Good article that gets into the details of leveraging Home Assistant (HA) to glue together various types of sensors and switches, etc.
I think categorizing HA users into 2 groups of either technical or non-technical is too coarse. You have to add another dimension that captures how much a user is willing to automate their home (making it "smart").
I'm technical, but my goal is to make things as seamless as possible. For example, my Z-Wave wall switches are the type that allow the original switch to override what the remote command sent. These in-wall Z-Wave switches are embedded in the switch box and the existing switch is then low voltage.
The same for my thermostat. Any household member can override locally. I detect the change and make sure I hold that new value over any automations that run that day.
In the end, my HA setup is pretty minimal with no HA add-ons and a few integrations, such as Z-WaveJS2MQTT and MQTT being the most used. This way I rarely hit any issues upgrading HA.
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.
> making all power switches controllable from a central private endpoint would be nice
This is what Zigbee and Z-Wave are for, and I would say one one of the main points of using home assistant: to keep it all local. The Nabu Casa stuff just allows you to access your required local home assistant setup (RPi, VM, whatever) without having to mess with DMZ to allow direct connections. Self hosted in the whole point of it all.
If you buy smart devices that require cloud connections, then home assistant can also work with many of those, but it ends up being a much worse experience when turning your lightbulb on requires sending an http request halfway around the world and back.
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 disconnect on every switch, so you don't need to go to the breaker box just to change a lightbulb.
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 that would find that level of tinkering and fixing overwhelming - but I must say that Home Assistant is moving positively in that direction by really focusing on UX - and having a giant community keeping integrations updated, even unofficial reverse-engineered ones, is great.
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.
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.
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.
Home Assistant is the Linux Desktop of consumer applications. Tons of power under the hood and it is not designed with the end user in mind. Home Assistant has accomplished something literally no one else has, including Google, Amazon and Apple. Home Assistant has the best integration across the most number of devices. It is also extremely reliable and you can run it without the cloud.
If you want easy to install, I would suggest using Alexa with Alexa compatible devices. Amazon has really made Home Automation easy.
I agree that Home Assistant documentation is really bad. If you are technical and want to stick it out with Home Assistant, there are Python bridges you can use to write your own custom code.
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 just a very poorly ran and guided open source project. I ended up buying a Hubitat last year and it's required a lot less effort to run.
I am using Home Assistant for my home automation for about 4 years now, before just lurking. For me Home Assistant is about quantity, not quality. Look at the massive amount of Integrations, currently sitting at almost 2000 [1]. Which is really impressive, but not even half of them are apparently used [2]?
Another example of this was when Blueprints were introduced [3]. I really, really love the idea of having templated automations, and I even introduced them into my setup. But sharing Blueprints is clunky, not mentioning updating Blueprints, which is borderline impossible from UI. Or at least, I haven't figured it out yet.
I still wouldn't recommend Home Assistant to a non-technical person, as some aspects are really hard to work out. Even if you're *Ops person.
> On caveat is that I have started running into some reliability issues (occasional device unavailability) once I exceeded 50 or so devices. This seems to be common for Zigbee networks,
It's patently ridiculous that you could add a lightbulb to your network and be unable to get in your front door the next day because now you have too many devices.
Even more so when you consider that the standard is twenty years old and should be extremely mature.
This is the problem with all this home automation stuff...all of them, Zigbee, Zwave, wifi - seem to crap out as soon as you have a decent number of devices. WiFi seems the least robust for high device count, but why haven't Zwave and Zigbee figured out how to get their systems to work for a large number of devices, a decade-ish into things?
Security is also something of a joke for both zigbee and z-wave.
> I'm excited about the upcoming Matter and Thread standards which are likely to replace/augment Zigbee (and Z-wave) as true interoperable home automation connectivity standards.
Interoperable, but you'll be forced by vendors to use someone's online services. There is no way Matter and Thread will be designed in such a way that you will have freedom from paying somebody every month and give data that will eventually make its way to marketers.
