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Home Assistant 2023.11

home-assistant.io

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Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#141

Post by redundantly »

vorpalhex wrote: post #127
hammock wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a beginner non-coder friendly HA “getting started” guide that someone here could recommend? I’m interested in investing in an ecosystem of smart switches, blinds, thermostat and music that is future proof and I can take with me as I rent Have some experience with ecobee and smart switches and trying to get onto Airplay 2 currently

HomeAssistants official plug'n play solution is HomeAssistant Green: https://www.home-assistant.io/green It's basically a mini computer (sbc) with homeassistant preinstalled and ready to go. Do expect that HA will expect some attention every few months. It's not a "set and forget" thing.

I opted for the Home Assistant Yellow, PoE version. It has built-in zigbee support and one less cable to deal with, no DC power cord and brick.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#142

Post by soitgoes511 »

briHass wrote: post #57
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…

The tight integration with ESPHome is what tips the scale to the positive side for me. 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 really appreciate both HA and ESPHome. The only gotcha I have encountered with ESPHome involved lost data with higher sampling rates (1 sample/0.2 second). To this day I am not sure what the issue was. I had better results with arduino framework vs esp-idf. Apart from that, it really does make spinning up a new sensor so easy and the OTA updates are excellent.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#143

Post by [deleted] »

walth wrote: post #81
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

[deleted]

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#144

Post by nomel »

walth wrote: post #81
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

My Samsung, Google, Wyze, and car charger integrations slowly stopped working. I'm replacing everything with dumb stuff again, because the breakage (not usually HA's fault) is just too annoying.

This stuff needs to be an appliance, or managed by someone else, to make sense.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#145

Post by xd1936 »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #113
smith7018 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently did the same and have been thrilled with it though I'm sad that the bulbs don't transition to new colors. They immediately change which looks a little jarring.

I had the same thought at first since that's the default, but it's configurable! In the zigbee2mqtt control panel, click the device, choose "Settings (specific)", and change transition to 1. The look/feel ends up being indistinguishable from the Hue defaults.

Hey nice! Is there an equivalent in ZHA?

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#146

Post by barbazoo »

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #117
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.

On one hand, I'm deriving a ton of value from HA. The other OSS platforms have nowhere near the same integration coverage. On the other hand, the jank I put up with... To start - just for the basic display functionality: * you can't really scroll around or zoom in the dates in the default visualization (graph) cards * HVAC visualization doesn't show heating heating mode, unless you also enable temperature viz. It can…

Have you tried alternative cards through the HACS?

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#147

Post by NortySpock »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #139
tibbon wrote: post #131

The only negative thing I can say about HASS is that getting it running in Kubernetes with a USB Zigbee/Zwave adapter is a real pain. I've got a local cluster and had it working once, but had to rebuild everything for some unrelated reason, and haven't been able to get it consistently working since. There are too many in-built assumptions about how you're running it and the USB access. Documentation assumes that _may…

What benefit would running it in k8s have? I’ve been running it on a bare pi for years without issue and have never once thought I needed abstractions upon abstractions… is this more a “because I can” sort of thing?

High availability, I assume.

I'm running HA in docker-compose (no USB device needs in my use case) , but being able to have docker-compose be the default tool that handles all of the external settings means I get something pretty close to Infrastructure-as-code, and that is nice for piece of mind and simplifying how the backup-and-restore process will work.

Plus I can be very deliberate about the pace at which I upgrade HA versions.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#148

Post by smarterhome »

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,…

I agree the UI can be improved a lot but in my experience a truly well done smart home does not need a lot of UI. I have automated pretty much everything and only use Grafana to show some data. If you actually want to include Grafana panels in Loveloce... that actually works. I described how to do that on my blog here if you are interested: https://thesmarthomejourney.com/2021/05/30/add-grafana-to-ho...

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#149

Post by nusl »

I’m looking for reasons to use Home Assistant. I know a few folks using it actively in their lives for very many things. Someday I’ll have a good use case but maybe for now I can have it turn the lights off.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#150

Post by rpearl »

briHass wrote: post #57
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…

The tight integration with ESPHome is what tips the scale to the positive side for me. 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

For automations, check out pyscript, https://hacs-pyscript.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

You can just write decorated functions in python.

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