51–60 of 195 posts
A base project for home automation centralization free of big name companies is inherently valuable software and a public good.
I gave up on Home Assistant, it required too much tweaking of configs between releases. I took inspiration from https://github.com/stapelberg/regelwerk instead
I realize that I'll eventually have to deal with the tech debt that I'm accumulating, but it's been really surprising how good hass has gotten at auto-migrating configs and dealing with neglectful users such as myself.
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.
Additionally, if you got in ~5 years ago when it was pure yaml, it seems a couple times a year there's breaking changes where more yaml is ripped out and manual reconfig is necessary (it'd be nice if it just migrated the config for you)
The bulbs don't directly work with Home Assistant for protocol reasons (I think). I went ahead a bought a ConBee II dongle, which is a kind of USB stick that interfaces with the Philips bulbs (and devices from other companies). Plug that into a Raspberry Pi that has Home Assistant installed and you got yourself a single app that can manage smart devices from almost all imaginable companies. It works very well for my use case. If you have devices from several different manufacturers, you should definitely look into HA to have a single app manage everything, and to future-proof your setup against shady moves by some these companies.
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…
OpenHAB? I generally look for OH mentions when discussions like this start up and am fascinated how it never seems to be mentioned. In my experience it has its own rough edges, but its significantly more understandable, more stable and easier to get going.
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…
IMO better architecture for such "IOT HUB" would be a rule-engine that basically just takes code (embeddable language like Lua or outright WASM) and runs them against incoming events. Maybe add pluggable storage so the code can use some kind of persistency on top of it.
Then UI would basically be just a configuration interface for that rule engine. So to run high availability you'd just run the engine on 2 nodes and sync the configs, and configuration/dashboard/whatever else using it could run separately on "bigger" machines.
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…
Quite often I feel frustrated dealing with dozens of lines of YAML in HA's convoluted DSL and wish I could drop to a real programming language. However, for the ESP/embedded devices, it's usually the opposite. ESPHome makes it easy to avoid all the boilerplate and footguns of the C++ libraries for these devices
I've never really been into home automation, but when I stumbled upon Philips Hue bulbs on sale for $5 at Home Depot a few years ago, I went ahead a bought a few. It turns out that they are great to wake up the kids on a schedule in the morning. I used the Philips app because it worked well enough that I couldn't be bothered to look for alternatives. Then recently I got a notification saying that the app wouldn't wor…
They are based on the Zigbee networking standard, that's why you had to buy the stick. It is effectively a networking adapter like a wifi usb adapter. That said, you can buy most other Zigbee devices now as well. Ikea has far cheaper Zigbee switches than Hue or almost anyone and you can configure them to also cross control other HA features.
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…
Competition is relative. You have mqtt, node red, ... You can piece together your own automations very easily using ready to use common components and some code. I am sure most just use the components as they are and use their own automation stuff. Like my mqtt stick that has its own automation control built in. Mixed with Google home you nearly have full control (with many limitations I know) IMO there is simply no…
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…
It's one of those pieces of software that was clearly designed by programmers for programmers. It's not user friendly in the slightest, there's no onboarding process, and it changes so quickly that half of the information you find is already out of date. It's very useful, but my god is it clunky (And apparently destroys SD cards by design, but even that information may be out of date) I compare it to something like R…