefore you can trivially connect to it. Not so with the homeassistant installer. No wifi setup, no ssh access at all. You really need to cable it, nmap the new IP, and then I got stuck because the web server doesn't show up. Attaching the keyboard brought me into a restricted ha> prompt, where I cannot fix anything. So far it's horrible

madaxe_again 1y ago
I’d suggest that you use a docker instance. The setup is trivial. Not having HAAS has made little difference to me being able to do all sorts of stuff - and HACS gives you access to a whole bunch of additional stuff, and works in docker.
- shermantanktop 1y ago
  +1. I know the parent reads like “do it my way” but ha in docker really is simpler.
SparkyMcUnicorn 1y ago
I did this a few months ago for a test home assistant setup and had the opposite experience. I forget exactly what I did, but it involved editing a file with the wifi settings and dropping my public ssh key on the SD card before installation. If you use ethernet, no editing required. Web interface goes into setup mode automatically. Worth noting that ha cli[0] (ha>) does have a `network` command to configure this as well. [0] https://github.com/home-assistant/cli https://github.com/home-assistant/cli
archi42 1y ago
Mind that you should not use a Pi with SD card for HA. I'm not sure what the official stance is, but: In my peer group failing SD cards were responsible for a vast majority of issues. Causes are probably a mixture of heavy logging and power outages; either from the grid, or user error not shutting down the Pi before disconnecting power. At our house I run HAOS in a VM (on a beefy server). My wife uses the app on her phone (as do I), and we have a cheap tablet with the app for guests. On the laptops/desktops we also have access to the web UI. As the article points out, remote access for the phones can be done via the commercial offering or a VPN (as in our case: wireguard on the OpnSense).

pmlnr 1y ago

Home Assistant is a toy when it comes to automation reliability. It's a good toy though. I'll stick to my domoticz for the "if it ain't broken..." approach.

SparkyMcUnicorn 1y ago
If you choose your hardware wisely, it's incredibly reliable. Most of my house is automated and I all I've done with it in the past year is add a few devices. I will admit that low (or zero) maintenance is easier to accomplish if you know your way around a little bit.
O5vYtytb 1y ago
I've never had HA itself fail. I've had it installed for 10 years and the only true failures were hardware (server, iot devices) or my own config mistakes.
Gud 1y ago
I used HA for about a decade without so much as a hiccup. What makes you think it’s a toy?

apexalpha 1y ago

I have HA running for years (in Docker) and it’s very reliable. It has integrations with allmost all devices or apps I use and the support for DSMR (Smart Electrical Meters) is first class I plugged a cable into my meter, the usb end into the server and it just works. It does have a steep learning curve, though. It really seems “by IT people for IT people”

tails4e 1y ago
I have it in docker a d use supervised mode (which seems discouraged, but I want my machine for other uses also). The one thing I struggle with is updating, I'm concerned if I update it'll break. Is there a way to fully snapshot a container state and it's disk state, so I can 100% restore to it if something goes wrong ? I'm still running HA from 2020 because of this. The other think I'm not a huge fan of is it's template language, it's clunky to say the least, but overall it's a great amd flexible system
- apexalpha 1y ago
  I just backup the folder (volume) and that’s it. If I should ever need to rollback I can change the Docker image tag from ‘latest’ to a specific one I guess. I’ve never had to do it but I do know people sometimes complain about updates breaking things.
- baq 1y ago
  I’m running it with docker compose for the same reason and it never failed an update, but there was an occasional config tweak required. For the most part it’s compose pull, compose up, check back in a couple weeks for the point release. Updating from that far is probably risky but you don’t need to backup everything, just the config directory. Automated backups to Google drive are worth the upgrade alone.
- acidburnNSA 1y ago
  In the last few releases they've polished the built in backup and restore features, which are available in the setting menu now. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/backup/ https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/backup/

deleted 1y ago

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Abishek_Muthian 1y ago

For a long time I was running home automation using individual scripts and was happy with it. Then I found myself in a remote place where the ISP gave a shitty modem which hangs when there's no heavy usage ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I had to automate restarting the modem when the Internet is down by power cycling a smart plug[1], Home Assistant turned out to be extremely useful for that. Official HW integrations and Node-RED was very straightforward to solve my problem. Since then I'm managing and monitoring various hardware devices in my home through HA. What's interesting is that there are manufacturers who are not only fine with HA but work with developers of HA integrations which enable offline usage of their IoT products even though their official apps are completely enshittified. Nowadays I checkout HA compatibility before I buy a IoT device. [1] https://abishekmuthian.com/restart-modem-automatically-when-internet-is-down/ https://abishekmuthian.com/restart-modem-automatically-when-...

