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Home Assistant 2023.11

home-assistant.io

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Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#31

Post by hypfer »

PennRobotics wrote: post #12

There's a decent amount of friction for a European resident trying to use HA. The landing page has two products with pricing in dollars and nothing else w.r.t. hardware. Click "Getting started" and there's still no sign of what to buy. Click "Installation" and then there are 9+ platforms (and multiple subplatforms) but no quick and realistic comparison of features or pricing. Is a NUC12WSHi3 a better deal, more energ…

> Even among HA products... It looks like I can get a Green from the official German supplier for 110 euros, from a different European vendor that I search on Google Shopping or Idealo for 103 euros, or from Slovakia for around 100 euros.

> It's all of the inconsistencies and friction that keep me from using HA.

Come on man that point is just bogus. Samsung TVs, Noctua Fans or any other conceivable good are also sold by multiple vendors with different prices, yet no one complains about that being "inconsistent". Especially not to Samsung/Noctua/whoever

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#32

Post by Heliosmaster »

oakesm9 wrote: post #28
Heliosmaster wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've only recently (less than a month ago) started to use HA and I have polar opposite impression from you. I gave up on updating because the 2 times i updated the HA Core package and the OS most of my integrations broke. The first time i bothered changing the config. The second time I decided to rollback and keep everything as is.

Maybe the issue is that you used the "Core" installation method which isn't a fully managed installation and only really there for "advanced" use cases. It has this warning above the installation steps: > This is an advanced installation process, and some steps might differ on your system. Considering the nature of this installation type, we assume you can handle subtle differences between this document and the syste…

I use what they recommend: I installed Home Assistant Operating System on a Raspberry PI 3. Which still means there's an OS and there's HA Core.

> Home Assistant Operating System: Minimal Operating System optimized to power Home Assistant. It comes with Supervisor to manage Home Assistant Core and Add-ons. Recommended installation method.

I tried on purpose to do everything as 'basic' as possible because I don't want to spend time making sure it keeps working.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#33

Post by darkwater »

I want to use this space to instead praise publicly Home Assistant, it's IMO one of the biggest and most-useful opensource project out there, it's very professional and it let you do thing that are simply unthinkable with any other "smart hub" from a proprietary vendor. I can control a wifi device with a zigbee button, use an NFC and scan it with a mobile phone to execute some action in some software that doesn't even know what NFCs are etc etc etc.

It also permits you to build a real "local-first" home automation system, which is the only way a home automation system should be, ever.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#34

Post by eternityforest »

Toutouxc wrote: post #7

Hass is the kind of software that has a lot of rough edges, but you use it anyway because there's very little direct competition. And every release feels like so much stuff has been finally polished, but then you deploy the new version and there's still a lot of stuff that feels or looks weird (the part-bad-UI-part-YAML automation). I have been using it for a couple of years now and I still haven't decided whether I…

I'm still using my scratch built KaithemAutomation(Currently just finishing up a large cleanup of some of the almost 10yo code, new release soon) because the off the shelf stuff doesn't seem to support the Pi well on SD cards.

The core workflow is all about having scenes, which have a list of cues, each of which can have IFTT-like rules attached to it, among other things, like sounds and DMX lighting values, live mixing of multiple soundcards, and ESPHome integration.

I'm never quite sure if I should try to move to HASS or some other platform, or keep working on this project a few hours a week.... it's pretty much feature complete, just needing some cleanup to be sustainable and maybe a move to a proper CSS framework, so switching to something else always seems like it's not really worth it.

At the moment HASS seems like the big name in open automation, and I like using the standard big name for everything, but it doesn't seem like the best fit for what I want to do with it.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#35

Post by yoavm »

Heliosmaster wrote: post #24
yoavm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where all the frustration with HA is coming from. I've only started with it last year and so far the experience is amazing. Not only that everything just works with it, it's also so simple to create fun automations, and recently I've even built a little watering system with a Pi Pico, and integrating it with HA to show graphs and controls was a breeze. Also, literally can't recall one time I had to updat…

I've only recently (less than a month ago) started to use HA and I have polar opposite impression from you. I gave up on updating because the 2 times i updated the HA Core package and the OS most of my integrations broke. The first time i bothered changing the config. The second time I decided to rollback and keep everything as is.

