Home Assistant – open-source home automation

by gjvc • 5 years ago

561 177 5 years ago

vxxzy• 5 years ago

With the HomeKit and UniFi integration I can finally say “Hey Siri, turn off the Xbox internet”

I do have to say, the amount of integrations are quite remarkable. I’ve been running Homeassistant for about two years now. It can only see it getting even better.

reid9• 5 years ago

The UniFi Protect integration is awesome. Turn on outdoor lights on motion, disable loud doorbell ding when the dog is sleeping, change privacy zones, send critical notifications to bypass silent mode on iOS devices when a person is detected while away… really amazing stuff.

The HomeKit Controller integration is also neat. All kinds of HomeKit compatible devices can just work with Home Assistant. Honeywell Lyric is the best example: PIR sensors with local push for lighting automation or special alerts when gates open to prevent the dog from escaping the backyard.

Edit: More useful things!

I have my washer and dryer in a garage. Can’t hear the machines inside. The Z-Wave light switches around my house have status LEDs, so one LED is dedicated to the washer and dryer status based on power draw from the outlet. Works really well. The same status LEDs are shared for all light switches around the house, so it’s a good ambient notification.

The Mac app can provide webcam or mic status as a sensor, which turns on a key light when I join video calls and turns on an LED on the light switch outside my office to signal when I’m on a call.

I also get a push notification on my computer and a LED light on the light switches when the Roomba is full. It fills up a few times during its typical run while I’m working.

I also have the door status (open/closed/locked) from the Lyric as LEDs on the light switches. Very easy to tell if something is unlocked or open at a glance while walking around the house.

paisawalla• 5 years ago

Amazing write up! Can you provide a link to the switches you use?

Also, how does HA know when the dog is asleep?

function_seven2• 5 years ago

Also, how does HA know when the dog is asleep?

I have the same question! Until OP answers, I'm going to guess some accelerometer collar that reports when little motion has occurred in 3 minutes?

reid9• 5 years ago

I use the HomeSeer HS-WD200+ which has programmable LEDs over Z-Wave: https://shop.homeseer.com/products/z-wave-dimmer-switch-arch...

HomeSeer is coming out with a new model soon so that model is discontinued. But the new one looks better since it doesn’t need a neutral wire!

My dog has really consistent daytime nap times. So I can disable the doorbell chime during those times to prevent the barking during a delivery. :)

zrail3• 5 years ago

How do you disable the doorbell chime?

reid9• 5 years ago

I have a UniFi Protect G4 Doorbell, so it’s as easy as calling the service unifiprotect.set_doorbell_chime_duration and setting the duration to 0.

I still get phone and other notifications when the button is pushed! Just no indoor bell.

matthew-wegner6• 5 years ago

Bolting on to this comment with some other neat things, as a fellow HASS enthusiast:

* Every single light in my house moves from dim/orange -> bright/bluer -> very dim/orange throughout the day (basically like an whole-home f.lux or Night Shift). Sadly still third party, but it's easy to use: Circadian Lighting component will find it

* I have "night" modes in all my rooms. This is usually a single bulb in lowest-brightness full red. You can barely see it during the day, but at night it makes bathroom trips a non-blinding affair

* I have 6+ speaker zones, on Raspberry Pis mostly. Snapcast runs the audio stream, but turning on/off a room mutes the speakers in it (walking into a room turns on the lights via motion detectors and music continues to follow, which is neat)

* I pipe a lot of text-to-speech messages. Some rooms won't play them if the room is off (outer stuff like my garage), but others always do (so I hear them). This is more custom now, and I even duck the playing music stream for the TTS portion. It can take in text, so I do things like have my automation say a bunch of things every morning (my age in days, some web-scraped snippets, etc)

* $10 power sensor is enough to know when your washer is finished. Power for awhile -> running state, no power after awhile in running state -> finished. This goes right into the text to speech system

* Every room has a 10-button remote (the very, very cheap zap remote kind). Most of the layout is the same--room on, room off, start music (or skip track if playing), stop music, full-bright lights, night lights. This still leaves a few for custom-to-the-room buttons, which I use

* Contact sensors on all openings to the house. I let me cats into the backyard during the day. Cat access via any configuration is still open, and sun is below X degrees? Text to speech

* Most of my logic is Node-RED (another comment here about that), which gives me a lot of flexibility. I have a global "house" mode, which I can set to guests or party to suppress most of my assumptions that I'm home alone

* Example of one of those: My setup knows if I'm using one of my two desk computers. If I am, and house is in "home" (alone) mode, I turn off all the other rooms in the house

I could go on--I went pretty deep when I first set up Home Assistant, but that was years ago now. Every now and then I do a major update or add functionality to smooth over something that's been bugging me

Once you hit some tipping point of soooo many things available as sensors or services in HASS, adding completely new functionality is a very incremental change

crooked-v• 5 years ago

walking into a room turns on the lights via motion detectors

Do you know if there's anything good in this space yet for detecting presence (not just entry)? There are some spots in my home where I only want the lights on while I'm there, and I haven't found anything yet that can reliably detect that somebody's actually left a space other than Hiome (https://www.hiome.com), and that doesn't work for something not delineated by a doorway.

throwoutway2• 5 years ago

"$10 power sensor "

Which sensor do you recommend. I am searching but some are low amps

lostlogin• 5 years ago

Bolting on

My favourite is the automatic switch on for the espresso machine at 6am each day. It changed everything.

rjzzleep• 5 years ago

I'm getting imposter syndrome from reading these two posts. Just how much time did you guys spend on this?

tpxl2• 5 years ago

Man I'd love to live in your house for a couple of days to see what it's like.

jkestner2• 5 years ago

Honest question: do you live with other people? I'd ask matthew-wegner as well but I can infer that he doesn't.

jon-wood3• 5 years ago

Reading between the lines here, I guess the real question is “does this stuff work when not everyone is technically inclined”.

