balloob

WebSerial just landed in Firefox nightly! https://bsky.app/profile/paulusschoutsen.nl/post/3mjfdx3ujta...

Kalman filters are great! For people interested of one used in practice, it's used by Sendspin to keep speakers in sync, even works in browsers on phones on 5G etc.

Open the Sendspin live demo in your browser: https://www.sendspin-audio.com/#live-demo

Some more info on Kalman implementation here https://github.com/Sendspin/time-filter/blob/main/docs%2Fthe...

Home Assistant [1] has been written using web components and it has been great. In 13 years that we've been around, we never had to do a full rewrite of the frontend but always have been able to gradually update components as needed. Not being tied to the JavaScript industry upgrade cycle (which is short!), has allowed us to pick our own priorities.

We currently use Lit for the framework on top (you do need one, that's fine). For state management we just pass props around, works great and allows community to easily develop custom cards that can plug into our frontend.

The downside is lack of available components. Although we're not tied to a single framework, and can pick any web component framework, the choices are somewhat limited. We're currently on material components and migrating some to Shoelace.

I talked more about our approach to frontend last year at the Syntax podcast[2].

[1] https://www.home-assistant.io [2] https://syntax.fm/show/880/creator-of-home-assistant-web-com...

This has never been the case. Custom elements are DOM Elements and so are just JavaScript objects. Just like you can do aEl.disabled = true, you can set any prop to any type of value.

Does the new app make it easier for users to expose the Ollama daemon on the network (and mdns discovery )? It’s still trickier than needed for Home Assistant users to get started with Ollama (which tends to run on a different machine).

Sounds very cool! Also interested in how to follow progress. Is it using ESPHome?

We don't want to come to rely on donations and have to show Wikipedia-style beg banners in our app (I would personally hate to see that myself).

So with the limited resources that we have, we currently only consider bigger donations valued $10k or more. We've had monetary donations from DuckDuckGo and Espressif so far.

Founder Home Assistant here. Want to chime in that I always love to see write ups like these to see the great things what people achieve with Home Assistant.

Not everyone might know, but last year we started the Open Home Foundation as a non-profit in Switzerland and I donated Home Assistant to it[1]. It's fully funded by users. There are no investors involved.

We are fully committed to building out a smart home that focuses on local control and privacy. Yes there are rough edges, but we're actively working on it in the open, with progress being released every month.

~Paulus, Founder Home Assistant & President Open Home Foundation https://github.com/balloob

[1] https://www.openhomefoundation.org/blog/announcing-the-open-...

Wifi yes. Thread depends on the settings on the Thread Border Router. Ours defaults to no internet access.

Maybe not exactly what you are looking for, but check out the Shelly BLU Button1. It's a BLE button with a long battery life.

It sends out BLE packets when pressed, which can be picked up by Home Assistant via a Bluetooth adapter or using a Bluetooth Proxy. You can make the latter with any ESP32 and https://esphome.io/projects/?type=bluetooth

There is Zigbee, Z-Wave and Matter. These are all smart home standards that are fully local and devices will be able to be set up and used even when the company goes out of business. You are however limited to the things that are standardized.

If you want to go a step further, look for devices made for ESPHome or devices made by Shelly. Both have local APIs and are very hackable.

(disclosure: I am the president of the Open Home Foundation and ESPHome is one of our projects and I am also a board member of the Z-Wave alliance)

Founder Home Assistant here. Want to chime in that I always love to see write ups like these to see the great things what people achieve with Home Assistant.

Not everyone might know, but last year we started the Open Home Foundation[1] as a non-profit in Switzerland and I donated Home Assistant to it[2]. It's fully funded by users. There are no investors involved.

We are fully committed to building out a smart home that focuses on local control and privacy. Yes there are rough edges, but we're actively working on it in the open, with progress being released every month.

~Paulus Founder Home Assistant & President Open Home Foundation https://github.com/balloob

[1] https://www.openhomefoundation.org [2]: https://www.openhomefoundation.org/blog/announcing-the-open-...

We need to stop chasing compatible API endpoints and work towards an AI standard. I wrote about it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42887610

Our launch post covers a lot of the original intentions and a good starting point: https://www.openhomefoundation.org/blog/announcing-the-open-...