brbcompiling 1y ago

Feels like building my own smart Jarvis at home — kinda tricky, but super fun!

russdill 1y ago
There's an excellent thread with someone doing just that, but Friday. https://community.home-assistant.io/t/fridays-party-creating-a-private-agentic-ai-using-voice-assistant-tools/855862 https://community.home-assistant.io/t/fridays-party-creating...

Havoc 1y ago

The real magic is in my opinion in ESPHome. The fact that you can amateur solder some aliexpress $2 sensors together and have that actually work in HA with no coding except some yaml that you found on the internet is wild. >It would be interesting to see what would happen to a pull request adding support for, say, OpenThings Cloud as an alternative. The fate of that request would say a lot about how open the project really is. I kinda hope nobody tries. Their attempts at monetization have been pretty friendly and tame thus far & if something spooks them that could change.

oakesm9 1y ago
> I kinda hope nobody tries. Their attempts at monetization have been pretty friendly and tame thus far & if something spooks them that could change. To be fair to them they've been making a big push on adding backup support recently. Their Nabu Casa subscription has built in support for this and was a major selling point for me getting the subscription (I have Wireguard for remote access already). At the same time they implemented first class support for their own subscription, they added the hooks for other integrations to provide the same level of backup support. Now you can easily choose to use Google Drive, S3, BackBlaze and others just as easily as Nabu Casa. In some ways it's "better" as Nabu Casa only supports a single latest backup. From this they seem pretty friendly and not too interested in lock-in.
- mook 1y ago
  Unfortunately their new backup support forces encryption; that makes sense for cloud-based backups but not for local (NAS etc.) ones. Requests for that just get replies to do it with manual backups the old way.
  - tw04 1y ago
    Why is that unfortunate? Encrypting backups is just a good best practice in general.
    - mook 1y ago

dengolius 1y ago

My friend uses self-hosted open-source software to monitor all his home IoT devices[1] and copies important information to the cloud. I'm using StarFive VisionFive 2 to host my database for monitoring, but also have a copy of the data of a chip hetzner arm vps, as well as hosting backups on the two different clouds. I know users who are running[2] for years to monitor Solar panels, lawn watering and vegetable garden watering. My question is: is it really convenient to use only SaaS now if there is always the possibility of losing your data? I am referring to the case described in the article. [1]: https://vrutkovs.eu/posts/home-infra/ https://vrutkovs.eu/posts/home-infra/ [2]: https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics-Community/homeassistant-addon-victoriametrics https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics-Community/homeassistant-a... PS: I'm working at VictoriaMetrics company

CoolCold 1y ago
in recent podcast episode with the found of your company ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xkCykuJwKs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xkCykuJwKs , От стартапа до международного бизнеса: история VictoriaMetrics и её уроки | Александр Валялкин | #36) he explicitly described the path VictoriaMetrics has come and one of the early steps was trying to sell SaaS, while quite a lot of users/customers want to have on premise/own setup for such tooling. So, answering your question: > My question is: is it really convenient to use only SaaS now no, it's not

farawayea 1y ago

[flagged]

sfeldma 1y ago
I'm concerned about privacy also, especially with Home Assistant integrations that "dial home" to vendor's clouds. Your data is not private. Check out my project that puts privacy as a main feature: https://merliot.io https://merliot.io.

protocolture 1y ago

Home Assistant is great, I have been able to push it to do things I wasnt expecting it to permit. Just running Python within a container arbitrarily interacting with the network and sensors. I used it to backend my own home web application. I believe a lot of people who are upset with the product have radically incorrect expectations.

