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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

#61

Post by jethro_tell »

iamjackg wrote: post #22
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).

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…

Heh, our kids have an Alexa and a couple smart plugs for lamps in their rooms.

They set their own bed/wake routines which was really great because we kinda got the buy in from them on how they want to do it and it's the same every time. They like to come by ever now and then and update the routine, add a step or piece of information. It's fun to do with them and it's nice to have them do their own thing but also not need an adult for everything thing.

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

#62

Post by 0ld »

HA is nice, and I've been running it on RPi for a few years, mainly to make my air purifiers work in the way I want, plus some light switches and a motion detector

The only annoying thing are random breaking changes which make me overhaul my configs a couple of times per year

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

#63

Post by nomel »

vladgur wrote: post #15

I dont think its clear from the blog, but HomeAssistant Blue and/or Yellow are nice, but not required to get going with HA. If you get your hands on RPI 3 or 4, an SSD card and a supported Zigbee/ZWave card, you should be good to go. Installation is well documented. But overall customization is in fact a major time sink regardless of hardware you use

> But overall customization is in fact a major time sink

I think that depends on what you're trying to accomplish, since "customization" doesn't really have a limit. If it's just exposing your smart devices so you can access them with your iPhone, it's easy. If it's having your lights turn to 5% brightness if you enter the kitchen at 3am, to get some milk, but then slowly ramp up the brightness to 15% when you linger around to make pancakes, then sure. You'll need to write an automation for that.

Having my HomePod remind me that my car charger isn't plugged in at 8:30pm required an automation that involved selecting things from some dropdown boxes.

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

#64

Post by merryMellody »

mrweasel wrote: post #38
denimnerd42 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you wouldn't be required to perform KT. in Texas anything attached stays so even lightbulbs but you can also exclude anything explicitly.

I believe one of the hosts on the Coder Radio podcast moved into a home with some home automation stuff (light, heating and locks), but wasn't informed about the configuration or how to operate it. He described it as moving into a haunted house.

This sounds incredibly fascinating. Do you have a link to the specific episode or a title?

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

#65

Post by madjam002 »

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 mean it's still all open source, so what if they want to monetise some hardware and cloud connectivity? Worst that will happen is they will drive more and more into paid plans, a fork may or may not happen and there will be a community split, but for my place personally I don't see much of a risk there when most of my stuff just uses the MQTT integration.

Hopefully with money coming in they can improve the core itself, because at the moment the real value of Home Assistant is the huge community around it and 3rd party integrations.

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

#66

Post by empiricus »

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 that is implemented in the cheapest hw thermostat you can buy. I mean, this is pure software, with 20 more lines of code you could implement a pid controller or smth. I looked into developing my own component, but the documentation for HA development also seems lacking at a quick look.

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

#67

Post by 01100011 »

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 aquarium top-off pump inexplicably fell off the network. I watched the water level slowly drop from 400 miles away over my webcam feed with no way to fix it. Moral of the story is beware of automation and always consider your failure cases. Building up these sorts of systems is fun and rewarding initially but can become a time sink and a liability if you're not careful.

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

#68

Post by nomel »

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.

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

#69

Post by mrspuratic »

pixelbreaker wrote: post #24

no thanks. I like switches and using my body. This kind of tech as progress is a fallacy.

I like using switches and my body too. I mostly like the latter at the beach though, so last year when we had to drive 70km back from the coast because the kid next door thought it would be fun to bounce a football off a window, I caved. Replaced the old school hard-wired 110dB neighbourhood-bothering alarm (home insurance policy requirements suck) with one I can set/unset/silence/check via internet or SMS.

Since then I've added a handful of sensors, switches and pass-through sockets. Very much cheaper than upgrading the entire heating system, long term fuel efficiency gains aside. I don't need to plan/remember to turn off things or change thermostats, I just need to set the alarm "away" and that's done.

I have 3 rules: everything has to work with the same app, I do not talk to my house, and everything has to work acceptably if there's an outage. If it's not helping with security or tangible energy savings I probably don't want it.

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

#70

Post by nouveaux »

huhtenberg wrote: post #34
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).

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 change temperature targets depending on time of day and day of the week.

The best type of switches are the ones that work without intervention. The most common is the sunset porch lights and the sunrise alarm clocks. Other good ones are humidity sensors that trigger bathroom fans, TV/stereo/console that turns on when you pick up your game controller, floor lights that trigger only at night when it senses movement, lights that change color temperature and lumens depending on time of day, etc.

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