Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 344 posts

Re: Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant

#221

Post by farhanhubble »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #89

If you are thinking of deploying Home Assistant (HA), let me give you a few tips that I should have known when started. HA environment is vast. There are myriads of options, features, and functions. There are some gotchas that can be costly down the road. All of the following are "for now, as you start out": Do not gyrate over which version of HA to run. Run the HAOS loaded on RasPi, or a dedicated machine. You can m…

This is the way to go if you want get things running without wasting days. HA needs to be on on wired LAN for the best experience so one more reason to have it run on RPi and maybe have it sit next to your router.

Re: Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant

#222

Post by drdaeman »

microtonal wrote: post #74
Someone1234 wrote: post #9

I include this when considering buying something integrated. For example Philips Hue is overpriced, but their Home Assistant integration is top tier and ultra-reliable. Contrast that with myQ garage door openers (LiftMaster, Chamberlain and Craftsman) recently breaking Home Assistant support on purpose, to essentially replace it with nothing, and they're dead to me. So Xiaomi adding support, assuming it is reliable,…

For example Philips Hue is overpriced, I wouldn't call them overpriced (at least not all products), their quality is typically great, you get what you pay for. We have had Hue lights for over 10 years (pretty much every light in our house is Hue) and never had any issues. I think over that period one light broke. And like you said, the integration is great. In our house we have it configured to use both through the H…

> their quality is typically great, you get what you pay for.

You're lucky. I also have almost all lights from Hue, and in almost 6 years I've had 6 or 7 completely dead bulbs (out of ~40). One more lightbulb failed in a weird way - it sort of worked, but in 90% of cases refused to completely turn off and still kept some of the LEDs lit. I haven't bothered to disassemble it to see how that happened. And one more light works normally, but somehow fails to report its status to HomeKit. It can be controlled but always shows up as "updating..." - guess it's a software bug of some sort, since it works in the Hue app.

No Home Assistant here at the moment, just regular Hue+HomeKit setup. I have tried HA a few times, but found no significant additional value over what I already have. It's just as dumb as all other "smart" home solutions, still has very limited diagnostics if something is not working (maybe if one really groks its internals it can be debugged better, but I don't) and requires maintenance. I was thinking about building something with plain simple Zigbee2MQTT and a bunch of DIY scripts to make it a little smart, but haven't yet had time for this.

Re: Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant

#223

Post by ericd »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #89

If you are thinking of deploying Home Assistant (HA), let me give you a few tips that I should have known when started. HA environment is vast. There are myriads of options, features, and functions. There are some gotchas that can be costly down the road. All of the following are "for now, as you start out": Do not gyrate over which version of HA to run. Run the HAOS loaded on RasPi, or a dedicated machine. You can m…

Good advice, except that I’d try whenever possible to get AA/AAA devices rather than button cells. Not only do the button cell devices burn through batteries, causing a maintenance headache if you have a non-trivial number of devices, but the rechargeable battery ecosystem is much better developed for AA/AAA. We’re currently working on swapping out all our button cell remotes, especially.

Also, the replacement process on the button cells tends to be so fiddly - tiny screws, tiny little doors, etc.

Re: Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant

#224

Post by s2l »

epcoa wrote: post #218
madeofpalk wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using things like USB Zigbee dongles, they can be a pain to pass through to the docker container, or just not possible at all on macOS.

HAOS uses docker to containerize everything, so it can’t be that difficult, and it really is not. Docker has a —-device flag for this purpose, udev makes it easy enough to assign stable names.

zigbee2mqtt makes things easier to establish the bridge. Running as a container, next to home assistant container.

Re: Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant

#225

Post by s2l »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #89

If you are thinking of deploying Home Assistant (HA), let me give you a few tips that I should have known when started. HA environment is vast. There are myriads of options, features, and functions. There are some gotchas that can be costly down the road. All of the following are "for now, as you start out": Do not gyrate over which version of HA to run. Run the HAOS loaded on RasPi, or a dedicated machine. You can m…

Can you share some of the zigbee devices that you are using? Thanks.

Re: Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant

#226

Post by briHass »

mavamaarten wrote: post #138
tills13 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nice part about mqtt is other things can subscribe to the same stream. I've also seen people do some really interesting things with hosting a copy of HA in the cloud -- this is what they connect to while outside their network -- and using mqtt to push updates to a local HA.