When I first started working in home automation my boss at the time had a saying “if you have to press a button, it’s not home automation”. That single phrase is the core of making automation work with non-technical users. The house should always do the least surprising thing by default, for example turning on lights when you enter a room, but only if it’s dark. Light switches should turn the lights on and off, rather than disable the light automation (looking at you Hue).

If you can configure things to that extent, then yeah, it works beautifully. If everyone has to faff around with a mobile app to be able to see where their aiming on a 4am toilet run it’ll be hated with a passion.

teekert6• 5 years ago

Hue turns on my bathroom lights, HA then switches on the fan via a tasmota flashed Sonoff. Everybody loves that. How does this relate to your remark? I read between the lines that you are making poor automation decisions, you need to rethink those. Not HA.

reid9• 5 years ago

I live with my wife. It’s important to do smart home things which work well for everyone in your space!

I don’t do a lot of fixed unchanging automation. I do a lot more ambient status and voice assistant integration.

It actually was really nice when my lady moved in after our wedding because my HomeKit things were able to work right away with her Google Home she was used to. :)

The webcam hall status light was to know when either of us are in a meeting. We are both working from home so it’s like a free/busy signal.

throwoutway2• 5 years ago

"The Z-Wave light switches around my house have status LEDs, so one LED is dedicated to the washer and dryer status based on power draw from the outlet."

Could you elaborate on how this works? Which Z-Wave light switches measure the power draw?

mleo• 5 years ago

Typically, there is zwave plug measuring the power draw and sending data to hub. Based on the data, an event is triggered to change an LED on a light switch. HomeSeer has zwave switches with LEDs used for dimmer feedback than can be programmed to show a color. I use the LEDs on one switch to match the state of two exterior door locks. Green/unlocked and Red/locked. I use another LED on the switch to match state of the Litter Robot, automatic cat litter box. Blinks red when full and needs to be emptied.

matthew-wegner6• 5 years ago

Not OP, but I would guess they don't directly.

If it's possible to set those status LEDs arbitrarily, you could use another power-sensing outlet's data, so a different device entirely.

This is the magic of Home Assistant in general--it's really just a big bag of sensors (temperature/power/times/etc) and a bag of services (turn on, set to X, change color). You can have sensors from anything trigger a service on anything else.

jvilalta• 5 years ago

Works great with z-Wave devices on a raspberry pi. I've got a few 433mhz sensors as well, integrated with all rtl-sdr. Also other raspberry pi devices taking to it via mqtt. Fun stuff.

function_seven2• 5 years ago

I bought an RTL-SDR dongle years ago thinking I was going to do all sorts of awesome things with it. After my initial screwing around with it, it landed in a drawer for a few years.

Well a couple of months ago I found this[1] and hacked together my own daemon to read my power meter and publish the result via MQTT. I then wrote a couple of sensors in Home Assistant to estimate my upcoming electric bill and the instantaneous power draw of my house.

It's been rock solid so far. I've been surprised how much energy I use while sleeping in the middle of the night (something like 350W)

[1] https://hackaday.com/2017/12/21/read-home-power-meters-with-...

ThatPlayer• 5 years ago

How does rtl-sdr compare to say esphome and those cheap 433mhz receivers/transmitters? I remember playing around with those a long time ago, with arduinos and without esphome, with some outlets before wifi outlets became really common.

nickvanw• 5 years ago

Home Assistant really hits the right spot on the "enthusiast" vs "product" spectrum for me - it's flexible and configurable, but also easy enough to set up that I basically spent almost no time actually making it work.

I've got it hooked up to a Z-Wave Hub so that I can control mechanized blinds with HomeKit (where no native integration exists), all the way over to Volvo On Call to report where my car is, how much gas is in the tank, and what the odometer reports. It's got a great community, and isn't too difficult to extend that it's not worth mucking around in the guts when I really want something to work.

nijave• 5 years ago

HA also has a pretty great community. I've done a couple small changes and have had very positive experiences

candiddevmike3• 5 years ago

Funny, I'm finally throwing in the towel and going back to HASS after trying to go all node-red. I loathe the GUI experience in both, and node-red updates weren't as painless as I read online (better than HASS, but now I'm monitoring a litany of NPM packages).