Edit: the author's upstairs window automation devices are ludicrously dangerous from a fire safety standpoint as there appears to be no easy way to open them if the device breaks or loses power. Folks, do not remove manual control from windows. It's not just dangerous, it's likely illegal. Windows and doors MUST be operable, easily, by one hand.
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 will not share this information."
3) Nabu Casa then started to hire up the more active community developers and set off on their own closed vision.
4) NC has bought up many of the associated pieces - the companion apps, the ESP32 stuff, etc, etc.
5) NC has hired many of the community developers and now quite some secrecy around the roadmaps and decisions.
6) You dare not question decisions or you get thrown off the forums and Discord channels for life. Many cases of this happening. They have a community manager who is particularly sensitive over any perceived negative comment and prone to going off to which the founder needs to step in and smooth the emotions. Not sure why they've not fired him after strike 4 or 5.
The end result is that Home Assistant is far less open than it was. It is going the same path pFsense did under the ownership of Netgate.
The challenge is many people invested into it and when it implodes it won't be pretty. I am hopeful someone forks it with a better community engagement model.
(I've been a user since the start, and a contributor in the early days. Left the community due to my work being monetized by NC without my consent.)
Great article, thanks for posting. I've been on a smart home journey myself, but I'm still currently relying on Alexa for most integration and a Hue Bridge. It works well for the 30-40 devices I currently have.
I totally agree that Home Assistant is probably the way forward for many power users, but it doesn't quite feel beginner-friendly enough yet (although the HA devs do seem to be making some great improvements in this area).
I'm still undecided on Matter and Thread. Both are naturally great technologies, but I can't see Google/Nest opening up to Amazon/Ring and vice versa. Not in any meaningful way, at least. My hunch is that Matter will help smaller smart home companies, but not make much difference for the pre-existing 'walled gardens' that the market has. I hope that I'm wrong though.
(Disclaimer: I blog and do YouTube videos as Smart Home Point, but I mainly cover consumer friendly products - and hence I haven't delved into Home Assistant too much)
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.
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?) Color
I highly recommend buying some Zigbee switch modules [1] and wiring them up behind your regular light switches. They convert any light switch into a smart switch that can be controlled through your Zigbee network. (This can be dangerous, but just make sure you turn off the power first, wear gloves, and learn all about line, neutral, ground. Get a good multimeter and triple check everything.)
I'd recommend checking out some of the "smart relay" devices that let you reuse your existing light switches.
e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Compatible-SmartThings-Philips-ZBBrid... - this one says "2 way" but I'm pretty sure you can wire it up with two physical lightswitches to get the 3-way behavior that you're after. The wiring diagram on the amazon product page suggests as much.
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.
I really enjoyed reading this, thanks for posting. I've been struggling to find a more sustainable solution on my end for all the sensors and buttons I have set up. Anecdotally I feel their battery life tends to be shorter based on whether they're in busy locations or not. I've ordered the CR2477 and CR2450 batteries they use in bigger quantities but I'd much rather be able to recharge them instead. Have you ever found devices of this type that allow them to be recharged?
I tried to build a company around this in ~2014, we built our own boards and everything, and had a fork with HASS that had more defaults based on our hardware. Too bad it didn't quite work out as a business.
Ubiquiti also briefly employed the founder of Home Assistant in 2018 and paid him specifically to work on it. People speculated that they were considering releasing some sort of product built on HA, but it never materialized.
It's maybe for the better from a user/community POV, but I'm surprised there hasn't been more commercial interest. HA in its current form is still probably a bit too technical for mass market, but I would think a company could easily spruce it up a bit and instantly have a fairly strong software ecosystem and a lot of good will as long as they handled it right.
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.
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 thousand GBP worth of Hue bulbs? That feels like a yes, just put in the cheapest bulbs.
And so it begins... some things stay, some things go, and the tooling is the hardest. This person has touch screen control panels and Home Assistant. Even if you left it behind, you'd need to transfer the knowledge around it too. But remove it, and the house goes beyond dumb in many ways.
