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Home Assistant 2023.11

home-assistant.io

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Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#151

Post by PennRobotics »

hypfer wrote: post #31
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…

I have to send a buggy audio interface from Munich to Czech Republic, because that's where I bought it for cheaper. For one, there's the environmental factor of sending shit from A to B to C. Second, it's a major hassle waiting a week instead of a day for each leg of shipping.

I'd rather buy local but not if it's costing 10% more. And I'm quite certain there are people who grumble that they need to buy a certain threshold of goods at Costco (perhaps the most prominent price discriminator) before a membership is worth it.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#152

Post by PennRobotics »

redrove wrote: post #15
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 European as well but I fail to see what's preventing you from buying hardware and deploying HASS. There's so many SBCs available now, in ARM or even x86 form (Zima Board). Pick one and deploy HASS on it. Pricing in USD be damned.

_I_ can buy hardware and set it up. That does not mean it's easy to use for the whole family when I'm not there.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#153

Post by VTimofeenko »

nunez wrote: post #100

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…

Have you considered ESP32 or something like a Konnected device to pretend to be a wall button? I'm in the market for a jackshaft and myq stuff is a huge red flag for me

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#154

Post by shepherdjerred »

nusl wrote: post #149

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.

One really cool thing it can do is adjust the color temperature based on the position of the sun in the sky.

The lights throughout my house are cool during the day, and warm at night. It's quite nice!

https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#155

Post by [deleted] »

darkwater wrote: post #33

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 eve…

[deleted]

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#156

Post by aequitas »

robertlagrant wrote: post #41
pierregillesl wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do feel like there's no point in making non-UI first home automation technology. It's not as though you'll be rolling it out across multiple environments.

Aside from easily rolling out (parts of) my home automation to multiple environments (like my parents home, office, etc). The real use case for non-UI first is that with home automation software you often have to roll it out on the _same_ environment very often. Be it a corrupted SD card, broken state after software update, database bit rot, hardware RMA, etc, there are many reasons state gets corrupted or lost. So you either need to rely on a backup (if possible and hope it's up to date and works with the version you have installed) or configure everything by hand, again and again and again, via the UI, step by step, hope you don't forget that one setting you didn't write down. I rather have my home automation setup be build and deployed reproducible from a (VCSed) source.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#157

Post by Rebelgecko »

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 end up having to do a mix of YAML and UI (on top of their templating language which i still can't grok). I think all-YAML is viable but all-UI is not if you use enough advanced feautures

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#158

Post by vorpalhex »

kkielhofner wrote: post #135
vorpalhex wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the things I'm really surprised by about HA/Nabu Casa is the complete lack of an LTS branch/releases. Things related to homes are measured in years or decades. HA has gotten better about it but there are still occasional "cross your fingers and pray" scenarios when doing upgrades because every single release combines new functionality, fixes, breaking changes, and introduces new issues (of course). People come…

I think the answer to this is generally to pin to a working version and expect to upgrade once a year unless there's a security patch.

I think the answer the HA folks would give is to point out that they are still under very heavy development and "longterm stability" just isn't something that the project has reached in a way that supports LTS. I don't think this answer is wrong - HA today is amazingly different than HA from two years ago or three years ago.

It is painful and it is why I do caution people that adopting HA means some regular investment in tooling around with it on occasion. There's a big gap still before it's ready for set-and-forget non-technical audiences.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#159

Post by PennRobotics »

russfink wrote: post #112
kkielhofner wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 recogniti…

This is very helpful, thanks. I am grateful for your explanations of the voice aspect - Amazon has kept all of this under wraps so much so that I didn't understand all the difficulties until I read your site just now. I can guess at the difficulties based on how often I have to repeat simple commands to Alexa, or "normal people bread" (my fam's word for non-grain, non-healthy bread) gets changed to "normal maple brea…

> Basically, I want an Alexa setup without the dependence on (or financial expectations from) Amazon

Amen.

+1 to timers, schedules, integration with a lighting bridge or even kitchen appliances e.g. Home Connect, custom routines, music (including Bluetooth and/or TuneIn), line out (so I can connect my own speakers), microphone relays that I can put all around the house instead of owning 5 or 6 RaspPis and the associated 15 to 30 watts

Better than math, for me, would be a Wikipedia summary readout that voices the first paragraph (or a reasonably defined "summary length") from simple.wikipedia.com, although metric/imperial conversions are also very handy.

Weather integration would also be delightful---including a way to tie this in to reminders e.g. "bring the plants indoors tonight", "remember rain clothes for riding home this evening", "tomorrow is probably the last good sled day until next winter"

Oh. And properly bilingual. We have a Philips light named "Turtle". Alexa absolutely cannot handle this name if the input is set to either German or German/English.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#160

Post by 404mm »

tbyehl wrote: post #134
404mm wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MyQ was my reason for trying HA. When I saw that the plug-in keeps hitting their API over and over, my excitement faded. I know Chamberlain are the ones causing this issue to begin with (missing HomeKit integration) but DDOSing somebody’s API is not a solution. My experience with HA came to an end when my gate unexpectedly opened on its own - and based on the log in the phone app, it came from HA.

MyQ had a HomeKit bridge... which they cancelled [1]. My experience with it was that, aside from eliminating the Internet/cloud dependency, it didn't make the MyQ experience any more reliable overall and I'm much happier with ATHOM's ESPHome-based kit. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/23/23318157/chamberlain-myq-...

I have a Meross garage door opener and it has been rock solid for 2 years. Not a single hiccup or miss.

The issue I’d like to solve is my driveway gate. It’s too far from WiFi and I don’t want to run any cables. It’s Homelink and MyQ compatible but that’s about it.

I suppose I could take one wireless remote and replace the switch with a HomeKit compatible relay. lol

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