HASS seems like the least bad OSS solution for home automation--it has a lot of inertia but I'm not a fan of the group (company?) making big decisions for the project. I really wish they hadn't dictated the end of YAML/declarative configurations.

tlrobinson2• 5 years ago

Doesn’t node-red complement HASS? I use Home Assistant for simple things and bridge to node-red for more complex automations.

candiddevmike3• 5 years ago

It can, a lot of users pushed people to use node-red in place of HASS automations prior to the automation update earlier this year and app daemon. "In theory", node-red can do everything HASS can (possibly missing some integrations, see inertia comment above), but in reality it's quite a bit more complex, especially when you don't have HASS handling all the stateful things.

I think the consensus now is to just use HASS, node-red isn't necessary?

barbazoo3• 5 years ago

I really wish they hadn't dictated the end of YAML/declarative configurations.

Can you elaborate a bit here? I might be on an older version but afaict it's still configured via yml configs.

teamspirit• 5 years ago

The devs decided to essentially eliminate yaml config files in favor of GUI configs. The reasoning being less braking changes (no need to individually update your yaml files when an update requires it) and easier adoption for new, less technical users.

I don't know about op, but I very much prefer config files. Using tools like sed or grep to make changes is much faster than mouse clicks - but I understand the devs point of view.

tout• 5 years ago

I've found openHAB to be quite stable. Setup is pretty heavyweight but I've just had it chugging along happily managing BLE, Z-Wave, a few cameras, etc.

madaxe_again• 5 years ago

Ditto. Even across upgrades it’s had very, very few issues - and I’m using it for both a bevy of normal home automation stuff, and to manage isolated power and water microgrids for several homesteads - routing power, switching dump loads on and off, balancing battery banks, monitoring tank levels, running pumps, alerting on low flow states (time to change a filter), and all the rest. It’s mission critical for us, and hasn’t let us down in the two years it’s been running the show.

StapleHorse• 5 years ago

I like Openhab. I hope the userbase and the community keeps growing.

snapetom2• 5 years ago

I gave up on all open source home automation solutions. Home Assistant is the "least bad" but that's not saying much at all.

I pony upped for a Hubitat earlier this year, and although the GUI is fugly, it just works and I don't have to keep babysitting it constantly like I did with Home Assistant.

justapassenger• 5 years ago

Same boat here. I really really really wanted to love home assistant. But it’s been constant battle to keep it running over 3 years of me using it. I’m fighting to keep systems up for money at work, and at home I just want something that works.

If only one day Hubitat makes usable dashboards (I know there are third party ones, but it means either some cloud solution that will die one day, or some hacky custom stuff I’ll need to fight with) then it’ll be perfect home automation solution for techies IMO.

Gatsky3• 5 years ago

Not my experience at all, HA has been unfailingly solid.

ornornor4• 5 years ago

I’m running HASS with the HASSOS VM image and it’s pretty solid. I’ve never tried running a custom install of HASS on a Linux system I installed separately but I can’t imagine that being much fun.

HASSOS is pretty much an appliance at that point. I can’t remember the last time I had to ssh into it. Upgrades, backups, etc are all done via the web UI or the iOS app with a couple of clicks.

robalfonso• 5 years ago

See, I just went to ha. My hubitat experience was bad. For two years I had crashes, failed devices and failed automations. The last lockup I had I said enough. At least with HA I could get under the hood and deal with an issue. Hubitat gui is awful and the rule system is tedious but powerful. It was just way too unreliable for me.

ornornor4• 5 years ago

I didn’t love nodered. It just didn’t click with my programmer mind.

Instead, I found appdaemon along with HASS. This allows me to write all my automations as python code rather than dragging and dropping boxes around. And it’s easier for me to use vs HASS yaml files.

bouke• 5 years ago

Your post resonates with me, but I dread the yaml configuration. I find it very hard to discover available settings and every module seems to have a slightly different file layout. I’m not a fan of needing the GUI for configuration either.

The constant work to keep things updated is a hassle, requiring python upgrades unavailable in the raspbian distro meaning slow compiles from source (which somehow fails on 3.9 and requires dropping to 3.8).

I would be very happy with something that just works, without constantly needing fiddling and handholding.

a254613e• 5 years ago

Agreed. Been using home assistant for years, and right now it's probably in the weirdest state as far as configuration/yaml/gui goes. And often times you need to go and edit "read-only" huge json file that contains every single integration instead of individual integration yaml files like it was before.

Nabu Casa (for profit company behind home assistant) made some of the decisions that were questionable at best.

aequitas2• 5 years ago

I really wish they hadn't dictated the end of YAML/declarative configurations.

Agree here. I wouldn't mind replacing YAML itself with some kind of other configuration language or stable configuration API as long as I'm able to use a IaC/declarative approach to create a immutable/disposable HA instance. But they seem to be going more and more toward GUI only configurations. Meaning if the application state is broken, you can only rely on (outdated) backups or doing everything manually through the GUI again.

This, together with the core team's hostile attitude towards alternative installation methods and other OSS projects like NixOS[0] has really turned me sour against what used to be a great and fun open source project to contribute to.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277

solarkraft• 5 years ago

HASS looked nice initially with all its polish, but I gave up on it when I couldn’t figure out how to interface with MQTT from the web interface and it generally just didn’t seem to have many features.

