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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

#171

Post by djanogo »

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…

I have few more things to add...

1. There is one specific "addon" developer/employee who wraps opensource docker containers and automates the releases through github release builds and proceeds to link the about page of addon to his donation page. Example: Nodered, InfluxDB, AirSonos/Cast addons in HA have no link to actual projects or their repos.

2. Absolutely have no standard for stability for what should be critical software, just check the number of production releases to end customer devices this month. EIGHT, yes they pushed eight releases to core app to end users, that's beside the "addon" updates that the guy does with his automated releases.

3. Thanksgiving week of 2021, they pushed a ZWave update which the guy rewrote how events are processed and proceeded to brick everybody who updated.

4. F*ckin forced OS update, the developer refuses to be able to turn off forced HASS OS updates. If you block the update hostname on your router the stupid script to check updates goes crazy and starts eating up CPU.

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

#172

Post by slyall »

constGard wrote: post #73
stevenpetryk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda related but I've always imagined selling a house and leaving behind a "readme" with the latest state of things. I know inspections cover many things, but it'd be nice to have something from the previous owner talking about how specific things work.

One of the most frustrating aspects of this is all the stuff that's buried in the backyard. I've had to painstakingly survey the property to find all of buried electrical and water pipes and I fully intend to pass the map on to the next owner.

Google is failing me but I've seen advice on having a book for your home. It lists the as-built, photos of the walls showing the wiring and pipes etc and then updates over the years.

I think "How Buildings Learn" by Stewart Brand covered it.

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

#173

Post by j45 »

giobox wrote: post #128
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…

There is almost no way you can handover any HomeAssistant installation during a home sale, not unless you want the buyer to be calling you for help with technical issues/gremlins months after the sale closes. Every single Home Assistant installation is effectively a custom install - there can be almost zero commonality between two different setups really. Things break because you don't update them; they break because…

So far I’ve been able to avoid some of this by registering my home with its own email account and then all home automation items to that account.

I am close to adding an iot wifi access point that can remain with the home. All gear connects to it and then up to whatever internet is present.

My HA currently runs in a vm but seeing the fanless devices (or laptops) is encouraging. Chrome books with 8 gb of ram seem like a good candidate to become a server appliance.

Add to it a few tablets and it’s not so bad. Documentation can go a long way as well even if it is for tenants.

The home assistant blue or yellow device is also intriguing for that reason. If it had a touchscreen built onto it it would be one step closer to being self sustained.

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

#174

Post by crazystar »

tremon wrote: post #162
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…

Speaking as a prospective buyer, I'd expect the seller to remove any and all cloud-connected devices before selling. To the point where I will explicitly list them as deductions in my offer.

How are you able to make such demands given the current market? Every single house on the market has atleast 4 offers...atleast here in SoCal.

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

#175

Post by zippergz »

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 sold a house with a bunch of smart home stuff last year, but it was all commercial stuff, nothing like a HomeAssistant system. The buyer wanted it and I didn't (and it would have been a hassle to remove), so it was a win/win for me. I just transferred all the accounts and/or changed the emails and passwords, gave them the credentials, and walked away. I do think that this is very situation dependent and there's risk of getting into weird situations where the buyer wants support or something. But I think that as long as the buyer reasonably knows what they're getting into, and you're transparent about what you're leaving, you are under no obligation (either legal or moral) to provide post-sales support...

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

#176

Post by pabs3 »

zacwest wrote: post #168
sneak wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible to entirely disable FCM in the client to avoid its phoning home to Google? If I wanted Google to have my home event data I would just use Google Home.

Yes. The toggle in Privacy will make the app not initialize Firebase. The library will still be in memory, but I don't believe it does anything. I also do not want Google to receive anything, which is why it's going to be removed once we have a replacement.

Re memory, maybe use dlopen to load Firebase when it is enabled?

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

#177

Post by jmathai »

01100011 wrote: post #67

As a SWE I was initially skeptical about using software to control more aspects of my environment but I finally gave in and gave HA a shot. It took some work but I managed to cobble together a system using a RPI and ZWave which seemed to work reliably. I slowly added more features like HVAC and controlling my aquarium top-off pump. Everything worked reliably until I went on vacation and the switch controlling the aqu…

I had HA set up for a number of things at my house but it took too much babysitting for me. I found it fun as a hobby project. But when we did a large remodel last year I intentionally decided not to have smart anythings. This includes Z-Wave, Zigbee, Alexa, Google Home, Sonos wireless speakers, etc.

Instead, I went the opposite direction. Wired everything including speakers. It was much more enjoyable figuring out and planning how to wire and install Sonance Invisible Series speakers behind drywall, pick the location for a Samsung Frame TV and bite the bullet to get a panel ready fridge.

In the end, I found I enjoy form over function and all electronic devices and appliances are either not present or completely hidden.

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

#178

Post by mafro »

snapetom wrote: post #150
empiricus wrote: post #66

I use Home Assistant in my new house, and it kind of works. But the amount of effort needed to control a cheap wifi on/off plug did not impress me positively. It is basically one bit of information, but it goes through who knows how many layers of software and configurations. Took me a couple of hours to make it work.. I also use the standard thermostat component, which is basic beyond belief. The kind of control tha…

I used HomeAssistant for over five years and pretty much hated every minute of it due to the amount of effort you describe. Setup, upgrades and maintenance were always a major pain. Features were introduced, rearchitected, and dropped without any consideration whether users 1) Wanted them in the first place 2) Whether it would be a burden to change things. 3) For dropped features, whether anyone would miss it. It's j…

I won't comment on the behaviour/oversight of the OS project itself, but as a user I have had an opposite experience to you.

I am still using HA after about five years, and once I had it setup (which admittedly was hard work) it's been no trouble at all.

- Upgrades have never caused an outage - Basically every device is already supported - I can write my own code to extend as necessary - It does not talk to the WAN at all - My only outage was when my SD card died in the rpi

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

#179

Post by thfuran »

crooked-v wrote: post #115
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…

Why would I need to go to the breaker to change a lightbulb?

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

#180

Post by mafro »

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…

Check out the Shelly products. You can wire them in behind a standard wall switch, and they can talk to a local MQTT server instead of the cloud. Replace your on/off flick switch with a push button.
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