351–356 of 356 posts
The author mentioned they would be moving towards local smart-home solution but doesn’t mention HomeAssistant even once https://www.home-assistant.io/
I agree, I went all in on nest hubs/minis etc to have assistant for making requests to control stuff. I've got a bunch of Xiaomi and custom sensors and other devices hooked up to home assistant with a relay through to Google (that I've had to pay for...because Google's home ecosystem is just fucking terrible, anybody could do better with their eyes closed). I've noticed over time that assistant has become much dumber…
What are the open, easy to install and use, and sustainable alternatives? It feels like enough work has been done on the margins of replicating some of the capabilities of Alexa and Google Nest hardware and software, but it’s not packaged up in an accessible way for the mass-market?
I've been running home assistant for years now.
My question is... where is the nicely packaged, off the shelf, easy to use but open to expansion voice assistant that works with it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fully respect when anyone decides they don't want smart devices, but all of your bullet points are quite easy to accomplish with off the shelf devices these days ("unnecessarily complicated" will always be debatable though). All of my lights, outlets, and dozens of other niche things, never connect to the internet, and everything is fully functional when there's no internet connection. Home Assistant with Zigbee de…
I am completely unable to understand why any of these devices need any kind of wireless radio at all. They're all plugged into wall power all the time, and powerline Ethernet works fine. What am I missing?
Most of the remotes switches, sensors, and some others are all battery powered and last at least a year without needing to be changed.
In fact, they would be largely useless or cumbersome if they needed a wire.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fully respect when anyone decides they don't want smart devices, but all of your bullet points are quite easy to accomplish with off the shelf devices these days ("unnecessarily complicated" will always be debatable though). All of my lights, outlets, and dozens of other niche things, never connect to the internet, and everything is fully functional when there's no internet connection. Home Assistant with Zigbee de…
I have lights in my home too. If I want to turn a light on or off, I get up, walk three steps, and turn the light switch on. I could make all this computer controlled over a home server if I wanted to, but what's the point?
My wife said the same thing as you at first, and originally had no desire for any of it.
Instead of buying dimmer switches to replace the on/off wall switches, I got dimmers that go in the gang box behind the existing switches. I did this for her, because she preferred a real switch and now we can on/off with a real switch (as it worked originally) or control brightness/on/off with voice, app, or zigbee remotes.
Since I did this on all our wall switches, my wife went from using the real switches 100% of the time to now around 0-5% of the time. When we're away from home she always makes a comment on how annoying it is to NOT have it.
Asking for a brightness change while watching a movie or cooking with dirty hands, automatically tuning the lights to something warmer at night and brighter during the day, forgot to turn something off and you're already in bed, automatically turn on the lights inside the front door when we open it with an arm full of stuff, having energy monitoring, virtual 3-way switches without any re-wiring, adding additional lights to switches that don't have real switches, controlling the TV without a remote, the list goes on.
If the reliability of it all wasn't 99%+, I wouldn't want it. I keep it because everything "just works".