I’m going to try OpenHAB next, as I’ve seen relatively complex setups with it.

jrm4• 5 years ago

Yep. Like many here I appreciate the idea of Home Assistant, but the abstraction on top of abstraction is a little disappointing, and seems like too much for someone who's pretty comfortable shell scripting..

..so yes, thats kind of what I'm fishing for. Is anyone aware of something a little more shell-oriented?

jonwest• 5 years ago

Node red is probably closer to what you’re looking for, though it’s JavaScript and not shell, it’ll give you a lot more flexibility.

ornornor4• 5 years ago

Some say nodered, I personally didn’t like it.

Appdaemon however is exactly what I wanted. It can do anything python can and there is no drag and drop UI, you write actual code to make things happen.

dividedbyzero• 5 years ago

Is appdaemon standalone or does it require HomeAssistant?

Denvercoder95• 5 years ago

You can try pyscript (https://github.com/custom-components/pyscript), which allows you to write automations in plain Python.

balloob• 5 years ago

Founder Home Assistant here.

Home Assistant is turning 8 years this week. To celebrate we have launched crowdfunding campaign for Home Assistant Amber, a device for both beginners and home automation enthusiasts and the easiest way to get started with Home Assistant.

For more info see https://www.crowdsupply.com/nabu-casa/home-assistant-amber

oaiey• 5 years ago

Product request: make it simple to create devices. Doing custom entities in the config, i miss those.

maartenh• 5 years ago

I worked around this by creating a button that runs a git commit & push, and an iframe that points to a local running flask app that renders a <pre><code>{{ shell("git status")}}</pre><code>. Not as nice as fully declarative YAML, as this also captures the data files, but at least I have point in time restore.

3np• 5 years ago

Thanks for posting and your service!

Any chance declarative configuration (tank or any other format) will be getting a second chance? Like many here it’s the one way of working with HASS that feels/felt nice.

maweki4• 5 years ago

Yeah, I started out orchestrating Home Assistant via Ansible throughout many devices in my home.

Now I feel that it would take me days to recreate the configurations that I needed to make with the UI.

Deprecating yaml is bad for configuration versioning.

croon2• 5 years ago

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but is there a reason for not having z-wave support on Amber? It wasn't mentioned in the picture and no ctrl+f "wave" hits on the page.

I'm very excited about this device. I've been using Smartthings and then IKEAs gateway, but haven't been happy with their performance and features.

jon-wood3• 5 years ago

The same is true of Blue, the current iteration of the hardware, and I believe its because people who are into home automation enough to buy a dedicated Home Assistant box probably already have a bunch of hardware and opinions on whether they like Z-Wave, Zigbee, HomeKit, 433mhz radios, or pulses fired down their power lines. Its much easier to provide some hardware which can support any of those via USB and GPIOs.

Also, Z-Wave licensing is an absolute nightmare, and significantly expensive.

teekert6• 5 years ago

I just want to say: Thank you.

Whenever I buy smart-home stuff I first check if it is supported by HA. (So no more Kasa, and Nest was a huge compromise, I'm thinking there is a place for HA to make a [OpenTherm] Thermostat, like you made the P1 smartreader ["SlimmeLezer", reads energy and gas usage in the Netherlands]). The new Energy dashboard is extremely cool and useful and it's making a difference.

I love what you are doing and it's making Home Automation/IoT a better place. It is how Home Automation should be, with privacy and local control as founding principles. Keep it up.

Edit: Amber looks great! M.2 nice! I thought you were all about Odroid internally, so I'm a bit surprised it has a Pi compute module, I like that though. What drove that decision? Maybe you can go on the Self-Hosted podcast [0] again and talk about Amber, I enjoyed the previous interview [1] :)

[0] https://selfhosted.show/

[1] https://selfhosted.show/45

edelans2• 5 years ago

I second this. I tried other platforms (jeedom, domotics) before stumbling into HA a few years ago, and my Home Assistant experience was so much smoother than the others. I never looked back. Most of the things just worked. When it did not, the community was super helpful and welcoming in the forums, even with the noobs, this is a big differentiator. Thank you.

CrazyPyroLinux• 5 years ago

SelfHosted and all the other shows at jupiterbroadcasting.com are fantastic! (Especially Coder Radio.) If anyone here somehow hasn't heard of them yet, congrats you're one of today's 10K. :)

goodpoint3• 5 years ago

I don't use Home Assistant because it's not being packaged by Linux distributions.

hsbauauvhabzb2• 5 years ago

Then submit a PR to you local repository maintainers! The rest of us thank you for your service.

spacemanmatt3• 5 years ago

It probably deserves its own distribution at this point. HA comprises multiple containers and container management so it would probably be an invasive install to your host OS.

ingenium• 5 years ago

They release pretty frequent updates (monthly), with features added in most of them. It honestly doesn't really make sense to package it with the distro. Home Assistant 1 year ago was missing a lot of nice features in the present version. Plus fixes for integrations that stopped working reliably due to API changes (Ecobee comes to mind), etc.

The best/easiest way to run it is to use Docker. They have a script that will set it up for you. After that, the container can basically self update and self manage. Any addons that you want to use are installed as separate docker containers that talk to the main home assistant container. It's super seamless and easy.

