I imagine readers here would want local control for home automation. Take a look at www.hubitat.com
The setup described in the article is local as well.
My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story
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Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story
#12I imagine readers here would want local control for home automation. Take a look at www.hubitat.com
The article describes a fully local setup, with much more open components...
Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story
#13I tried to build a company around this in ~2014, we built our own boards and everything, and had a fork with HASS that had more defaults based on our hardware. Too bad it didn't quite work out as a business. The 3D designs for the hardware cases are still on GitHub: https://github.com/Smart-Torvy/3D-Objects
Ubiquiti also briefly employed the founder of Home Assistant in 2018 and paid him specifically to work on it. People speculated that they were considering releasing some sort of product built on HA, but it never materialized.
It's maybe for the better from a user/community POV, but I'm surprised there hasn't been more commercial interest. HA in its current form is still probably a bit too technical for mass market, but I would think a company could easily spruce it up a bit and instantly have a fairly strong software ecosystem and a lot of good will as long as they handled it right.
Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story
#14Not sure if I'm just getting older, but the less things/complications in my home, the more peace of mind I have. Been watching the youtube LTT channel on his smart home and I feel all the things going on would drive me crazy.
This doesn't apply only to tech, but even for my next house (Looking into passive homes, least possible HVAC footprint, floorplan for minimal plumbing/electrical).
Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story
#15I dont think its clear from the blog, but HomeAssistant Blue and/or Yellow are nice, but not required to get going with HA.
If you get your hands on RPI 3 or 4, an SSD card and a supported Zigbee/ZWave card, you should be good to go. Installation is well documented.
But overall customization is in fact a major time sink regardless of hardware you use
Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story
#16Great article, thanks for posting. I've been on a smart home journey myself, but I'm still currently relying on Alexa for most integration and a Hue Bridge. It works well for the 30-40 devices I currently have. I totally agree that Home Assistant is probably the way forward for many power users, but it doesn't quite feel beginner-friendly enough yet (although the HA devs do seem to be making some great improvements i…
The promise of thread versus reality I feel will be a big problem - I'd love to be wrong though. I'm on the outside of things (haven't used thread, only read about it... use zigbee a lot though). But the way I understand it is that once you join a device to a particular bridge you will still need to use that bridge's ecosystem to communicate - even though the device has its own IP address. For example, when a thread device joins to homekit and establishes an encrypted handshake, it's not like I'll be able to use that device's IP address to talk to it. It's not going to trust me - only homekit. But at least it'll be able to talk to any homekit bridge on the network and avoid a SPOF if I unplug one of my homepod minis.
Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story
#17I imagine readers here would want local control for home automation. Take a look at www.hubitat.com
I really want hubitat to succeed but to me it feels like it’s in a tricky place: less open/customisable than HA but not user-friendly enough to be used by total beginners. Hopefully they get the second half of that sorted out and can carve out a niche.
Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story
#18Good article that gets into the details of leveraging Home Assistant (HA) to glue together various types of sensors and switches, etc.
I think categorizing HA users into 2 groups of either technical or non-technical is too coarse. You have to add another dimension that captures how much a user is willing to automate their home (making it "smart").
I'm technical, but my goal is to make things as seamless as possible. For example, my Z-Wave wall switches are the type that allow the original switch to override what the remote command sent. These in-wall Z-Wave switches are embedded in the switch box and the existing switch is then low voltage.
The same for my thermostat. Any household member can override locally. I detect the change and make sure I hold that new value over any automations that run that day.
In the end, my HA setup is pretty minimal with no HA add-ons and a few integrations, such as Z-WaveJS2MQTT and MQTT being the most used. This way I rarely hit any issues upgrading HA.
Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story
#19Not sure if I'm just getting older, but the less things/complications in my home, the more peace of mind I have. Been watching the youtube LTT channel on his smart home and I feel all the things going on would drive me crazy. This doesn't apply only to tech, but even for my next house (Looking into passive homes, least possible HVAC footprint, floorplan for minimal plumbing/electrical).
I get the geeky joy of monitoring and possibly automatically controlling things, but the added benefit feels marginal at best for a home. It’s less than marginal unless you go big into the automation.
The other thing that jades me to automation is that in my experience with technology, you either get a easy to use, but limited, remotely brickable, subscriptionware, or you have to roll your own, and end up debugging your bathtub. Neither is very appealing.
Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story
#20Not sure if I'm just getting older, but the less things/complications in my home, the more peace of mind I have. Been watching the youtube LTT channel on his smart home and I feel all the things going on would drive me crazy. This doesn't apply only to tech, but even for my next house (Looking into passive homes, least possible HVAC footprint, floorplan for minimal plumbing/electrical).
I struggle with this too. Whilst there is a lot of opportunities for learning and fun when setting these systems up, you soon forget how things intermingle and monitoring, upgrading, or debugging things becomes a chore.
Systems like this balloon in complexity with all of the different server hardware, IoT standards, subnets, cables, etc. For the average user, things that aren't easy or set-and-forget are probably too much. That sense of overwhelm is my personal experience, at least.