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 you do update them. It's a small but constant stream of maintenance tasks once your HA installation reaches a certain degree of complexity and new owner is likely not going to be interested in that at all?
For me and my own HA install, I accept I will have to revert everything to how it was when I bought the home, which is itself a really tragic statement on the state of home automation in 2022. I get satisfaction from running it, but it does require running. It is not an "appliance", and there are still no real building codes/standards for ensuring these things stay compatible for years to come.
Similarly, if the seller tried to convince me to take a house with their own home made HomeAssistant setup, I would likely request it be removed completely before I closed the sale, regardless of any perceived quality of the work. If nothing else, I couldn't trust they hadn't left their own remote access ability somewhere in the stack and I don't have time to audit what might be years of quite hacky integration work.
There is an old saying, "Never sell a car to a friend". Home assistant is like that, but you should never sell it to anyone, regardless of how good you think you've got it running today.
10 years ago I sold a house that had only a couple smart switches, and I took them out before we listed and replaced them with regular switches.
A few months ago I sold a house a house with lots of Insteon stuff, and I left almost all of it in place. Partly it was because we sold quickly and I didn't have time, and partly because it was 9+ year old gear anyway. Insteon has the benefit that the keypad scenes and switch-to-switch links work without a hub. I took my hubs (ISY99 and HomeAssistant) which means no automations or timers.
I would have left the ISY99 if the new buyers had asked, but I didn't want to provide tech support of any sort for it. The downside of this type of gear compared to (the orders-of-magnitude more expensive) commercial stuff is you really have to know quite a bit about it to manage it. For the most part there's really not any local trades people you can call for service, and frankly, it's not worth the headache as a seller to even try to explain any of this.
In my new (current) house I'm in the process of installing Zwave switches. I think they're pretty hub-dependent, which is definitely a downside compared to Insteon for resale. I am really not sure what I'll do when I move, but hopefully it will be several years before that's an issue. I am fairly certain though that HomeAssistant (both software and ecosystem) won't be at the point where I could just leave it for the new owners and not cause more trouble for myself than it's worth.
I've been wiring up my house for the past couple years. All of our light/dimmer/fan switches are Lutron Caseta and work without a hub. You can add the hub for additional automation and functionality, but you don't need it. Without the hub, the switch controls the device and it just works.
When we leave my plan is to leave the Caseta system in place. Some of the devices are wireless and some switches have batteries (CR2032). We did this so we could put switches in locations you would normally have switches in a modern home without having to tear out the walls and rewire an 80 year old home. Ripping the system out is not an option, and I'm ok with that.
Everything else is going with me. All the z-wave outlets, bulbs, timers, sensors, etc. will still be useful in a new home. I've saved all my old outlets so it will be an easy swap switching the new back to the old.
The only thing I'm unsure about is the Wyze camera/security system I am currently building out. My expectation is that by the time I even think of selling my home it will be obsolete so I'll probably just leave it for the new owners to worry about.
This is why I opted for Shelly on my house build. The dimmers keep dimming and everything works regularly without a hub/HA/Wifi. Leaving the modules inside the light switches. No need for special bulbs and having switches with springs allows any light to be dimmed as long as the fixture/bulb supports it.
I just did this, and it's... fun. Particularly account transfers--most devices that are tied to internet accounts (like Nest) don't allow you to transfer them to other accounts.
So hard-resetting them is often the only option, which is often a time consuming process in itself (I'm looking at you Insteon) and throws away the configuration.
I didn't even attempt to leave the HomeAssistant-based stuff in place.
The most-requested feature for boringproxy has been WebSockets support (which landed in master just this week), from what I can tell primarily because Home Assistant needs it. I hadn't realized how popular HA is. Their forum is very active:
Home Assistant is also quite useful in a Company Office / Small Business.
There's daily "added value" on repetitive tasks and simple automations that provide immediate productivity gains.
It's also a great platform to implement weird "physical workflows" that aren't common in household scenarios.