Yeah like others suggested, maybe it has to do with the installation method. I'm using a Home Assistant Blue. It all came configured, I'm clicking "update" a couple of times a month and never had the slightest issue.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#36

Post by Heliosmaster »

I love Home Assistant. I only started using less than a month ago (moved into a new house).

However, the two times i needed to upgrade Core (I use Home Assistant OS, their recommended installation procedure), it broke.

The first time they had changed the spec of the 'correct' way of the YAML config file. Which means I didn't have an integration until i fixed the file manually (they deprecated something not gracefully).

The second time I don't know: I couldn't see anymore my Viessman Heater and check everything related to my hot water / heating so I gave up and rolled back.

I am a Clojure developer where there's almost never breaking changes, so this is a good reminder to not take that for granted. I think this is an aspect they have to improve a lot, if they want to cater to people who don't want a new hobby.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#37

Post by baq »

Heliosmaster wrote: post #32
oakesm9 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the issue is that you used the "Core" installation method which isn't a fully managed installation and only really there for "advanced" use cases. It has this warning above the installation steps: > This is an advanced installation process, and some steps might differ on your system. Considering the nature of this installation type, we assume you can handle subtle differences between this document and the syste…

I use what they recommend: I installed Home Assistant Operating System on a Raspberry PI 3. Which still means there's an OS and there's HA Core. > Home Assistant Operating System: Minimal Operating System optimized to power Home Assistant. It comes with Supervisor to manage Home Assistant Core and Add-ons. Recommended installation method. I tried on purpose to do everything as 'basic' as possible because I don't want…

no idea why it's recommended to install manually; I'd recommend docker every time. currently running on docker and upgrading was indeed just pulling new images (didn't even have to tweak the compose file, just docker compose pull). There's been a few helpful UI messages about outdated integrations in the config (e.g. workday detection moved to UI config, used to be yaml).

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#38

Post by ur-whale »

Not sure why there is some much negativity in this thread towards HA.

I'm a very happy user, and there simply is nothing out there that comes close in terms of ease of use and breadth of devices supported.

Sure, if you're going to (and can afford to) pay 200K USD for a vendor locked-in, turnkey home automation system, you'll get something that likely will be a little smoother and more polished that HA.

For a while.

The day something breaks or goes out of date, you'll have to pull out the checkbook again. And good luck integrating anything in there that does not come from the vendor in the first place.

The whole HASS thing is - true - a little bit unusual, but OTOH, does work fairly flawlessly as long as you don't start making outlandish customizations to it.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#39

Post by michaelmior »

Heliosmaster wrote: post #36

I love Home Assistant. I only started using less than a month ago (moved into a new house). However, the two times i needed to upgrade Core (I use Home Assistant OS, their recommended installation procedure), it broke. The first time they had changed the spec of the 'correct' way of the YAML config file. Which means I didn't have an integration until i fixed the file manually (they deprecated something not gracefully…

I've been using Home Assistant for several years and I can count on hand the number of times I've had breaking upgrades. These were always pretty clearly explained in the release notes. I think the nature of the broad scope of Home Assistant is such that different users may have very different experiences depending on what integrations they use. But I don't think it's generally as bad as your comment suggests.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#40

Post by garblegarble »

Dayshine wrote: post #5
lvncelot wrote: post #2

I've tried getting into Home Assistant a few years ago, but it was right at the switch from declarative yaml files for (almost) everything to most of the stuff being set up via the UI. I would love to give Home Assistant another shot - is that still the case, or is there some way to set up the Home Assistant config via code?

I used to be annoyed by the push from yaml to ui. I wanted my config to be version controlled, and I wanted the power that I though text based config gave me. However, it turns out it's really annoying to use text based config for most things. Primarily because integrations can't edit your config, so you have to do a lot more manual migration of config. Yaml also doesn't have any proper ide support, so it's an annoyi…

>Yaml also doesn't have any proper ide support, so it's an annoying loop of restarting the app and staring at logs looking for typos.

Since YAML is a superset of JSON, I highly recommend converting[1] it to JSON, and then just treating it as a JSON config file.

1: For this, I use yaml2json (npm yaml-to-json)

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