In my case, I just setup a barebones Debian VM and ran their setup script. It took care of all the Docker stuff and got it up and running.

InsomniacL• 5 years ago

Thank you!

I feel like you're missing an opportunity by launching this as a DIY type device. That market segment can already cater for themselves with a Raspberry pi etc..

You've made big leaps with the Config Flow system, I feel like the time is right to launch a fully polished device. Cater for the people who don't want to ever see the PCB, they're tech savy but want a pretty device to sit on the mantle piece with a GUI that just works.

kristianpaul• 5 years ago

This is very interesting. I host hass my self and probably will get one. Have you considered bundling it with hardware to also measure and control home devices?

dkarp3• 5 years ago

Just trying to see the benefit of the Home Assistant Amber over a Raspberry Pi 4 2GB.

It looks like you get:

* Zigbee module ($45 for rp4 https://phoscon.de/en/raspbee2)

* PoE module ($20 if desired for rp4 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14882)

* M.2 Slot (but no SD card slot)

* battery powered RTC

* A case

It's priced at $149 with all that, whereas rp4 2GB w. zigbee and PoE would be $45 + $45 + $20 = $110, so price seems reasonable if you need all those things as you're getting the rtc, m.2 and case all in a nice package.

My use would probably only need the Zigbee module and I can 3D print a case, so I'd go with the rp4 especially as I have a bunch lying around anyway! But Seems like a really nice package if you need all those things, and especially PoE is nice to have built in.

dspillett• 5 years ago

Just trying to see the benefit of the Home Assistant Amber over a Raspberry Pi 4 2GB.

I'm guessing largely the "for beginners" part in the description. That and people who lack time or for other reasons want something working out-of-the-box?

Wheaties466• 5 years ago

Right now, I have an issue with a third party add on where if I upgrade the host OS it doesn't pass USB devices the same way to the guest container. Its stuff like this where I don't want to designate the time to figure it out. Where an out of the box solution would more than likely alleviate that and have more people working on a solution for everyone.

cryo• 5 years ago

Note the Zigbee / RaspBee II in your link contains a battery powered RTC already.

_ea1k• 5 years ago

The main thing that I notice is the lack of wifi and 2GB of RAM. I think it'd be easy for that to get tight with some of the big add-ons and I'd think the consumer space is exactly where you'd want wifi.

Otherwise, it looks like a pretty decent package, though.

kop3164• 5 years ago

If I could ask, is there a reason that your development team is hostile to others packaging Home Assistant:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277

To the point that they will threaten to relicense their own software: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326#issuecomment-86...

And when they ask about it: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/consider-to-avoid-addi...

It gets delisted.

As the author of FOSS tools, I have worked to make sure things I have developed get packaged and used, and I have even spent a fair amount of time helping others to port it to their systems, even if it does nothing to help my use case. Frankly, seeing tsuch a hostile stance towards redistribution makes me wary of using it.

arcbyte3• 5 years ago

I just wasted half an hour reading through the threads.

The gist is that NixOS has some weird dependency management that overrides Home Assistant's in a way that makes HA on NixOS a unique experience. And NixOS is not done repackaging HA, so it is in an unfinished state that only advanced users should attempt. ThIS will inevitably confuse users. Those users will then go to HA for support and will be unable to get it. HA doesn't want to support that and was pretty clear about it. Then this Jorg person got all up in arms and threw a hiss fit all over the internet and everybody got tense.

JGM_io• 5 years ago

Why not collab with the pine64.org peeps?

They have a great amount of hardware already available and lots of knowledge to accelerate and cheapen your roadmap.... If you are willing to share the design of course.

waynesonfire• 5 years ago

anyone creating an insolated network for IoT devices around the house? I'd be interesting in how this can be achieved.

herewulf• 5 years ago

Yes. VLANs.

stragies4• 5 years ago

Which is only the first half of the story for many installations.

If something at your place uses SSDP/MDNS/UPNP/etc to communicate/find_each_other, you'll then have to start doing multicast bridging/rewriting and other hacks. And for those, there is no one-recipe-fits-all.

holoduke• 5 years ago

I have a large mix of devices in my house. From WiFi to Zwave to ZigBee. I have about 100 lights, garage doors, various sensors and switches. My configuration in HA is insane. Extremely large, with a lot of custom configs. I would say: unmaintainable. It works almost flawlessly for about 3 years.

01100011• 5 years ago

Been using HA for over a year now to run my Z-Wave+ network of sensors and switches. It has a rather steep learning curve but should be usable by most software folks. I feel like some of the terminology could be changed to make it more familiar and understandable, but after a few weeks you'll get the hang of it.

One warning though: If you're running it off an SD card or other small, solid-state device, your first priority should be turning down the amount of logging. Without reducing log spewage, expect your SD card to die within the first few months of use.

I can't complain too much, it's free software and I don't have the resources to contribute much right now, but there are some sharp edges you need to watch out for.

stragies4• 5 years ago

I also use HomeAssistant, and am quite happy with it, but i wish, they would start including the [`remote_homeassistant`](https://github.com/custom-components/remote_homeassistant) addon.