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).
Sufficiently advanced home automation is indistinguishable from a haunting.
Lighting controlled by home-assistant is endlessly frustrating. Especially if zwave. The networks are slow, the devices are awkward to configure, and when things go wrong debugging is difficult. Sometimes it takes my lights a good 60 seconds to respond during which time I'll try a few different button dances which all then get lifo queued... End result is light automation that works 95% of the time with the 5% remainder being enough to sour the whole experience.
This isn't home-assistant's "fault," it's the zwave product space being a convoluted mess that HA tries to paper over. Other integrations are better but each integration is a separate plugin thing so quality depends on who wrote the plugin.
My house got a 10% premium due to the home-assistant setup according to the realtor. Lights and music and blinds all easily controlled from an iPad mounted to a thing in the hall. I left all the equipment including the raspberry pi that ran HA, but I took the SD card for privacy reasons. 99% certainty that they don't even know what Z-wave is let alone how to rebuild the network... I'm sure that if I buy a "smart house" in the future it will be beyond my abilities.
I can't imagine the state of these houses one or two generations down the line.
I witnessed "smart" houses when my parents' blinders died in "down" position and had no manual override... or when the electricity was down and they couldn't start their wood stove because it needs electricity to work...
I think some people are just so drawn to tech that they end up in these kind of rabbit holes. It reminds me of my nerd friends in uni who spent weeks configuring their linux distro from scratch just to start over a few months later, they were showing me their new shiny shells, how the trackpad finally worked with X and Y drivers, how their tiling window manager was better than macos'.
I don't think the end goal for them is to have a useable thing, it's more about tinkering and probably some form of attention seeking.
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 turn off the lights after 30 seconds. When I press it again, it turns off the noise and stops the sleep tracking. If we didn't have Home Assistant we'd have to do all these things manually multiple times a day. Instead it just takes a single button press.
It's a small example, but things like this will keep popping up, and I'm looking forward to making them easier.
I struggle with this too. Whilst there is a lot of opportunities for learning and fun when setting these systems up, you soon forget how things intermingle and monitoring, upgrading, or debugging things becomes a chore.
Systems like this balloon in complexity with all of the different server hardware, IoT standards, subnets, cables, etc. For the average user, things that aren't easy or set-and-forget are probably too much. That sense of overwhelm is my personal experience, at least.
I get the geeky joy of monitoring and possibly automatically controlling things, but the added benefit feels marginal at best for a home. It’s less than marginal unless you go big into the automation.
The other thing that jades me to automation is that in my experience with technology, you either get a easy to use, but limited, remotely brickable, subscriptionware, or you have to roll your own, and end up debugging your bathtub. Neither is very appealing.
I generally agree with this, although I'm also a fan of home automation. I want all my switches to continue to work (they do), no internet connection between me and my automated devices, no complicated "scenes", and I don't want to mess around with some UI every day. Setup, sure, but that's it.
So in the end I have lights that turn on in any room we're in and turn themselves off some time after we've left. My porch light adjusts itself according to time of day, and my laundry tells me when it's done, which is huge for us since it's in the basement.
I keep it simple (one JS file controls the whole house), but it's still a life improvement.
My toddler recently knocked over my poorly placed server which damaged the zwave dongle. Replacing it took a couple hours, but the week spent without the automations was noticable.
There's something about every room lighting up as I walk through the house that makes it feel more welcoming. A bit warmer.
Also, my son loves to turn off the dining room light and then try to run through the dining room as fast as he can without setting off the motion sensor. It turns on every time, but it's a joy to watch.
Misquoted from the Internet: Tech enthusiasts have voice-controlled smart home hubs; sysadmins have a printer and a gun next to it to shoot the printer if it starts acting up.
I mostly agree. I have a few smart switches for main lighting (5 switches of 20+) with basic automations (turn off at bed time, turn on front step and foyer when I get close to home after dark, turn all on if motion sensor trips while I'm not home).
