How Home Assistant became the most important project in your house • Hacker News Board

Re: How Home Assistant became the most important project in your house

#11

Post by nirav72 » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 8:03 PM UTC

joshstrange wrote: post #2

Home Assistant is awesome and I highly recommend checking it out. Even if you have an existing smart house hub/platform you can often integrate HA in cleanly. I used SmartThings for years and was hesitant to switch but I was able to control all my devices in ST from HA without moving/repairing/etc devices over. Once I had seen the power of HA I started a _slow_ migration over (took over a year cause I was lazy). The…

I got into ST about a year or so before samsung acquired them. Amazing ecosystem at the time and the ST community was great. I even taught my self groovy, so I could write my own device handlers. Then it went down hill couple of years after the acquisition. I still have my gen 2 ST hub and have been slowly trying to pivot towards HA. How easy is it to integrate ST into HA? I have a bunch older zwave wall switches and few other sensors that are tied into ST. But I really hate the ST app.

Re: How Home Assistant became the most important project in your house

#12

Post by joshstrange » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 8:09 PM UTC

nirav72 wrote: post #11

joshstrange wrote: post #2

Home Assistant is awesome and I highly recommend checking it out. Even if you have an existing smart house hub/platform you can often integrate HA in cleanly. I used SmartThings for years and was hesitant to switch but I was able to control all my devices in ST from HA without moving/repairing/etc devices over. Once I had seen the power of HA I started a _slow_ migration over (took over a year cause I was lazy). The…

I got into ST about a year or so before samsung acquired them. Amazing ecosystem at the time and the ST community was great. I even taught my self groovy, so I could write my own device handlers. Then it went down hill couple of years after the acquisition. I still have my gen 2 ST hub and have been slowly trying to pivot towards HA. How easy is it to integrate ST into HA? I have a bunch older zwave wall switches and…

I was in the same boat at you and I found it super easy to use ST as the hub and HA as the brains until I decided to get Z-Wave/Zigbee dongles for my HA.

That said, I went to find the instructions to do it and it appears that Samsung broke the integration about a year ago and there still isn’t a solution. I’m sorry, it seems like I migrated fully just a few months before it stopped working and that explains the 1 device I still had on ST stopping working about a year ago (it wasn’t important and I never tracked it down).

Re: How Home Assistant became the most important project in your house

#13

Post by retrodaredevil » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 8:12 PM UTC

joshstrange wrote: post #2

Home Assistant is awesome and I highly recommend checking it out. Even if you have an existing smart house hub/platform you can often integrate HA in cleanly. I used SmartThings for years and was hesitant to switch but I was able to control all my devices in ST from HA without moving/repairing/etc devices over. Once I had seen the power of HA I started a _slow_ migration over (took over a year cause I was lazy). The…

Raspberry Pi is a bad choice for any application that frequently writes data to disk. Most Home Assistant setups will often have historical tracking of at least one data point, which means that it would be constantly writing to disk.

If you get a high quality SD card with more storage than you'll ever need (64GB, 128GB), you can have a stable system for a while until the SD card becomes corrupt. The larger SD cards help with longevity because it means the SD card can spread writes out over a larger area, which means it'll take longer for the SD card to go bad.

Make sure to always have RAM logging enabled on your Pi! DietPi defaults to RAM logging.

Re: How Home Assistant became the most important project in your house

#14

Post by Fwirt » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 8:13 PM UTC

Home Assistant is the poster child for an incredible open-source project. There are community plugins for a mind-boggling number of devices, and crazy functionality that seems like magic. (Flash a $5 ESP32 with some pre-built image and you can connect HA to any BLE devices it can see.)

However, it is very much a product by nerds, for nerds. My wife loves it but she's not going to bother writing YAML to create her own dashboards. She used to write simple web forms so I have no doubt she could, but it's not something that appeals to the average person. Imaging a machine is beyond the realm of what the average consumer is willing to do.

HAOS runs really well as a VM image and doesn't use much in the way of system resources, if you have a home server with 4GB of extra memory you can throw it in KVM and it'll be happy as a clam. I've never had it brick itself.

Re: How Home Assistant became the most important project in your house

#15

Post by ahaucnx » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 8:32 PM UTC

It’s actually a nice article if it wouldn’t be so obviously AI written.

In my opinion this really devalues the reputation I am having for a publication and is a pity especially in this particular case as home assistant is such a great community.

Re: How Home Assistant became the most important project in your house

#16

Post by nicolaslem » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 8:56 PM UTC

move-on-by wrote: post #10

I do love my HA setup. I use it for everything from home security system (door/motion sensors) to turning on/off the Christmas tree lights. One thing I think is a little more unique is my home electrical uptime monitoring. I have my router, HA, and a few other devices running on a APC UPS. The UPS has a data port that I plugged into the computer running HA. I installed Network UPS Tools (NUT) on that computer and use…

Friendly reminder that you should never test a UPS by unplugging it from the wall as this also cuts the ground connection.

Re: How Home Assistant became the most important project in your house

#17

Post by euroderf » Tue, Dec 02, 2025, 9:15 PM UTC

bradgessler wrote: post #7

If you run an Apple HomeKit stack and don’t need all the other stuff HA offers, I recommend checking out https://homebridge.io

There is a lot of complexity lurking there. At a second home I have HA running on an RPi and also an Apple Homepod Mini (with Matter). I wish someone could explain to me how these two devices do (or do not) interact, and how I can get Apple Home on my iPhone to play nicely with HA both locally and (when I'm away) over Tailscale (so I can do remote operation of thermostats and a heat pump on wi-fi).

Is this the kind of scenario that I should be asking an LLM to sort out for me ?

Re: How Home Assistant became the most important project in your house

#18

Post by rc1 » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 8:13 PM UTC

Cursor opened in config/ + HomeAssistant MCP is exceptionally good. I have blundered along with Home Assistant over the years, but it lit up with the above setup for me the other day.

For giggles, I had it set all the lights into a disco.

Next, we vibed a markdown file containing a to-do list of all my upstairs lights that are abstractly named by the different integrations. I put an x against a name and it turned the light off.

Once I identified it, I wrote a better name next to it. It updated the system.

We vibed dashboards and routines.

The problem with Home Assistant is that once it works, you don't touch it for a year and are back to square one with the layers of concepts. But I am left satisfied knowing I have backed up the conversation/context that we can pick up next year or whenever again.

A memorable computer experience.

Re: How Home Assistant became the most important project in your house

#19

Post by noplacelikehome » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 10:00 AM UTC

joshstrange wrote: post #9

noplacelikehome wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raspberry Pis themselves are perfectly reliable given a stable power supply and good storage — steer clear of slow and flakey SD cards. The HAOS virtual appliance is awesome though.

> Raspberry Pis themselves are perfectly reliable given a stable power supply and good storage — steer clear of slow and flakey SD cards. At some point the problem stops being my fault and must be the ecosystem. I bought official power supplies, I bought top tier SD cards, I bought special hats to use NVME with RPi, they all sucked IMHO. Maybe I am "holding it wrong" but after buying every RPi from the original B to…

I have 12 of them in a cluster and had endless lockups and performance issues with USB drives and SD cards. I ended up switching to a USB to SATA adapter and a cheap consumer grade SSD and have had no issues since.

They aren’t the fastest, but they are reliable IME.