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My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

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

#111

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#112

Post by boring_twenties »

nomel wrote: post #68
spaetzleesser wrote: post #21

Nice! If I understand correctly this is fully local and doesn't depend on cloud stuff? After a few failures I don't want anything that relies on somebody's buggy cloud systems.

It's all local unless you want to pay for the cloud service, which just gives you safe remote access to your local home assistant instance, and gives some services like a nice (cloud based) text to speech engine. Neither are required. You can happily open up DMZ and use whatever TTS engine, yourself.

Do you have any suggestions for a local TTS engine to use with HA?

I have HA up and running but have only used its web interface so far.

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

#113

Post by boring_twenties »

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.

I went from those to a basic HomeAssistant setup, and really enjoy the fact that my light timers can be "30 minutes before sunset" instead of a fixed time that needs to be adjusted throughout the year.

On the other hand, the fact that everything stops working if wifi goes down is a real bummer. I can't for the life of me understand why these "smart" plugs don't just use powerline ethernet. I guess I should just be thankful that their API could be reverse engineered.

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

#114

Post by madjam002 »

zacwest wrote: post #108
sneak wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's freakin awesome, it's so refreshing to see this, especially when Home Assistant is likely to be installed on non-techie's phones and you want to just set it and forget it.

Thank-you for all of your work on the Home Assistant iOS app, it's one of the best parts of the ecosystem imo.

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

#115

Post by crooked-v »

reacharavindh wrote: post #51

May be my day job of handling servers and services at scale makes me say this… I’d like my home, appliances and equipment to be dumb and simple. A basic level of automation by making all power switches controllable from a central private endpoint would be nice, but hooking that up to a non self-hosted service is a big No for me. I’m about to buy a home. It will be fun to find that simplicity in automation for myself.

I'd personally recommend the Lutron Caseta line. They use a proprietary RF system so if you want full automation or phone-based control you need their hub, but even without one you can just use them as normal switches, pair switches and remotes, pair switches with motion sensors, etc just as built-in behavior.

They've also covered basic usability issues that a lot of other smart switches overlook, like having a hard disconnect on every switch, so you don't need to go to the breaker box just to change a lightbulb.

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

#116

Post by luma »

eisa01 wrote: post #100
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…

Any prospect of a an alternative commercial provider to NC for the cloud stuff? Other open source software (E.g. LibreOffice) has several shops that help businesses with support and integration/bug fixes

There are three major cloud components. Alexa and Google integrations both have open options that are documented by NC and you are welcome to use them. There’s a lot of setup as you need to deal with a semi-complex config on AWS or GCP which can be challenging if you’re new to those environments, but they work as well as the paid NC option.

The remote access proxy service doesn’t really have an open equivalent but there are tons of other supported solutions out there for secure remote access to your Home Assistant install. Here is one example add-on to provide Wireguard support, developed and supported by an NC employee: https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-wireguard

In short, the paid cloud services provide an easier path to solutions you can deploy for yourself if you wish. You can still use equivalent services that you host yourself under your own AWS/GCP account. Those services cost NC money to host, so asking for money isn’t too far out there. Of course, that money is more than what the cloud parts cost, and what we all get in return is a team of skilled developers working full time on the project and releasing everything for free.

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

#117

Post by function_seven »

Tyr42 wrote: post #93
nouveaux wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Speaking of that last thing, what's the best way to implement different brightnesses based on time in HA's yaml? I could do a bunch of ifs in each automation but there might be a better way?

I use https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting/ in my config.

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

#118

Post by nomel »

boring_twenties wrote: post #112
nomel wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all local unless you want to pay for the cloud service, which just gives you safe remote access to your local home assistant instance, and gives some services like a nice (cloud based) text to speech engine. Neither are required. You can happily open up DMZ and use whatever TTS engine, yourself.

Do you have any suggestions for a local TTS engine to use with HA? I have HA up and running but have only used its web interface so far.

No, but I was looking at ha-rhvoice before I went with Nabu Casa (to support the devs). The readily available local TTS voices will, obviously, not sound as good.

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

#119

Post by luma »

ryanianian wrote: post #42
turtlebits wrote: post #14

Not 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).

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...…

You have a serious problem with your ZWave network if it is performing as you describe. I have just over 70 devices live right now and have none of these problems.

Monitor your logs and see if some node out there is screaming or otherwise taking up a lot of bandwidth, as your experience is not at all typical of how ZWave should work.

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