Every time I think about expanding this, I remember what a PITA it was to setup the basic stuff. And I don't bother. I'll walk my lazy ass to the switch instead.
Doesn't help that Smartthings is a dumpster fire of shitty UX that glitches regularly. Anything "better" like HomeAssistant is the rough equivalent of using Linux desktop in the late 90s/early 00s.
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 on it - dimmers, hues, scheduled and presence lighting/heating, etc. Once this is done, accepted and integrated in everyday life, move to more advanced gadgetry.
Without knowing your home, it's hard to say. I think the biggest benefit right now is sun rise alarm lights and circadian rhythm lights. This should have a noticeable benefit for everyone. The hardest part is figuring out what to do with your physical light switches.
At the end of the day though, the ones that benefit the most from home automation are enthusiasts who enjoy tinkering. If that's not you, get some hue lights and light switches, and call it a day.
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
[+] [-] idatum|4 years ago|reply
I think categorizing HA users into 2 groups of either technical or non-technical is too coarse. You have to add another dimension that captures how much a user is willing to automate their home (making it "smart").
I'm technical, but my goal is to make things as seamless as possible. For example, my Z-Wave wall switches are the type that allow the original switch to override what the remote command sent. These in-wall Z-Wave switches are embedded in the switch box and the existing switch is then low voltage.
The same for my thermostat. Any household member can override locally. I detect the change and make sure I hold that new value over any automations that run that day.
In the end, my HA setup is pretty minimal with no HA add-ons and a few integrations, such as Z-WaveJS2MQTT and MQTT being the most used. This way I rarely hit any issues upgrading HA.
[+] [-] reacharavindh|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nomel|4 years ago|reply
This is what Zigbee and Z-Wave are for, and I would say one one of the main points of using home assistant: to keep it all local. The Nabu Casa stuff just allows you to access your required local home assistant setup (RPi, VM, whatever) without having to mess with DMZ to allow direct connections. Self hosted in the whole point of it all.
If you buy smart devices that require cloud connections, then home assistant can also work with many of those, but it ends up being a much worse experience when turning your lightbulb on requires sending an http request halfway around the world and back.
[+] [-] crooked-v|4 years ago|reply
They've also covered basic usability issues that a lot of other smart switches overlook, like having a hard disconnect on every switch, so you don't need to go to the breaker box just to change a lightbulb.
[+] [-] llamataboot|4 years ago|reply
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 that would find that level of tinkering and fixing overwhelming - but I must say that Home Assistant is moving positively in that direction by really focusing on UX - and having a giant community keeping integrations updated, even unofficial reverse-engineered ones, is great.
[+] [-] tra3|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 01100011|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmathai|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] empiricus|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nouveaux|4 years ago|reply
If you want easy to install, I would suggest using Alexa with Alexa compatible devices. Amazon has really made Home Automation easy.
I agree that Home Assistant documentation is really bad. If you are technical and want to stick it out with Home Assistant, there are Python bridges you can use to write your own custom code.
[+] [-] snapetom|4 years ago|reply
It's just a very poorly ran and guided open source project. I ended up buying a Hubitat last year and it's required a lot less effort to run.
[+] [-] alex3305|4 years ago|reply
Another example of this was when Blueprints were introduced [3]. I really, really love the idea of having templated automations, and I even introduced them into my setup. But sharing Blueprints is clunky, not mentioning updating Blueprints, which is borderline impossible from UI. Or at least, I haven't figured it out yet.
I still wouldn't recommend Home Assistant to a non-technical person, as some aspects are really hard to work out. Even if you're *Ops person.
1. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/ 2. https://analytics.home-assistant.io/#integrations 3. https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/12/13/release-202012...
[+] [-] KennyBlanken|4 years ago|reply
It's patently ridiculous that you could add a lightbulb to your network and be unable to get in your front door the next day because now you have too many devices.
Even more so when you consider that the standard is twenty years old and should be extremely mature.
