My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story • Hacker News Board

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#101

Post by ryanianian » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 8:35 PM UTC

jaywalk wrote: post #84

ryanianian wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sufficiently advanced home automation is indistinguishable from a haunting. Lighting controlled by home-assistant is endlessly frustrating. Especially if zwave. The networks are slow, the devices are awkward to configure, and when things go wrong debugging is difficult. Sometimes it takes my lights a good 60 seconds to respond during which time I'll try a few different button dances which all then get lifo queued...…

I don't know what your Z-wave setup looks like, but all I've got are GE smart switches and GE smart outlets, controlled with Home Assistant using an Aeotec Z-stick. It works flawlessly with zero noticeable delay, 100% of the time. It sounds like you've either got some bad interference or bad devices.

So much of one's experience depends on the z-wave hardware and it's not obvious at all which brands or products will be more reliable or better than others. My network is a hodge-podge of different switches and outlets, but mesh networking means it's easy to poison the network with a bad implementation. And then good luck finding the offending hardware.

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#102

Post by benley » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 8:37 PM UTC

coreyp_1 wrote: post #86

I want SO BADLY to convert my switches to smart switches, but it feels impossible to find what i need. Good luck searching on Amazon, too. Search for Zigbee, and it will return page after page of zwave, proprietary, and other listings. It's impossible to wade through. I've tried and given up multiple times. This is what i need that is evidently so difficult to find: 1. Zigbee 2. 3-way 3. Dimmable 4. Beige (almond?) C…

I'd recommend checking out some of the "smart relay" devices that let you reuse your existing light switches.

e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Compatible-SmartThings-Philips-ZBBrid... - this one says "2 way" but I'm pretty sure you can wire it up with two physical lightswitches to get the 3-way behavior that you're after. The wiring diagram on the amazon product page suggests as much.

I've personally used this Aeotec z-wave variant and it has worked well for me: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XC4CH98

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#103

Post by everyone » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 8:37 PM UTC

All this smarthome stuff like an enormous amount of work. What are any actual concrete benefits over doing things the dumb way?

I can't think of anything significant, certainly nothing to justify the cost (not just money, also time, embodied energy etc).

Though I have 0 experience with this stuff, so I am asking a genuine question.

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#104

Post by gnopgnip » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 8:46 PM UTC

buro9 wrote: post #23

When you sell a house like this... what do you leave behind and what do you take? This has increasingly been on my mind. I've no desire to sell soon, but there's a Nest doorbell that is wired in, so it stays. A Nest thermostat, which I could remove but when I got the boiler I chose to not have the control panel extra with timer as I knew I had Nest. Then the lighting, the motion sensors... should I take the few thous…

You negotiate it between the buyer and seller. You can take everything, or leave everything if you agree.

Otherwise the default if not excluded in most contracts in the US would be to leave nearly all of it. Kind of like keys, even if something is not permanently affixed to the home it is "annexed" and transferred with the home when it is part of the customized home automation system. So the thermostat is part of the real estate even though it is wireless. The motion sensors and door bell are both annexed, and fixtures as they are attached with a wire. The lightbulbs are one thing that is probably not annexed or a fixture, it is a grey area, but potentially are addressed specifically in the contract like curtains.

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#105

Post by sneak » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 8:47 PM UTC

robbiet480 wrote: post #60

stingraycharles wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do I understand correctly that you just gave the iOS app out of your hands, for Nabu Casa to maintain? Or is it solely a legal structure? I find it interesting if it were the former, I personally would have considered monetizing it myself, but then again, it’s probably not a coincidence I haven’t founded any opensource projects as impactful as Home Assistant. :)

Nabu Casa doesn't maintain it, the community does. I personally haven't worked on it in a while now because I've been consumed with my new company but it is still being very actively developed. I still have full access to the source code and developer account and such and am a resource to whoever needs my input as time permits.

If the community maintains it, why hasn't the community removed the phone-home surveillance in the iOS client?

This is something I only see in packages maintained by a central authority that wants to consume the data from the community, at the expense of end user privacy.

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#106

Post by huhtenberg » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 8:54 PM UTC

nouveaux wrote: post #70

huhtenberg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that the vast majority home automation tech got the whole thing backwards. They start with "we can do this" and then "let's see what we can bolt it on". Instead, they should've started with small things like being able to toggle every existing switch from your phone. Let lazy people be lazy efficiently. Now that has a mass appeal and would've led to a better adoption. Once this is in place, then you can build…

"toggle every existing switch from your phone" Home automation is not intuitive. It turns out that toggling every existing switch from your phone is not an ideal goal. Pulling out your phone to use your home automation gets annoying fast. The best home automation is a system that works without intervention. A good analogy is a digital thermostat vs a traditional analog one. A digital thermostat has the ability to cha…

> Pulling out your phone to use your home automation gets annoying fast.

