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Home Assistant 2023.11

home-assistant.io

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Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#171

Post by wolrah »

michaelmior wrote: post #39
Heliosmaster wrote: post #36

I love Home Assistant. I only started using less than a month ago (moved into a new house). However, the two times i needed to upgrade Core (I use Home Assistant OS, their recommended installation procedure), it broke. The first time they had changed the spec of the 'correct' way of the YAML config file. Which means I didn't have an integration until i fixed the file manually (they deprecated something not gracefully…

I've been using Home Assistant for several years and I can count on hand the number of times I've had breaking upgrades. These were always pretty clearly explained in the release notes. I think the nature of the broad scope of Home Assistant is such that different users may have very different experiences depending on what integrations they use. But I don't think it's generally as bad as your comment suggests.

> I think the nature of the broad scope of Home Assistant is such that different users may have very different experiences depending on what integrations they use.

I think this is a common problem with "hub" projects that intend to bridge together multiple incompatible technologies. I work in VoIP and have been using Asterisk in one way or another for over 20 years. That project is even named after the wildcard character because originally it was intended to be able to connect any kind of telecom technology from analog to TDM to all sorts of VoIP.

As the world moved on and most everyone has standardized around SIP as the future those of us who run all-SIP systems and/or common analog/TDM interfaces have generally been able to upgrade willy-nilly with little to no trouble, but there's always "that one guy" who has rigged up something where a call comes in over a SIP-GSM gateway, gets sent over an H.323 trunk to another box elsewhere in the world, then rings to a SCCP phone and of course they're always having issues because no one else is doing anything close to that.

HA has that problem to an exponentially larger degree because at least the telecom world theoretically has widely accepted standards that most equipment uses where home automation gear has a few competing standards alongside hundreds of vendor-specific APIs that may or may not be documented or even officially open for use.

Someone who is just using HA to unify their lighting control across a few vendors using well-tested Zigbee and Z-Wave implementations is going to have a much easier time than the people who have rigged up a Rube Goldberg machine of integrations of varying quality.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#172

Post by nunez »

chromakode wrote: post #130
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…

Re: MyQ, check out ratgdo [1]. It's a lovely little hardware project that wires into Chamberlain/Liftmaster controllers and provides a local WiFi-only interface. It integrates perfectly with HA and requires no soldering or disassembly to install. It's a shame Chamberlain discontinued their homekit bridge, because it shouldn't be necessary to use a cloud integration to trigger a garage door. [1]: https://paulwieland.g…

I have; he's super backlogged (great problem to have!)

Apparently you can still buy the HomeKit bridge (it's even on Amazon) and it will still work.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#173

Post by LeafItAlone »

agloe_dreams wrote: post #58
polivier wrote: post #54

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…

> The bulbs don't directly work with Home Assistant for protocol reasons 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.

> Ikea has far cheaper Zigbee switches than Hue

Not beating the $5 sale price that the parent mentioned.

I love the IKEA smart home devices (practically all of the commercial smart devices I have still in use are IKEA). But the size and shape of their US outlets is absurd.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#174

Post by Izkata »

oakesm9 wrote: post #28
Heliosmaster wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe the issue is that you used the "Core" installation method which isn't a fully managed installation and only really there for "advanced" use cases. It has this warning above the installation steps: > This is an advanced installation process, and some steps might differ on your system. Considering the nature of this installation type, we assume you can handle subtle differences between this document and the syste…

> I'd imagine the full OS image is even easier and more stable.

It notifies you when there's an upgrade, you just click "Install" in the GUI.

That said, every time I update it the disk image grows by like a full gig. Haven't figured out where that's going so I just don't update it anymore. It's running on a minimal headless computer and doesn't have enough space to keep doing that.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#175

Post by quickthrowman »

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.

I’ve never seen Crestron or RTI used for commercial building automation, aside from Crestron lighting controls on a rare occasion. Crestron is mostly an A/V company with a lighting controls line as far as I’m aware.

Building automation is owned by Johnson Controls, Carrier, Siemens, and Honeywell. There are some smaller manufacturers around, but those four plus Trane sell the vast majority of commercial building automation systems.

I manage electricians that wire up building automation systems, for what it’s worth.

And to be honest, knowing what I do about commercial building automation, I don’t see why you’d want to automate your home. If I was going to upgrade the lightning controls in my home, it would all be local non-networked controls from Lutron. I’m not sure what you’d monitor on your HVAC system.. do you really need to know what speed your furnace fan is spinning at? Most home HVAC systems aren’t large central boilers/chillers that send chilled/hot water to terminal units that can call for more heat/cold, a furnace can be controlled with its factory controls and an external thermostat.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#176

Post by etedor »

asylteltine wrote: post #132
gaganyaan wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/04/14/the-future-of-... Just one relevant quote: > Any new integration that communicates with devices and/or services, must use configuration via the UI. Configuration via YAML is only allowed in very rare cases, which will be determined on a case by case basis.

It’s misleading at best. You can configure literally everything via yaml including your dashboard. Mine runs custom js and css for crying out loud. Even if they changed some options that can’t be configured via yaml which I haven’t encountered, what’s the actual damage to you?

The result is things can no longer be configured via YAML, which is the direction they have been moving in for years.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#177

Post by Izkata »

PennRobotics wrote: post #170
diffeomorphism wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I don't want to run HA on hardware I already have. I want to put a small box with new hardware on my bookshelf where my Google Home used to live until it was replaced with Alexa, which got removed three weeks ago. If HA is not hardware, why do they have multiple hardware platforms for sale? And what is actually the best value for a dedicated HA device? That is unclear. Why would you need more extensible storage or a…

I bought a headless computer from Amazon, installed Ubuntu, and added HomeAssistantOS. Been running for about 3 months with no maintenance.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#178

Post by robertlagrant »

aequitas wrote: post #156
robertlagrant wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

Ah yes agreed, but I was thinking more of an export/import mechanism, that can be version controlled, diffed, etc, than full on cli- or programming-first interactions.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#179

Post by emsixteen »

jasonjayr wrote: post #49
robertlagrant wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For technologists, DIY'ers and coders, CLI first or CLI parity means you can use common dev tools to build, integrate and track changes. UI first means you have to build an awful lot of extra cruft to emulate parts of an already solid + flexible toolchain. EDIT: I should mention that includes text + file based config too...

Locking the ability to set up a smart home behind the ability to code and do a heap of DIY if a big part of the problem.

Re: Home Assistant 2023.11

#180

Post by mongol »

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…

If you only had it for a year, you may not have seen it yet. I had lots of configs setup, then I did not have it running for a year or so. Trying to make it run again on the latest version was frustrating. I want to set up and forget to the largest extent possible.
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