This is the problem with all this home automation stuff...all of them, Zigbee, Zwave, wifi - seem to crap out as soon as you have a decent number of devices. WiFi seems the least robust for high device count, but why haven't Zwave and Zigbee figured out how to get their systems to work for a large number of devices, a decade-ish into things?
Security is also something of a joke for both zigbee and z-wave.
> I'm excited about the upcoming Matter and Thread standards which are likely to replace/augment Zigbee (and Z-wave) as true interoperable home automation connectivity standards.
Interoperable, but you'll be forced by vendors to use someone's online services. There is no way Matter and Thread will be designed in such a way that you will have freedom from paying somebody every month and give data that will eventually make its way to marketers.
Edit: the author's upstairs window automation devices are ludicrously dangerous from a fire safety standpoint as there appears to be no easy way to open them if the device breaks or loses power. Folks, do not remove manual control from windows. It's not just dangerous, it's likely illegal. Windows and doors MUST be operable, easily, by one hand.
[+] [-] sanguy|4 years ago|reply
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 will not share this information."
3) Nabu Casa then started to hire up the more active community developers and set off on their own closed vision.
4) NC has bought up many of the associated pieces - the companion apps, the ESP32 stuff, etc, etc.
5) NC has hired many of the community developers and now quite some secrecy around the roadmaps and decisions.
6) You dare not question decisions or you get thrown off the forums and Discord channels for life. Many cases of this happening. They have a community manager who is particularly sensitive over any perceived negative comment and prone to going off to which the founder needs to step in and smooth the emotions. Not sure why they've not fired him after strike 4 or 5.
The end result is that Home Assistant is far less open than it was. It is going the same path pFsense did under the ownership of Netgate.
The challenge is many people invested into it and when it implodes it won't be pretty. I am hopeful someone forks it with a better community engagement model.
(I've been a user since the start, and a contributor in the early days. Left the community due to my work being monetized by NC without my consent.)
[+] [-] tristanperry|4 years ago|reply
I totally agree that Home Assistant is probably the way forward for many power users, but it doesn't quite feel beginner-friendly enough yet (although the HA devs do seem to be making some great improvements in this area).
I'm still undecided on Matter and Thread. Both are naturally great technologies, but I can't see Google/Nest opening up to Amazon/Ring and vice versa. Not in any meaningful way, at least. My hunch is that Matter will help smaller smart home companies, but not make much difference for the pre-existing 'walled gardens' that the market has. I hope that I'm wrong though.
(Disclaimer: I blog and do YouTube videos as Smart Home Point, but I mainly cover consumer friendly products - and hence I haven't delved into Home Assistant too much)
[+] [-] vladgur|4 years ago|reply
But overall customization is in fact a major time sink regardless of hardware you use
[+] [-] nomel|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] coreyp_1|4 years ago|reply
This is what i need that is evidently so difficult to find: 1. Zigbee 2. 3-way 3. Dimmable 4. Beige (almond?) Color
Any ideas?
[+] [-] nathan_f77|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002164359835.html?spm=a2...
[+] [-] benley|4 years ago|reply
e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Compatible-SmartThings-Philips-ZBBrid... - this one says "2 way" but I'm pretty sure you can wire it up with two physical lightswitches to get the 3-way behavior that you're after. The wiring diagram on the amazon product page suggests as much.
I've personally used this Aeotec z-wave variant and it has worked well for me: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XC4CH98
[+] [-] mafro|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pydry|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0ld|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] casenjo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FanaHOVA|4 years ago|reply
The 3D designs for the hardware cases are still on GitHub: https://github.com/Smart-Torvy/3D-Objects
[+] [-] gh02t|4 years ago|reply
It's maybe for the better from a user/community POV, but I'm surprised there hasn't been more commercial interest. HA in its current form is still probably a bit too technical for mass market, but I would think a company could easily spruce it up a bit and instantly have a fairly strong software ecosystem and a lot of good will as long as they handled it right.
[+] [-] spaetzleesser|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buro9|4 years ago|reply
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 thousand GBP worth of Hue bulbs? That feels like a yes, just put in the cheapest bulbs.