What I meant, if it wasn't clear, is to have this as an option. In addition to what's already in place.

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#107

Post by zsarnett » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 8:59 PM UTC

sanguy wrote: post #33

Home Assistant is great, but it will face huge hurdles as the founder tries to cash in on the popularity. It's already underway. 1) Nabu Casa was founded with a claim that "it will all be transparent and reported" as to income, etc, etc. 2) Then the "private" components happened only for Nabu Casa - like the cloud connection stuff. 3) A few years later when pointed out nothing was transparent yet the response was "We…

Wow, that is a bunch of assumptions incorrectly presented as the truth! The Open Home conference in December is laying it out pretty good and shows why and how most of the above is actually miles off: https://www.home-assistant.io/state-of-the-open-home/

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#108

Post by zacwest » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:00 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #105

robbiet480 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nabu Casa doesn't maintain it, the community does. I personally haven't worked on it in a while now because I've been consumed with my new company but it is still being very actively developed. I still have full access to the source code and developer account and such and am a resource to whoever needs my input as time permits.

If the community maintains it, why hasn't the community removed the phone-home surveillance in the iOS client? This is something I only see in packages maintained by a central authority that wants to consume the data from the community, at the expense of end user privacy.

I'm the maintainer of the iOS/macOS app these days. I'm not paid by Nabu Casa and I do it in my free time (if anything, Nabu Casa has avoided doing things which may inadvertently monetize my work to not my benefit, which I appreciate).

There's no analytics nor reporting in the app. I've been slowly removing[0] things that talk to servers other than your Home Assistant server, but your private information's never left the device. Right now the app will talk to 2 additional sources, both of which you can disable in the Privacy settings:

1. alerts.home-assistant.io, which will alert for security issues but is strictly a JSON file it loads [1]

2. Firebase Cloud Messaging, for push notifications (since we can't talk to APNS directly in HA)

FCM is a dependency I'm actively trying to kill off in favor of an implementation that is both end-to-end encrypted and talks directly to Apple's Push Notification Service. Apple would not allow a solution where HA talks directly to APNS as they do not want that many active connections, and it would require disclosing private keys for the App Store account.

Unless Robbie wanted to give me his personal Apple ID password, moving the app to the Nabu Casa App Store account was the only way for me to do anything with the app.

[0] https://github.com/home-assistant/iOS/pull/2010 [1] https://github.com/home-assistant/iOS/blob/861a40a50aa201ff4...

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#109

Post by jaywalk » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:07 PM UTC

yurishimo wrote: post #97

jaywalk wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you flick that switch when you're on vacation and want your home to appear occupied?

You joke, but we both know that automatic lamp timers have existed for decades. I like home automation stuff as much as the next person but this is a disingenuous argument.

With an automatic lamp timer, you lose the ability to (easily) control the lamp manually. Also, what about all of the lights that aren't lamps?

If all you've got are lamps and you're willing to be a slave to the timer, then by all means just use the timer. But once it gets just a little bit more complicated, the timer isn't so great.

I've got an "evening" scene that turns on 10 or so different lights. I will trigger it manually when I'm home and feel it's time, or if my system is in vacation mode it will trigger based on the sunset time. I don't have to worry about accidentally having left a switch off or anything like that. You cannot even begin the replicate this with an automatic lamp timer.

Re: My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

#110

Post by CrossWired » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:10 PM UTC

buro9 wrote: post #23

When you sell a house like this... what do you leave behind and what do you take? This has increasingly been on my mind. I've no desire to sell soon, but there's a Nest doorbell that is wired in, so it stays. A Nest thermostat, which I could remove but when I got the boiler I chose to not have the control panel extra with timer as I knew I had Nest. Then the lighting, the motion sensors... should I take the few thous…

I just sold, all switches were GE ZWave paddle switches, new house is old wouldnt work, left them all.

Both doors were Z-wave enabled locks, left both of them as I bought updated ones for the new house

Left 2 IP Cams (with manual and details) that were not smart to take down, and planned on switching at the new house.

I took all the Ubiquiti wifi gear, all the home automation hubs and anything I could EASILY reuse.