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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

#191

Post by sanguy »

robbiet480 wrote: post #37
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…

Hello, I’m the original creator of the Home Assistant iOS Companion App. Just wanted to clear up that Nabu Casa took over the iOS and Android apps purely because of requirements by Apple and Google around a corporation being the only entity that can have a development team. At no time did Nabu Casa pay any money to me or anyone else to acquire the apps. They were transferred to Nabu Casa purely for convenience, since…

Hey Robbie - glad to see you. Yes, the iOS app was transferred prior to Nabu Casa ramping up their current approach.

Too bad; if you hung on you could have gotten some $$$ for it. It would have made me happy to see you financially rewarded as you did contribute a lot early on.

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

#192

Post by klinquist »

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…

Agree on Hubitat.

Decided to ditch SmartThings. Went all-in on HA for a month. Went to Hubitat and am much happier.

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

#193

Post by tass »

thfuran wrote: post #179
crooked-v wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not necessarily a smart switch thing, but dimmers don’t break the circuit when off. If you remove a bulb, it will hurt if you put your finger in the socket.

There’s usually a secondary way to break the circuit - pull out a bit of plastic, snap the switch plate away from the wall… something. All mine of different brands have some way to do it.

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

#194

Post by giobox »

j45 wrote: post #173
giobox wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If it had a touchscreen built onto it it would be one step closer to being self sustained.

Until there are proper standards that we can rely on to last for decades plus for automatable home devices in general, Home Assistant will never be truly self-sustaining. Almost all of its integrations rely on unofficial API access, those APIs change often enough to requiring patching etc. Finding a cheap reliable machine to just run Home Assistant has never been the problem either.

Home Assistant doesn't try to solve the elephant in the room: the complete lack of any standards in the industry, instead it tries to patch over it through regular software updates to keep everything working together.

No matter how good you have Home Assistant today, you are just one bad release or API change from any of the hundreds of smarthome product vendors breaking it - it is completely outwith your control. It doesn't happen super often, but it's often enough that I'd think someone a little silly to include it as part of a home sale process. Almost zero of HomeAssistants integrations are supported by the vendor, some vendors are even actively hostile towards efforts to use their APIs in HomeAssistant.

I'm secretly hopeful that the new standard, Matter, finally solves some of this for the long term, especially with Google/Apple buy in, but will probably be years before we see Matter devices hit mass market:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard)

> https://csa-iot.org/all-solutions/matter/

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

#195

Post by [deleted] »

mafro wrote: post #178
snapetom wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

[deleted]

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

#196

Post by gedy »

sanguy wrote: post #190
gedy wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the HA founder and think you're mischaracterizing him and his motivations. What you call "Cashing in" is attempting to focus full time on a really terrific project. He's certainly not rich off this and could have instead gone for a commercial/closed source vs the open project it is now.

He tried to sell it to Ubiquiti but they did not bite. So he ramped up the Nabu Casa approach to "control" the top community developers to ensure he did not loose control of the project. It can only fork if momentum to fork; and if you hire all the contributors that momentum is curbed. Many have also indicated he's also tried to sell it to Ikea as a center piece to their Smart Home line of products. This was quickly…

I don't think he tried to sell, ubiqiti sponsored him.

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

#197

Post by bmicraft »

giobox wrote: post #194
j45 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If it had a touchscreen built onto it it would be one step closer to being self sustained. Until there are proper standards that we can rely on to last for decades plus for automatable home devices in general, Home Assistant will never be truly self-sustaining. Almost all of its integrations rely on unofficial API access, those APIs change often enough to requiring patching etc. Finding a cheap reliable machine to…

That's way less of a problem than you make it out to be. As long as you don't use some kind of bridge but just a local zigbee or wifi network not connected to the internet everything will stay as is until a device physically breaks. Few devices actually need a cloud connection and and there are always alternatives that don't.

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

#198

Post by goodpoint »

luma wrote: post #126
goodpoint wrote: post #120

Home Assistant seems to be hostile to Linux distributions. It's still difficult to package. Maybe they might want to have their own OS only. Maybe charge money for it in future.

The primary distribution method for Home Assistant is via a docker container, which should run just fine on most Linux platforms. There is a Home Assistant OS which is free to use and mostly exists as a lightweight docker host. It is the preferred installation method and is simple to deploy and keep updated.

No thanks. I wrote "distribution" and users should expect a home automation tool to be easily installed and updated without dedicated VMs, containers or other kludges.

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

#199

Post by tra3 »

llamataboot wrote: post #46

I have slowly gone all in on Home Assistant over the past 5 years and I think it is an amazing community, and amazing open-source success story, and fantastic software. I will say that programming your house yourself can be fun (you can literally do anything) but you also have to then keep up with all the technical debt and changes over time. I still don't think it's a great choice for non technically minded folks th…

What devices are you using with HA? I find that's the biggest hurdle for me. There are so many hurdles and the quality is unknown.

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

#200

Post by [deleted] »

bmicraft wrote: post #197
giobox wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it had a touchscreen built onto it it would be one step closer to being self sustained. Until there are proper standards that we can rely on to last for decades plus for automatable home devices in general, Home Assistant will never be truly self-sustaining. Almost all of its integrations rely on unofficial API access, those APIs change often enough to requiring patching etc. Finding a cheap reliable machine to…

That's way less of a problem than you make it out to be. As long as you don't use some kind of bridge but just a local zigbee or wifi network not connected to the internet everything will stay as is until a device physically breaks. Few devices actually need a cloud connection and and there are always alternatives that don't.

[deleted]
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