balloob 1y ago

Founder Home Assistant here. Want to chime in that I always love to see write ups like these to see the great things what people achieve with Home Assistant. Not everyone might know, but last year we started the Open Home Foundation as a non-profit in Switzerland and I donated Home Assistant to it[1]. It's fully funded by users. There are no investors involved. We are fully committed to building out a smart home that focuses on local control and privacy. Yes there are rough edges, but we're actively working on it in the open, with progress being released every month. ~Paulus, Founder Home Assistant & President Open Home Foundation https://github.com/balloob https://github.com/balloob [1]: https://www.openhomefoundation.org/blog/announcing-the-open-home-foundation/ https://www.openhomefoundation.org/blog/announcing-the-open-...

cyberax 1y ago
Is it possible to donate to your foundation via some kind of a subscription? I have a Nabu Casa subscription, but I don't really need it.
- baby_souffle 1y ago
  > I have a Nabu Casa subscription, but I don't really need it. Shame there’s no way to donate it.
  - lolinder 1y ago
    I mean, if you're paying for the subscription but never use it that's effectively a donation, right? OP explains their motivation for not accepting small donations in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44014822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44014822
    - pabs3 1y ago
      I think baby_souffle might have meant a way to donate the subscription to someone else.

gitroom 1y ago

[dead]

bluGill 1y ago

I got frusterated with HA's attempts to make is hard to run outside of their distro and installed openHAB. I find that works good enough for me.

liotier 1y ago
Funnily, I had the opposite journey: I got plainly frustrated with everything OpenHab and was delighted with the versatile integrations and ease of setup with Home Assistant...
- bluGill 1y ago
  If you use openhab as they want it is easier. However if you don't want it it on a dedicated computer it becomes much harder.
  - MaximilianEmel 1y ago
    I assume you meant to write "Home Assistant".

linker3000 1y ago

I tried HA back in the day and got YAML-bound trying to get various sensors and controllers to integrate and work reliably. I revisited HA a couple of times over the years, but by then had become cosy with Node-RED and saw no strong reason to change. I understand HA's now more configurable through the front-end GUI, which is nice. I've just integrated an office UPS with the Node-RED stock dashboard to log status, mains voltage and battery charge state - it took all of 5 mins, including the time to install the UPS NUT plugin for Node-RED via the GUI. I love the ease of the visual, block-based configuration, and the ability to add codable function blocks to process and modify data. The only things that are not so great in Node-RED are the dashboard look and feel, and the dashboard setup tools.

mkoubaa 1y ago

Looking forward to the day we might have home appliances without on board cpus, they will just be LAN wifi firmware devices. Something like HA could be used to make them as smart or as dumb as the user wants without giving the manufacturer any control over the UX

baq 1y ago
That’s literally Zigbee.

tomhow 1y ago

Please note this is a two-part series. The second part can be read here: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1017945/93d12d28178b372e/ https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1017945/93d12d28178b372e/ Someone posted that URL as a separate submission shortly after this was submitted, but rather than splitting the discussion, we've merged the comments here so it can all be discussed as one topic.

homedespot 1y ago

I started using home assistant when it first came out, found it too clumsy, returned years later, and found it too bloated. A lot of volunteer work has gone into it but it lacks overall coordination of efforts and a usage model that is simple and consistent. That’s one of the downsides of open source: too many cooks and you get mediocrity, but accidentally when everyone is good hearted about it. I had to do so much research on appliances I was adding that it was easier to just roll my own gateway and cloud. Now it is a vastly smaller code base that I control and can easily debug issues. Maybe HA could refactor into a smaller set of modules that doesn’t require a huge set of assets from the get go?