It solves the Usecase, where not all BT(LE) devices in the house are reachable from the main HA, and you need remote "pickups" for their signals, and then want to integrate them back into the "master instance". It also solves a bunch of other problems, like integrating some sensors of the HA of your holiday home into the HA of your main home.

The author describes the rationale better here: https://github.com/home-assistant/architecture/issues/246

For some reason, NabuCasa doesn't want to integrate it. Maybe they see it as competing with an own upcoming (cloud?) solution of their own?

splitbrain• 5 years ago

Instead of running full blown secondary HA instances for that, simply use ESPhome on a ESP32. I used that method to pick up the signals of a couple of bluetooth hygrometers in the cellar: https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2021-08/16-humidity_control_...

stragies4• 5 years ago

But I already have devices running linux-SBCs with "free" bluetooth in most rooms. Why should I need to add ESP32s just for that?

And what about the second-home-case I also mentioned?

Also, I use remote_homeassistant also for e.g HDMI-CEC-control of devices in other rooms/places, which ESPHome cannot do.

(I agree though, ESPhome@ESP32 is a viable solution for some subset of situations)

rcarmo• 5 years ago

I’ve been trying HA yearly (as my home set up is essentially HomeKit/homebridge with Node-RED bolted on to expose unsupported devices) and it always strikes me as very declarative and finicky to configure, requiring either maintaining a bunch of YAML files or clicking through screen after screen of longish forms.

I wonder if there are any plans to make the UX feel simpler and less crowded…

teekert6• 5 years ago

I think that is priority 1 for them, after starting as a yaml first system, you can now even add automation using natural language (never used that though). It will get less complicated for sure. As for the "crowded", I think that's up to you.

edcastro• 5 years ago

It already is. With the latest changes, almost everything can be done through the UI, hardly ever I touch YAML files.

gregable• 5 years ago

Ive just gotten started, but what I like so far is based on node-red but only using HA triggers, functions, and HA call service nodes.

Essentially I use the trigger blocks to schedule my function calls. The function then ignores the inputs entirely and just inspects the variables from home assistant that it cares about, it then sends this output to any devices I want to toggle.

This way, I'm just writing code. This works naturally for me, since it's my day job. But I can use node-red for visually organizing input output tuples, and the debugging data that it shows as things activate.

I also add one manual trigger and one debug output node on each end of the function so I can just run it manually if desired.

So far it's pretty goos, but I'm missing stuff like writing tests, which means I test my functions by turning on/off devices or something which isn't ideal.

Kosirich2• 5 years ago

I'm looking into 2-3 wireless cameras and some movement trigger sensor for home security. Besides security, we are getting a dog and I want to see what she is doing when we are away. If anyone has good ideas, links to equipment they used, or just want to share their experience with HASS in regards to home security, it will be appreciated. Link to some good project is also great :) (I only played with is and connected few sensors I made with ESP32s)

l72• 5 years ago

For any camera that provides an rtsp stream, you can use frigate[1], which has some excellent detection algorithms (it differentiate between people, dogs, ...). It also has hooks to integrate with HASS. I use it with a LaView system to monitor my external cameras and get notifications (including push to my iphone) through HASS.

[1] https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate

Kosirich2• 5 years ago

Thanks!

maweki4• 5 years ago

My main problem with Home assistant is the automation language. It could be very powerful, but isn't.

I feel that if there was a way to introduce temporary state and force an expression as the value of a switch it could be great. I would love for something ASP/Datalog based.

Having a light that's just on if some expression is True and off if the expression is false is more difficult than it should be. The automations are not goal-based. But maybe in a decade the next project will do it that way.

Denvercoder95• 5 years ago

You can try pyscript (https://github.com/custom-components/pyscript), which allows you to write automations in plain Python.

maweki4• 5 years ago

That's not AI/Logic programming though. Ideally I'd write a boolean formula and the system tries to make it true by adjusting the values it can adjust.

Say I want something like the light should be off it is dark and the window is open (bugs), but if the window is closed and it is dark, the light should be on.

    dark & window.open -> !light
    dark & !window.open -> light

Obviously, it can't close the window. But it can turn the light to make the formulas true.

If this were answer-set-based, the system could find multiple ways to make the formulas true (that's why I say goal-based) and act in a truly intelligent manner.

Edit: if it could close the window, it had a second way to make the formulas true. That would be nice as well, that the window closes when I turn on the light.

Edit 2: note that at daytime the formulas are always true, such that I can adjust the light and window as I like.

Edit 3: We could also rewrite this as

    dark -> (window.open != light)

And it is great that we could reason about our rules in that manner.

colordrops• 5 years ago

Yes, I added some simple automation scripts to calculate bandwidth being used on my router from snmp data and it eats up 100% CPU. The calculations are super simple and shouldn't take almost any CPU.

moritonal• 5 years ago

At the risk of sounding like a broken-record, Node-Red is a very easy but flexible visual-scripting engine and has a good integration with Home Assistant. It could be a solution for the places where HA is lacking.

