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Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform running on Python 3

home-assistant.io

41–50 of 178 posts

Re: Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform running on Python 3

#41
post #38

This thing seems to be mostly an interface for other home automation devices. In the demo, it doesn't directly control anything important. It's not like there are motor control relays connected to the Raspberry Pi's GPIO ports. A big question is how this fails. It needs to fail into some safe condition. Raspberry Pi machines have a full Linux and no stall timer, so they can end up crashed or hung. If this thing turns…

Home Assistant supports sensors and switches using GPIO pins (if you're running on a Pi, obviously)

https://home-assistant.io/components/rpi_gpio/

Home Assistant is indeed an "aggregator" for a lot of different home automation devices. Personally, I find it very useful to have my Nest, my ZWave devices, various ESP8266 "things" (garage door controller, temp/humidity sensors, my doorbell, etc), along with my Chromecasts, and the home/away status of my wife and I all rolled into one state machine (plus a lot of "general" information... the time, sunrise/sunset timing, current weather in my area, traffic conditions, etc).

Having all that information in one place means those various components can be controlled intelligently, based on all the available information, rather than just the small island each of them would be on their own.

A Pi is totally optional, BTW. You can run HA on pretty much anything that runs Python3.

Re: Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform running on Python 3

#42
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Home Assistant community appears to be more active (about 2x) and the barrier for entry is much lower. I would go so far as to say Home Assistant is literally the best open source community out there today. Very active, lots of folks happy to help users with issues, and lots of devs happy to help newer devs through the PR process.

Having contributed to a number of projects via github, this is not true at all. I have had prs closed within minutes with curt replies. That is not how you “help newer devs through a PR process.” In another case this happened for a very clear bug. I’m cool with making amendments but maintainers do not seem open to that often, feeling more content to close things because they see the fix as a “hack”. Compared to other…

This has not been my experience at all when contributing to HA. Maybe we interacted with different people.

They do have strict code standards, but it's hard to argue that's a bad thing.

Re: Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform running on Python 3

#43
post #14

I'm a co-founder of Snips https://snips.ai , we are building a 100% on-device Voice AI platform which protects your privacy as it does not rely on sending voice on servers like Google and Apple do You can use the platform for free (we will also open-source over time), it can run on Raspberry 3 and we added an integration with the amazing Home Assistant: https://home-assistant.io/components/snips

How are you able to improve the training over time if you aren't centralizing the data anywhere?

Re: Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform running on Python 3

#44
post #12

Founder of Home Assistant here. If anyone has any questions, let me know! Besides being able to install it as a Python package on Python 3, you can also install it using our Hass.io OS. Based on ResinOS and powered by Docker, it offers over the air updates and management of your device via the user interface: https://home-assistant.io/hassio/

Hass.io? In case you don't know, hass means hatred in German.

In turkish it might sound like "hassiktir," which means "fk off", "WTF", but pronouncing only the first half is very common.

Re: Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform running on Python 3

#45
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Home Assistant community appears to be more active (about 2x) and the barrier for entry is much lower. I would go so far as to say Home Assistant is literally the best open source community out there today. Very active, lots of folks happy to help users with issues, and lots of devs happy to help newer devs through the PR process.

Having contributed to a number of projects via github, this is not true at all. I have had prs closed within minutes with curt replies. That is not how you “help newer devs through a PR process.” In another case this happened for a very clear bug. I’m cool with making amendments but maintainers do not seem open to that often, feeling more content to close things because they see the fix as a “hack”. Compared to other…

As a counterpoint, I had a really good experience with the 2 or 3 PRs I submitted. They were merged pretty quickly with helpful feedback. It definitely makes me more likely to contribute in the future.

Re: Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform running on Python 3

#46
post #42
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having contributed to a number of projects via github, this is not true at all. I have had prs closed within minutes with curt replies. That is not how you “help newer devs through a PR process.” In another case this happened for a very clear bug. I’m cool with making amendments but maintainers do not seem open to that often, feeling more content to close things because they see the fix as a “hack”. Compared to other…

This has not been my experience at all when contributing to HA. Maybe we interacted with different people. They do have strict code standards, but it's hard to argue that's a bad thing.

Probably. I had a couple prs accepted by another maintainer fwiw. The code standards were not the issue, nor were unit tests. Not my first rodeo. The later interactions were not pleasant and did not engender much interest in further contribution.

Re: Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform running on Python 3

#47
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Home Assistant community appears to be more active (about 2x) and the barrier for entry is much lower. I would go so far as to say Home Assistant is literally the best open source community out there today. Very active, lots of folks happy to help users with issues, and lots of devs happy to help newer devs through the PR process.

Having contributed to a number of projects via github, this is not true at all. I have had prs closed within minutes with curt replies. That is not how you “help newer devs through a PR process.” In another case this happened for a very clear bug. I’m cool with making amendments but maintainers do not seem open to that often, feeling more content to close things because they see the fix as a “hack”. Compared to other…

Obviously this is an entirely subjective thing, and neither of us is "right" or "wrong".

Home Assistant has certainly gotten a lot more particular about new code as the project has grown, but I still feel they do a great job of helping new users along.

Bummer you had such a negative experience...

Re: Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform running on Python 3

#49
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having contributed to a number of projects via github, this is not true at all. I have had prs closed within minutes with curt replies. That is not how you “help newer devs through a PR process.” In another case this happened for a very clear bug. I’m cool with making amendments but maintainers do not seem open to that often, feeling more content to close things because they see the fix as a “hack”. Compared to other…

Obviously this is an entirely subjective thing, and neither of us is "right" or "wrong". Home Assistant has certainly gotten a lot more particular about new code as the project has grown, but I still feel they do a great job of helping new users along. Bummer you had such a negative experience...

Which is sad considering an issue I was attempting to contribute was a bug fix rather than new feature work. Clearly a lot of the earlier code suffers from lack of design.

As I mentioned later I have had PRs accepted but overall I find maintainership to be a real mixed bag. Better run open source projects do not have this inconsistency.

Re: Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform running on Python 3

#50
post #12

Founder of Home Assistant here. If anyone has any questions, let me know! Besides being able to install it as a Python package on Python 3, you can also install it using our Hass.io OS. Based on ResinOS and powered by Docker, it offers over the air updates and management of your device via the user interface: https://home-assistant.io/hassio/

Hass.io? In case you don't know, hass means hatred in German.

Interesting. It is also a not uncommon last name.
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