MostlyStable 1y ago

Is there anywhere that compiles a database of local control capable smart home devices? I tried briefly to search and I found databases of smart devices but none seemed to have that as a filter.

gempir 1y ago
The Home Assistant docs at least document how the integration works by "IoT Class" https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/12/classifying-the-internet-of-things/#classifiers https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/12/classifying-th... For example Tado: cloud polling https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/tado/ https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/tado/

ldng 1y ago

Well clearly he did not look under the hood ... I did. A few technical decisions are ... questionable. But it's prohibited to ask why in the forum. HA could do well in cleaning up its community that can be particularly toxic, especially toward advanced user and start accepting critics. The hostility one face when they don't want to follow the "dumb down version, do as we say" installation process is really off-putting.

dfc 1y ago
Its not prohibited here. What technical decisions are questionable?
- billfor 1y ago
  Yes it's prohibited I posted a few corrections (one positive , one negative) to his technical review, and it got downvoted, as will this probably....
  - jolmg 1y ago
    I wouldn't consider downvotes to mean something is prohibited. I did in the past because that's what I limited myself to downvoting, but people just downvote what they don't like for whatever reason. All you can do is to not let it get to you.
  - Bjartr 1y ago
    "prohihited" implies an official rule enforced by the community organizers. Downvotes are an expression of opinion by community members.
- traverseda 1y ago
  Home assistant supervisor is not very friendly. It's designed so that it must be kept up to date, and handles it's own auto-update features. It also won't run nicely in a docker container with some significant hacks. This means that the only deployment option if you want a complete home assistant install is to use their "Home Assistant OS" or specific debian versions. Generally it feels like they're making deploying it as hard as possible, doing stuff like checking if supervisor is running in a docker container and just not working if it is. This is presumably born out of frustrations with users deploying it incorrectly, but there really is no reason a supervisor based HA install can't run in a docker container. I've got a some private hacks doing just that, that I'm hesitant to post publicly in case they find some way to break it. No idea what the obsession is with keeping a full home assistant install from running in a container, but it's very strange. Trying to add more friction so they can sell more of their dedicated hardware? Their hardware is nice and stands on it's own, the only reason I don't use it is because I want to run on an old touch screen chromebook for very low power usage.

billfor 1y ago

> Home Assistant has support for that remote option, and no others. The openHAB Cloud Connector allows connecting the local openHAB runtime to a remote openHAB Cloud instance, such as myopenHAB.org, which is an instance of the openHAB Cloud service hosted by the openHAB Foundation (https://www.openhab.org/addons/integrations/openhabcloud/ https://www.openhab.org/addons/integrations/openhabcloud/) > There is also a container-based method that can run on another distribution, but this installation does not support the add-ons feature. You can use the add-ons with the containerized version. This has been discussed elsewhere.

MacNCheese23 1y ago

I don't really get HA. It seems oversized for what most people need for their own home automation. Maybe I'm just jaded because my house is fully KNX wired, but the only "addon" I need is NodeRed for some Dashboard and Integrations of ESPs that are just for additional monitoring. It runs in a lonely docker container just fine and does not need a million dependencies. Then again, I also don't understand why people buy every "smart"/cloud based device and try to glue everything together - when the hardware fails most likely the vendor does not exist or no longer supports it anymore and then you start all over again.

pkulak 1y ago
So, this comment boils down to: “this free software project has too much capability, and there exists hardware that is reliant on cloud servers.”
cbull 1y ago
Your house is wired with an alternative and you can't imagine people who DON'T have that infrastructure are looking for a way of doing smart automations? I have been using HA for years and I love it, it does what I need it to do while operating quietly in the background. I don't have any devices that are "cloud based" so I don't care if the vendor goes out of business or not. My stuff is a mix of wifi, z-wave, and my cameras are ethernet cabled but can be integrated with onvif. My house was also built in 1958, there's no chance I'm running KNX cabling anywhere, much less all the places I have devices.

jillyboel3 1y ago

> Home Assistant has support for that remote option, and no others. It's literally just a reverse proxy. Set up any you like. Wireguard, cloudflare tunnel, caddy with a security plugin, the options are limitless.

greatgib 1y ago

Something that annoys me a lot with recent versions of HA is that it does not play well anymore with yaml file configs. Your are mostly forced to configure things through the interface, that is ok but might be annoying and painful to do when you have a few devices with a little bit more complicated setup. For example, I wanted to replace a light bulb by another one that has a different Mac address to replace another one exactly. Before it was as simple as changing the Mac in the config file. No it is more complicated. Also it was very easy to review and backup the config files. Now it is less obvious.