Okay but if you have Home Assistant in the center of all things, why would other things need to subscribe to that same stream? I use MQTT but for me it's only a tool for getting a certain device integrated in HA. I don't see why I would want more devices to communicate that way. Plus, from my development background, I have grown to really dislike event buses. And mqtt sure feels like a weird big non-strict event bus…

Because HA is a single point of failure. It's big, complex, and frequently updated (there were 3 minor version updates this month already.) Any one of those updates could bring some issues that require fixes/rollback, and even when it's smooth, it takes a minute or two on my 8th-gen, i5-based, NVMe-having home server, not some underpowered Pi or SBC.

Meanwhile, a standalone MQTT broker like Mosquitto is rock solid, had 2 minor updates this year, and could run on the most minimal of hardware/LXC.

Re: Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant

#227

Post by mindslight »

jakupovic wrote: post #186
mrandish wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tasmota runs on hundreds of different devices including switches, plugs, buttons, power strips, sensors, IR & RF gateways, etc. Tasmota homepage: https://tasmota.github.io/docs/ . There are over 2800 devices listed in this user maintained repository: https://templates.blakadder.com/ . Three years ago when I was choosing devices I initially ordered a Kasa switch to try but after a little research quickly realized I di…

Sir, take it from a random person on the internet, you're more than kind. Thank you so much for the details and bits of your own experience to make it relatable. Even though I have many Kasa switches I do want the option 3 that was raised earlier. Again, many thanks.

I have a bunch of Kasa devices. I got them before Tasmota was really on the scene, because they are configurable and controllable without Internet access. The protocol could be better, but it does work. I've heard that TP-Link may have changed the protocol since then (at least on some devices), so YMMV.

https://github.com/softScheck/tplink-smartplug/blob/master/t...

https://python-kasa.readthedocs.io/en/latest/cli.html

As an aside - Tasmota is great, but I'd be very wary of random Chineseum off Amazon for switching mains power.

Re: Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant

#228

Post by madeofpalk »

epcoa wrote: post #218
madeofpalk wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using things like USB Zigbee dongles, they can be a pain to pass through to the docker container, or just not possible at all on macOS.

HAOS uses docker to containerize everything, so it can’t be that difficult, and it really is not. Docker has a —-device flag for this purpose, udev makes it easy enough to assign stable names.

Docker does not support USB/serial device passthrough on macOS https://docs.docker.com/desktop/troubleshoot-and-support/faq...

Re: Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant

#229

Post by TacticalCoder »

XorNot wrote: post #202
IgorPartola wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also don’t think Docker can do ARP network interrogation, though I could be wrong about that. Also not sure how it handles mDNS.

I've ditched all ARP, mDNS in my setup. Everything is static IP addresses: it vastly improved robustness against network glitches, which absolutely will happen to you. If my router is unplugged or offline, everything with power can still communicate for example.

Nearly everything is static on mine too. I keep track of all the various devices' MAC addresses and assign them one IP. I also make sure that, even should I reinstall an OS on a device and "forget" to assign it a static IP, my router always assigns that MAC address the static IP I picked for that MAC address. I then keep a little range of IP addresses for unknown devices that the router is allowed to use when a new device shows up. Once in a while I log into my router and look which new device(s) I forgot to assign a static IP too.

When you say you ditched all ARP, did you do anything special? For example do you configure, on all your machines, static ARP entries for each MAC address of all your devices?

Re: Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant

#230

Post by est »

seanvelasco wrote: post #165
noicebrewery wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think this is unique to Chinese tech companies? Windows 11 put ads in our start menu.

do you mean putting Bing on the start menu? Microsoft just made them opt-in by default and hoped that folks won't notice or care. you can disable them. for Chinese devices, there's no way to disable them. the difference is, for Windows, having Bing on start was a feature (although a bad one). for Chinese devices, you just get ads - you're stuck with ads while changing your brightness.

> for Chinese devices, there's no way to disable them.

Uh can you stop spreading misinformation? Try google "disable xiaomi ads" it takes you like 5 minutes to make all ads gone on MIUI or HyperOS. Sure the opt-out buttons were hidden deep behind menus for maximizing profit.

But be warned, in certain countries you are getting a modified ROM from your local re-seller, in that case some ads can't be disabled and they are not from Xiaomi. The only solution is to flash your ROM to the official releases.

Post reply on HN