The way the world works, you need to be either a company or a non-profit to be able to partner with the industry. Just being an open source project is not enough.

Since the launch of the foundation, we see a large uptick in companies and universities reaching out to partner with Home Assistant. A lot of manufacturers are very happy to see that an independent platform is being established as alternative to the big tech platforms. Universities want to collaborate on energy and privacy research for the smart home. We've also seen some industry donations (ie DuckDuckGo) to support our work.

Not from our side. You can see our roadmap here; https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/11/15/roadmap-2024h2...

Now the community should be able to create such things, as our automation engine is very powerful.

I think the challenge in general with room presence detection is that these systems are not very common/reliable yet for us to aim to standardize.

You're right. Home Assistant is the best toolbox out there, but people need to build things themselves. That's something we plan to tackle, but no timeline. Leak sensors, smoke detectors, CO2 sensors, garage door openers, they can all have benefit from some built-in automations to warn when a problem is detected.

We are working on the automations UI as we speak!

(this can also be seen on our roadmap update https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/11/15/roadmap-2024h2... )

We have very good relationships across the industry, especially the bigger companies. I literally just came back from a meeting with Google Home :)

Where we see the most pushback is from industries adjacent to the smart home, as they don't appreciate the openness. Think garage doors, cars, or cloud data providers for info that can be useful in the home.

When someone complains, like Mazda [1], we pull their integration and communicate their stance to our shared users, and people considering buying into their products. We don't fight for access, as a manufacturer with a cloud service will always be able to find a way. If it is a local device though, our community tends to find a way[2]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/10/mazdas-dmca-takedown-ki... [2]: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/11/06/removal-of-myq...

Like the other commenter said, smart switches are the way to go. I prefer the Shelly modules behind light switches. They are tiny, affordable and their new generation does Zigbee/Wifi/Matter/Bluetooth, so always something that suits your installation.

We've actively managing our backwards incompatible changes, but sometimes it's out of our control (ie an API change). For things we deprecate in Home Assistant, it is a minimum of 6 months period where we print warnings with alternatives. Integrations set up via the UI, will only change for improvement if we can ensure there is a migration path (sometimes requiring adding some extra info).

Some backwards incompatible changes like requiring a new Z-Wave JS version are also able to be managed automatically by Home Assistant. However, because of choice, there are many ways Home Assistant can be installed and we're not always responsible for the installation.

I believe that we can do better in knowing what integrations you use, and mapping that against the integrations that require changes.

Founder of Home Assistant here. Let me know if anyone has any questions about the project or the Open Home Foundation (which now owns Home Assistant, ESPHome etc)

This is Home Assistant. Everything is hackable.

Inside Home Assistant the processing is delegated to integrations providing Speech-to-Text, command processing, Text-to-Speech. You can make custom integrations for all of them

Our estimates are more than a million active instances https://analytics.home-assistant.io/

Use the voice activity detector we wrote for Home Assistant. It works very well: https://github.com/rhasspy/pymicro-vad

The foundation can only work in the interest of privacy, choice and sustainability for the smart home. It is important that we have a thriving ecosystem of communities and companies working towards this goal. You cannot do this with just a single player. If, at some hypothetical point in the future, that means it will work against my interests, then the foundation is doing exactly what we created it for.

If there are people reading this and are excited to try out ESPHome: try it out without writing a single line of configuration by installing some of our ready-made projects: https://esphome.io/projects/

It allows you to turn a cheap microcontroller into a voice assistant, bluetooth proxy or media player directly from your browser.

One of the people leading ESPHome here. Let me know if there any questions.

Last Saturday we announced that ESPHome is now owned by the Open Home Foundation. The Open Home Foundation fights for privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart homes. And for every person who lives in one. Learn more at https://www.openhomefoundation.org/blog/announcing-the-open-...

I use this one and it works great: https://github.com/kbx81/ClimateSprinklerController

This is coming in the next release.

Thanks! We're continuously improving it and nowadays have two people full-time working on it.

If you want to hear about the future of ESPHome, make sure to tune into the State of the Open Home next week: https://www.youtube.com/live/oa__fLArsFk