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Home Assistant 2023.11

home-assistant.io

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Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#91

Post by kkielhofner »

pierregillesl wrote: post #19
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…

We are making Gladys Assistant ( https://gladysassistant.com/ ), an open-source smart home software. It's less "techy" than HA (no YAML files, no CLI), and UI first. We have way less integrations for now, but are working hard on it. Don't hesitate to try it and make us some feedback.

Very nice!

Would you be interesting in integrating with my project Willow[0]?

Willow supports Home Assistant, OpenHAB, and generic REST+MQTT endpoints today. With Home Assistant and OpenHAB we benefit from their specific API support for providing speech to text output and processing through things like the HA Assist Pipelines[1].

From our standpoint we handle wake word, VAD+AEC+BSS, STT, TTS, user feedback, etc. All we really do is send the speech transcript to the Willow command endpoint (like HA) and speak+display the execution result. Other than all of the wild speech stuff and our obsession with speed and accuracy Willow is really quite "dumb" - think of it as a voice terminal.

OpenHAB has something similar but it's significantly more limited.

[0] - https://heywillow.io

[1] - https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/voice/pipelines/

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#92

Post by diffeomorphism »

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…

Nonsense. HA is software not hardware. Get any pc, raspberry pi, whatever, install, follow the pretty interface instructions. I have no idea why you think European has anything at all to do with that.

> then there are 9+ platforms (and multiple subplatforms) but no quick and realistic comparison of features or pricing.

No. It is simply "what hardware or OS do you have? Click here".

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#93

Post by goodlinks »

I love HA and will persist with it. Main complaint is that it (and more so its docker containers) want access to the things that are not documented or configurable.

E.g. it tries to contact DNS other than the configured one and i cannot figure out what exactly it needs access to to allow updates to work.

This is especially important for home automation tools as i want them as far from the internet as possible

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#94

Post by sumtechguy »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #21
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…

"HomeAssistant is the worst form of home automation, except for everything else." Eg the amount of work it takes to play a sound locally is upsetting. But once setup, it is rock stable - which is what really counts. And the number of integrations is impressive, it even detected my tea kettle which for some reason has bluetooth.

When I was designing APIs in this space that was our biggest issue.

How do we make this more easy to use. But still show everyone the things they need. You end up with a spaghetti graph to tie things together or some monster spreadsheet. How do you expose timers, locations, nodes, and comms together. Each with their own way of reading things. A modbus might have 64k locations to pick from more if you treat the spec in a weird way. Meanwhile that one off lightbulb from some rando Chinese company has 3 points but 60 hidden behind those 3. Then how do you get that in front of a user so it looks consistent.

When you do get it all working though it is usually fairly rock solid. You just have to keep an eye out for systems that think 'log the world and the past 3 years of data and sort it out later' that will obliterate a flash card. Some data if there is a missing hole it is not that big of a deal. Some is 'must keep'. Also logging should rarely be kept on the device except in very rare cases.

Then on top of all of that you have different market segments in home automation that all look the same on first glance. You have your early adopters. They have to change out their light switch every 6 months. They are totally down with it. Then you have pretty much the rest of the market. Which is that switch better last at least 10 years if not longer. Oh it fails because of some firmware update... garbage, toggle switch it is. They are not going to mess with it.

HomeAssistant is one of the better ones out there. Thera are much worse ones.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#95

Post by darkwater »

MPSimmons wrote: post #83
asylteltine wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

On that I agree, giving what's possible with opensource UIs like Grafana's, it could be probably borrowed (I mean, the whole JS code) in Lovelace as well. But I guess there is some debt from early versions that makes that more complicated.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#96

Post by billfor »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #87
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 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.

It’s not natural. I use both hA and Openhab with about 20 integrations/addons and HA breaks more (hello zwave}. Openhab almost never breaks on an addon level. If it breaks at all it’s in the core and patched quickly.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#97

Post by kkielhofner »

russfink wrote: post #85
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…

There are two main approaches to voice with Home Assistant:

1) Their native Home Assistant voice stuff combined with either their ESPHome project or their "voice satellite" software implementations that run on a Raspberry PI (or whatever) with any microphone attached. Either of these provide wildly different results. It turns out you can't just slap a microphone on something and get quality voice and speech recognition from 15 feet away (or even much less) under typical conditions. I learned this the hard way many many years ago.

2) My project Willow[0].

Our approaches could not be more different in terms of implementation and each has advantages and disadvantages. That said, between my 20 years of experience with the intersection of voice, networks, etc and thousands of users using Willow in the real world for six months I certainly believe our approach is substantially better in terms of a user experience competitive with the commercial big tech stuff.

HA voice is essentially at initial release and they will undoubtedly be making improvements but my experience (confirmed by initial user feedback and my own testing) tells me they will probably need a complete re-architecture at some point. Basically, I took my 20 years of experience with this stuff and combined it with "inspiration" from the big tech implementations and made it local and private.

I love Home Assistant and have very deep respect for the team but they clearly don't have much real-world experience with voice (which is a very unique animal). Their architecture and the end result demonstrates that.

I want to be very careful to not sound overly critical or harsh but decades of experience and the resulting accumulated knowledge makes a huge difference. They only just started learning voice and it's very painful process.

[0] - https://heywillow.io/

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#98

Post by bjibvc »

russfink wrote: post #85
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…

If only you had a device that had access to like a giant library of knowledge. I don’t know what we’d call it, but for the sake of argument let’s say the world wide information library. If only you could then use that device to pull up a card catalog and go find the information you’re looking for.

The first thing you should do is learn to organize your thoughts into coherent questions.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#99

Post by onedr0p »

goodlinks wrote: post #93

I love HA and will persist with it. Main complaint is that it (and more so its docker containers) want access to the things that are not documented or configurable. E.g. it tries to contact DNS other than the configured one and i cannot figure out what exactly it needs access to to allow updates to work. This is especially important for home automation tools as i want them as far from the internet as possible

If you want to try, I build and maintain a rootless home-assistant container (which they refuse to support) that shouldn't have the issue.

Container: https://github.com/onedr0p/containers/pkgs/container/home-as... Source: https://github.com/onedr0p/containers

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#100

Post by nunez »

I love HA but hate how manufacturers are going all-in on preventing people from integrating their devices into the platform without an alternative.

Chamberlain MyQ did this by turning on CloudFlare Super Bot Fight and 429'ing anything that doesn't look like it came from their app. That's fine and reasonable, but I can't even pay to create an OAuth client, even though I am paying for their Tesla integration, and they provide no pathways for integrating with Apple HomeKit or Alexa.

I don't want to use a billion apps to control my house. HomeKit was supposed to solve this, but companies just won't let up.

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