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Home Assistant 2023.11

home-assistant.io

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Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#81

Post by walth »

awsanswers wrote: post #51

I will never understand the petty gripes people have about HA. This category of software requires a community keeping the integration ecosystem up to date. Software with easy to understand abstractions and no frills UI/UX makes it easy to hack on without having to grok complexity. A base project for home automation centralization free of big name companies is inherently valuable software and a public good.

I don't think you'll find much software that touches the day-to-day life of the average user as much as Home Assistant does.

Living through breaking backwards compatibility and deprecations I think is the paint point- just continued paper cuts for the grumpy here.

it's easy to lose sight of how great a piece of software it is

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#82

Post by PurpleRamen »

ChrisRR wrote: post #27
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…

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slightest, there's no onboarding process, and it changes so quickly that half of the information you find is already out of date. It's very useful, but my god is it clunky (And apparently destroys SD cards by design, but even that information may be out of date) I compare it to something like R…

> It's one of those pieces of software that was clearly designed by programmers for programmers. It's not user friendly in the slightest

Yet, as a programmer, I've never felt at home either. It's clearly designed by programmers, because for a long time it was just a messy collection of functionality, without design. This changed some years ago, and has now become that frankenstein-thingy that tries to cater to end users, but is not really there yet to be actually good enough, and continues to be something in between that works hard on finding its real form and identity.

And along the way it's break so often that it annoys everyone, yet still stays popular. Quite fascinating.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#83

Post by MPSimmons »

asylteltine wrote: post #79
rj45jackattack wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of negativity in here. So this is nice. I use HA at home and it's nothing short of amazing. I primarily use Zigbee devices and they all just work. I pay Nabu Casa for the external access and Google integration. I look forward to replacing my Google Homes with HA as well.

I don’t understand the negativity at all. HA rivals or exceeds commercial automation systems like crestron, RTI, etc. clearly those people don’t have any industry experience. I’ve generally never had an issue with HA beyond my own fault, like a buggy integration.

Home Assistant is an amazing project. I use it a ton, and I deeply appreciate what they've done.

HOWEVER, Lovelace specifically is pretty terrible. Having used Grafana extensively, trying to use Lovelace to arrange a UI is so far backwards that it's constantly grating to try to create or modify dashboards. I really wish there was a way to use Grafana as the UI and embed cards as panels. The ability to drag and drop, resize, and move UI elements would be a godsend, but instead it feels like I'm writing Tk-style UI arrangement in yaml, and it's awful, so I do it as infrequently as possible.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#84

Post by asylteltine »

gaganyaan wrote: post #61

Are they still gallivanting their way around the internet being assholes? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277 I still use HA but haven't upgraded in a good while. Partially because of the switch away from YAML, and partially because that link left a pretty sour taste in my mouth.

Who cares and there was no such switch away from yaml

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#85

Post by russfink »

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…

I'm convinced Amazon is going to phase out Alexa because it's not making them money. After visiting the Home Assistant website and reading these comments, I have a mixed reaction. Can someone explain by examples what it is and how it works? I see some videos where people are raising desks and turning on lights. How does that work? Besides Green or Yellow (not entirely sure what the differences are), are there modules you have to buy? Can I control it from a phone? Can I control my Alexa outlets with it, or do I have to buy all new outlets? If there's a "cloud," how does that align with the goal of privacy and everything being stored locally? What is a "YAML" file and why would I need to mess with it?

And can I talk to it like Alexa? Half the site seems to say yes, the other half no.

I'm probably going to hold out for something more friendly that inevitably will come out just as Alexa is being lowered into the grave.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#86

Post by Cyph0n »

PaulWaldman wrote: post #76
jakecopp wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconding this. I was able to just run it with docker compose on a cheap mini PC and it chugs away happily, interfacing with all manner of devices (Phillips/Lifx/IKEA/Airpurifier/Bunnings brands). Only gets tricky to set up devices when you're dealing with some hostile cloud based gadget that doesn't want to play nice. Unbelievable it can all be controlled offline using Siri on an iPhone, or other voice assistants. I…

>Unbelievable it can all be controlled offline using Siri on an iPhone, or other voice assistants. Does your iPhone need an i ternet connection for this to work?

No, just WiFi. Your HA server acts as a HomeKit bridge and exposes its entities to the iOS Home app.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#87

Post by PurpleRamen »

yoavm wrote: post #23
mongol wrote: post #20

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 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 don't know where all the frustration with HA is coming from

Because it's breaking all the time. They have a big surface, and integrations are changing fast, this is natural. But at the same time they are also eager to change and break things on their own software, and this all accumulates to a messy experience for many people.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#88

Post by maxerickson »

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…

Isn't Yaml a serialization format? Seems like it shouldn't be a big deal to read it into a live object, remap things and then write the updated config back out.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#89

Post by izacus »

ur-whale wrote: post #38

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. T…

Yep, I was able to replace a whole set of really really shitty IoT vendor apps with a nice dashboard in HomeAssistant. It's now accessible for everyone in the household from any device or OS without jumping through hoops by creating multiple IoT accounts in multiple clouds.

It's an incredible project (and easily extensible too for a few items of hardware that didn't have official integrations yet).

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#90

Post by 8fingerlouie »

Mashimo wrote: post #71

Oh neat Today I learned that if you have residency in Denmark can just log into eloverblik.dk and see yearly, monthly, daily and up to hourly statistics about your energy consumption. Going back to 2021 for me. And it has an API, for which there is an HA plugin. No special hardware or account required. Fantastic.

It goes even further back. Mine goes back to 2013, though "recent" changes with heat pump and EVs makes the data points kinda moot.

As for the HA plugin, sadly the data is delayed by ~48 hours, so you can't use it for the energy monitor plugin.

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