And so it begins... some things stay, some things go, and the tooling is the hardest. This person has touch screen control panels and Home Assistant. Even if you left it behind, you'd need to transfer the knowledge around it too. But remove it, and the house goes beyond dumb in many ways.
[+] [-] giobox|4 years ago|reply
For me and my own HA install, I accept I will have to revert everything to how it was when I bought the home, which is itself a really tragic statement on the state of home automation in 2022. I get satisfaction from running it, but it does require running. It is not an "appliance", and there are still no real building codes/standards for ensuring these things stay compatible for years to come.
Similarly, if the seller tried to convince me to take a house with their own home made HomeAssistant setup, I would likely request it be removed completely before I closed the sale, regardless of any perceived quality of the work. If nothing else, I couldn't trust they hadn't left their own remote access ability somewhere in the stack and I don't have time to audit what might be years of quite hacky integration work.
There is an old saying, "Never sell a car to a friend". Home assistant is like that, but you should never sell it to anyone, regardless of how good you think you've got it running today.
[+] [-] gregmac|4 years ago|reply
A few months ago I sold a house a house with lots of Insteon stuff, and I left almost all of it in place. Partly it was because we sold quickly and I didn't have time, and partly because it was 9+ year old gear anyway. Insteon has the benefit that the keypad scenes and switch-to-switch links work without a hub. I took my hubs (ISY99 and HomeAssistant) which means no automations or timers.
I would have left the ISY99 if the new buyers had asked, but I didn't want to provide tech support of any sort for it. The downside of this type of gear compared to (the orders-of-magnitude more expensive) commercial stuff is you really have to know quite a bit about it to manage it. For the most part there's really not any local trades people you can call for service, and frankly, it's not worth the headache as a seller to even try to explain any of this.
In my new (current) house I'm in the process of installing Zwave switches. I think they're pretty hub-dependent, which is definitely a downside compared to Insteon for resale. I am really not sure what I'll do when I move, but hopefully it will be several years before that's an issue. I am fairly certain though that HomeAssistant (both software and ecosystem) won't be at the point where I could just leave it for the new owners and not cause more trouble for myself than it's worth.
[+] [-] bmurphy1976|4 years ago|reply
When we leave my plan is to leave the Caseta system in place. Some of the devices are wireless and some switches have batteries (CR2032). We did this so we could put switches in locations you would normally have switches in a modern home without having to tear out the walls and rewire an 80 year old home. Ripping the system out is not an option, and I'm ok with that.
Everything else is going with me. All the z-wave outlets, bulbs, timers, sensors, etc. will still be useful in a new home. I've saved all my old outlets so it will be an easy swap switching the new back to the old.
The only thing I'm unsure about is the Wyze camera/security system I am currently building out. My expectation is that by the time I even think of selling my home it will be obsolete so I'll probably just leave it for the new owners to worry about.
[+] [-] tlsalmin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bradstewart|4 years ago|reply
So hard-resetting them is often the only option, which is often a time consuming process in itself (I'm looking at you Insteon) and throws away the configuration.
I didn't even attempt to leave the HomeAssistant-based stuff in place.
[+] [-] anderspitman|4 years ago|reply
https://community.home-assistant.io/
[+] [-] dmatos|4 years ago|reply
It's also a great platform to implement weird "physical workflows" that aren't common in household scenarios.
[+] [-] turtlebits|4 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] ryanianian|4 years ago|reply
Lighting controlled by home-assistant is endlessly frustrating. Especially if zwave. The networks are slow, the devices are awkward to configure, and when things go wrong debugging is difficult. Sometimes it takes my lights a good 60 seconds to respond during which time I'll try a few different button dances which all then get lifo queued... End result is light automation that works 95% of the time with the 5% remainder being enough to sour the whole experience.
This isn't home-assistant's "fault," it's the zwave product space being a convoluted mess that HA tries to paper over. Other integrations are better but each integration is a separate plugin thing so quality depends on who wrote the plugin.