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/home-assistant-communi...

edelans2• 5 years ago

Have you considered AppDaemon ? https://github.com/AppDaemon/appdaemon

jayelbe• 5 years ago

This is dead easy to do in Home Assistant if you use a jinja-based template as the automation trigger. Any template that will evaluate to true will trigger the automation. Templates are re-evaluated every time the state of the object changes or (if you use a time function, or don't reference any objects) every minute.

Here's a simple example that would send a notification if I left my kitchen LEDs on 200 brightness or more for longer than two hours.

  alias: Kitchen
  description: ''
  trigger:
  - platform: template
    value_template: ' {{ state_attr('light.kitchen_led', 'brightness')|int >= 200 and as_timestamp(states.light.kitchen_led.last_updated) + 3600 < as_timestamp(now()) }} '
  condition: []
  action:
  - service: notify.my_phone
    data:
      title: Kitchen lights still on
      message: The kitchen LEDs have been on very bright for more than 2 hours. 
  mode: single

maweki4• 5 years ago

That's absolutely not what I meant. The trigger condition is not the problem. The action is. It is not goal-based. I can't give a target value (as template) and the system tries to bring the entity to that state.

I have to have another check (or two automations) to trigger the off/on-action. Home assistant basically has no idea how to bring entities to a desired state.

35mm2• 5 years ago

Can anyone recommend what the best way is for me to set up a simple temperature sensor connected to Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi?

Semaphor2• 5 years ago

Best is hard to say. Depends on what you want. I have 4 Temperature sensors (2 Aqara temp & humidity sensors, and 2 Hue motions sensors that have temperature sensing included) connected via Zigbee (using Deconz) to my HA on the PI. No issues at all.

35mm2• 5 years ago

Sounds like a great solution. What are you using in terms of hardware to get Zigbee on your Pi?

roland35• 5 years ago

I believe things like Home Assistant are the future of IoT. There are always going to be thousands of random devices and sensors - many of which may become obsolete or unsupported by their manufacturer. A centralized intelligent and well-maintained hub which can communicate with many different things really helps keep everything glued together and working long term.

alex3305• 5 years ago

Nice to see HA getting some love on HN. A colleague recommended it to me about 3 years ago as an alternative to Domoticz. I've migrated back than and haven't looked back since. I consider myself a real Home Assistant enthousiast. I've contributed some small amounts to the project, created and maintain my own add-ons and love to share my configuration with others.

Although most of the things currently just work, especially with the (migrated) UI integrations. Some things still feel very unfinished, like blueprints. Which was a terrific idea, but maintaining and keeping those up to date is an absolute nightmare and you will have to that yourself [1]. Same with battery powered devices. When they work, it's all great, but having to watch their battery level is just a hassle. You can create your own automation to do that for you, but it seems unnecessary.

For me the community also sometimes feels very hostile. For instance, you can have a Portainer add-on, but installing other Docker images makes your system 'unsupported'. Same with some blacklisted images [2], which break Home Assistant Supervisor. Or when the maintainer of one of the add-ons completely ignores a breaking issue after a day [3].

1. https://community.home-assistant.io/t/reload-automations-aut...

2. https://github.com/home-assistant/supervisor/blob/main/super...

3. https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-adguard-home/issues/1...

Denvercoder95• 5 years ago

If you want to do anything more than just run Home Assistant with the system it's on, I recommend ditching their whole OS and Supervisor, and just running HA Core in a virtualenv.

The developers have shown that they're very opinionated about how their software should be used, and they're hostile to everything that falls outside of that. That makes their OS totally unusable as a general-purpose solution. Besides, it's an OS that doesn't get regular security updates, so that alone should disqualify it from serious use.

Gatsky3• 5 years ago

Well their approach allows them to deliver software that works without being inundated by issues related to someone’s peculiar set up. I don’t think ‘hostile’ is a very fair assessment.

dzikimarian2• 5 years ago

+1 to that - HASS is nice option if you don't want to host anything else on this device and/or really want add-ons and in-gui upgrades.

For me it was giving up too much control over the device. I'm running plain docker image for over a year now with zero issues. Upgrade is done by simple bash script, functionality offered by add-ons can be achieved by manual installation as add-ons are simply wrappers for various software.

Anyway HA is awesome. Highly recommend it.

JustinAiken• 5 years ago

I used to use this quite heavily, but about a year ago the move away from YAML made it too hard to keep a declarative config that can be checked into source control...

Ended up giving up and just have a dumb home now.

afavour• 5 years ago

I am very grateful for Home Assistant but I’m in a weird spot with my setup now. I’m running an old version (honestly can’t remember which) in a Docker container and when I tried to upgrade all my integrations stopped working. So I downgraded again and have been sat there ever since. Every now and then it stops responding and I restart the container.

There’s a tricky balance between a dumb appliance that doesn’t do what you want and a smart one that requires too much babysitting, and for me HA is just too far towards the latter. Not enough that I’m going to replace it tomorrow but I’ve been looking at Hubitat lately:

https://hubitat.com/

More and more I’m liking the idea of a box that runs itself more than HA does.

spacemanmatt3• 5 years ago

Every HA I setup and invested time in cratered beyond repair within a few months. I gave up due to the Discord experience.

dzikimarian2• 5 years ago

Try upgrading version by version, not directly to the newest. I've dockerized instance I upgrade very regularly for over a year, and it had zero issues.

meteo-jeff• 5 years ago

Hi balloob! I was showing my non-commercial weather API project [0] to HN 2 days ago. Another HN member was already pointing out your project.

