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My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story

jorisroovers.com

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

#151

Post by snapetom »

tristanperry wrote: post #5

Great 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…

It's not even power user friendly.

Things were so fragile, I eventually created Ansible playbooks to maintain my setup. I couldn't trust a simple point upgrade wouldn't break anything, so I had to easily replay steps to revert.

If you have to set up a whole devops infrastructure to maintain one simple home project, there's something wrong.

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

#152

Post by llamataboot »

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

yeah, I don't even need the NC integration, I use a reverse proxy with SSL, but I pay the $5 a month just because they are doing such a frigging amazing job with a giant project and I want to pay something for it so they can keep doing it full time!

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

#153

Post by iamjackg »

hayleox wrote: post #142
NegativeLatency wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no law of nature that says you need to track your kids sleep and upload it to a could service.

It looks like it's self-hosted: https://github.com/babybuddy/babybuddy

It is indeed. It's an interesting open source project too, because its usefulness is very much inversely proportional to the time you spend using it! Contributors often start submitting changes, then their children grow up and they lose interest in the project. Sort of a built-in attention span limit.

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

#154

Post by iamjackg »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #96
iamjackg wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, a lot of that came down to making sure every automation I add is usable with the least amount of mental effort. For the longest time I didn't automate much at all and often questioned whether I needed all this or not, then we had a baby. Now we have a button in his nursery that will dim the lights, start playing white noise on a Google Home speaker, mark the start of a new nap on our Babybuddy instance, then…

There’s no law of nature that says you need to track your kids sleep and upload it to a could service.

Good thing it's not a cloud service then!

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

#155

Post by llamataboot »

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 also depends on what /you/ setup - eg, you can certainly control some things locally and some things only through the cloud if you are using the manufacturers hub, but most things you can also buy a zwave stick and/or a zigbee stick and connect to your devices directly.

Some are a perpetual cat and mouse game though for the companies that simply must snoop your data as part of their biz model or have another reason to be terrified of you directly talking to their things.

And like any smart thing you put in your house, some things you need to block at the DNS level if they are hardwired to phone home constantly. But yes, Home Assistant and choosing the right things makes it possible to keep everything internal for sure

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

#156

Post by Tyr42 »

criddell wrote: post #27

When your power goes out for a few minutes, what state does everything go into when it resumes?

Hm, rebooting the pi doesn't change any state on its own.

Lights which are ZigBee or wifi might turn on when power is restored, and most of my automations are of the form "when motion sensor state changes to occupied: turn on light. When motion sensor state is vacant for X minutes, turn off the lights", so they might stay on until you walk by the motion sensor, at which point they fix themselves.

If you have smart switches, I think they would be off after a power outage.

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

#157

Post by pkulak »

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…

The trick is just to make all the automation optional. If I sell my house, I'll hand over my Lutron Hub and Z-Wave USB stick. If the new owner wants to plug those in to something, they'll have a bunch of entities to automate how they please. If not, it's just a house with a bunch of light switches like any other. Well, there are also some door/motion/humidity sensors, but it's not like they do any harm if you don't do anything with them.

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

#158

Post by pkulak »

gregmac wrote: post #71
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…

10 years ago I sold a house that had only a couple smart switches, and I took them out before we listed and replaced them with regular switches. A few months ago I sold a house a house with lots of Insteon stuff, and I left almost all of it in place. Partly it was because we sold quickly and I didn't have time, and partly because it was 9+ year old gear anyway. Insteon has the benefit that the keypad scenes and switc…

ZWave is nice because once you get them connected to a USB stick, that stick is all you need to transfer to a new owner; you can take your hub with you. The new owner doesn't get your automations, but those are personal anyway.

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

#159

Post by Tyr42 »

mdoms wrote: post #76

I simply flick a switch to turn on lights. Opening shades is no problem for me, a physically fit human.

You are asking for snark with a reply like that you know.

I have forgotten to close the garage a few times, so I get a notification if it's open for more than an hour, or past ten pm.

Motion sensor connected lights are great, and even better if they are time aware.

I like waking up to sunlight and yet I still have some trouble opening the shades while asleep, even as a physically fit human.

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

#160

Post by anderspitman »

vladgur wrote: post #139
Havoc wrote: post #82

You can sidestep the cloud stuff if you've got a static IP and wireguard.

I have so far failed at setting up wireguard in my home, much less making it work with HASS. Can you share some pointers?

There are simpler tunneling solutions:

https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

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