If you are interested, we could have a look at integrating weather data without the need of your users to sign up for API plans with their personal data.

[0] https://open-meteo.com

MrDunham• 5 years ago

I just started switching to Home Assistant and LOVE it. Rather shocked to see this is just now being posted to HN to be honest.

Up until the switch I’ve had a patchwork system consisting of Alexa, Smart Life (app), Smart Things, and a lot of digital duct tape.

Having both 1) a central "command center" and 2) Zigbee/Z-Wave capabilities (requires a dongle) suddenly opens up so much more opportunities than WiFi components alone. EG I've attached door sensors to my garage doors to trigger lights and notify my dumbass when I leave the garage open at night.

Plus, I'm no longer locked into one brand's ecosystem and can keep my patchwork hardware setup.

Big fan here, strongly recommended.

Note: I have no association with any smart home brand/equipment nor home assistant… though I'd consider being associated with HA.

ocdtrekkie• 5 years ago

Rather shocked to see this is just now being posted to HN to be honest.

Home Assistant frontpages on HN probably every other month, fear not, lol.

melenaos• 5 years ago

Are there alternatives to homeassistant? I liked the idea until i figured out that i cannot easily create a new integration with my custom adruino automation.

The forums didnt had any example and the discord/irc channels couldn't help.

c0wb0yc0d3r• 5 years ago

Anyone have an idea as to why you wouldn't be able to get the PoE version with their nice looking case? Too big, too hot?

michaelmior• 5 years ago

One of my favorite uses of Home Assistant so far has been to allow to be a bridge for voice control for cheap Bluetooth lights. I'm running it off a Raspberry Pi and wrote my own code to control the lights based on a reverse engineered description of the protocol I found online. HA makes it easy to connect to Google Assistant and Alexa as well.

It's also great being able to set whatever rules for automation I want. Far more powerful than IFTTT or any routines with Google Assistant or Alexa.

djanogo• 5 years ago

I currently use HA OS for my automation and have bad experience with it and would immediately jump ship if there is any other alternative. I have my lights, thermostats and MOST importantly my pool pump automated with it. Home automation is meant to control devices VERY VERY reliably. The previous pool automation system lasted outdoors for over 30 years, I don't trust HA to last even 3 week without code issues or reboots. Most of the UI decisions don't seem well thought out.

LONG RANT

1. Too many moving pieces to get Z-Wave working, they deprecated native Z-Wave support and now use 2 or 3 different JS open source projects whose reliability is still in-flux! (running on node!, NPM is part of your home automation)

2. Z-Wave network randomly goes down, if you enable logging to debug the issue it will only show top 20 or 30 lines, no indication on how to access rest of the log data. After you google for it, you have install addons for SSH and go through bunch of steps to enable it and then google where the logs are getting stored. WHY the heck are logs not downloadable in UI?

3. Forced updates, yes the system will auto update after certain days and restart itself. No way to disable it, the dev for OS actively refuses providing option to disable auto updates. They push updates VERY frequently, multiple times every month, I guess my home automation is that dev's russian roulette? Screw your pool pump if it runs too long or doesn't run or burns itself because update messed up automation task.

4.iOS app makes your system cloud dependent!. I don't think the dev who writes iOS app uses HA himself. The app in your own home, on your own Wifi requires the local computer named connection to have valid SSL certs, it can't save signature of self signed or cloudflare or letsenrypt cert and verify that for future connections. You have to override your router DNS resolution and use public domain name. App has option for internal/external URL's but uses WiFi name to decide which to use, which requires iOS location permission!. BRUH, why don't you try local URL connection in parallel and if it connects, use it?, Why is there no option to ignore local URL cert verification and make app not internet/cloud dependent?

5. Number of "ideas" to name stuff, "Blue Prints" - Auomation template, "Scripts" - Automation without trigger, "Automation", "Devices" - DuckDNS and File Editor are devices, "Entities", "Helpers" - Variables for use in automation, "Scenes" - Goodluck, "Addons", "Integrations"

6. Significantly less reliable than Samsung Smart Home, which ran for 5 years and rebooted less than dozen times (and Samsung notified me about update reboot through email ahead of time). If you can't beat Samsung's software reliability that says something.

7. The left navigation screen is cluttered with irrelevant(for me) hard-coded links. (Energy - for solar panels because everybody got them?, Map - Why?, Media Browser - Why would I want my automation server to deal with video streams - is it reliable home automation or storage for movie files?),

8. Log book and History, why aren't these same thing with different visual options?, it's like 2 people developed them without talking to each other and both had git permission to hard code those links in left nav.

9. History defaults to 3 hours, if you change it and leave that screen it will go back to 3 hours again. Good luck debugging any issue which spans more than 3 hours.

10. iOS app starts auto-tracking iOS device properties without asking if user wants them, these properties flood your logbook and history, can't disable or delete these easily. Dozen of these properties start showing up in every screen and drop down.

Home Assistant – open-source home automation

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