My house got a 10% premium due to the home-assistant setup according to the realtor. Lights and music and blinds all easily controlled from an iPad mounted to a thing in the hall. I left all the equipment including the raspberry pi that ran HA, but I took the SD card for privacy reasons. 99% certainty that they don't even know what Z-wave is let alone how to rebuild the network... I'm sure that if I buy a "smart house" in the future it will be beyond my abilities.
[+] [-] lm28469|4 years ago|reply
I witnessed "smart" houses when my parents' blinders died in "down" position and had no manual override... or when the electricity was down and they couldn't start their wood stove because it needs electricity to work...
I think some people are just so drawn to tech that they end up in these kind of rabbit holes. It reminds me of my nerd friends in uni who spent weeks configuring their linux distro from scratch just to start over a few months later, they were showing me their new shiny shells, how the trackpad finally worked with X and Y drivers, how their tiling window manager was better than macos'.
I don't think the end goal for them is to have a useable thing, it's more about tinkering and probably some form of attention seeking.
[+] [-] iamjackg|4 years ago|reply
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 turn off the lights after 30 seconds. When I press it again, it turns off the noise and stops the sleep tracking. If we didn't have Home Assistant we'd have to do all these things manually multiple times a day. Instead it just takes a single button press.
It's a small example, but things like this will keep popping up, and I'm looking forward to making them easier.
[+] [-] amphitheatre|4 years ago|reply
Systems like this balloon in complexity with all of the different server hardware, IoT standards, subnets, cables, etc. For the average user, things that aren't easy or set-and-forget are probably too much. That sense of overwhelm is my personal experience, at least.
[+] [-] jonathankoren|4 years ago|reply
The other thing that jades me to automation is that in my experience with technology, you either get a easy to use, but limited, remotely brickable, subscriptionware, or you have to roll your own, and end up debugging your bathtub. Neither is very appealing.
[+] [-] enobrev|4 years ago|reply
So in the end I have lights that turn on in any room we're in and turn themselves off some time after we've left. My porch light adjusts itself according to time of day, and my laundry tells me when it's done, which is huge for us since it's in the basement.
I keep it simple (one JS file controls the whole house), but it's still a life improvement.
My toddler recently knocked over my poorly placed server which damaged the zwave dongle. Replacing it took a couple hours, but the week spent without the automations was noticable.
There's something about every room lighting up as I walk through the house that makes it feel more welcoming. A bit warmer.
Also, my son loves to turn off the dining room light and then try to run through the dining room as fast as he can without setting off the motion sensor. It turns on every time, but it's a joy to watch.
[+] [-] dsr_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alistairSH|4 years ago|reply
Every time I think about expanding this, I remember what a PITA it was to setup the basic stuff. And I don't bother. I'll walk my lazy ass to the switch instead.
Doesn't help that Smartthings is a dumpster fire of shitty UX that glitches regularly. Anything "better" like HomeAssistant is the rough equivalent of using Linux desktop in the late 90s/early 00s.
[+] [-] huhtenberg|4 years ago|reply
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 on it - dimmers, hues, scheduled and presence lighting/heating, etc. Once this is done, accepted and integrated in everyday life, move to more advanced gadgetry.
[+] [-] thebean11|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] everyone|4 years ago|reply
I can't think of anything significant, certainly nothing to justify the cost (not just money, also time, embodied energy etc).
Though I have 0 experience with this stuff, so I am asking a genuine question.
[+] [-] markvdb|4 years ago|reply
- burglary alarm
- smoke alarm
- no guests? all lights off
- minimal heat in winter to prevent freezing pipes
- preheat home and boiler before arrival
- ...
[+] [-] nouveaux|4 years ago|reply
At the end of the day though, the ones that benefit the most from home automation are enthusiasts who enjoy tinkering. If that's not you, get some hue lights and light switches, and call it a day.
[+] [-] 0ld|4 years ago|reply
The only annoying thing are random breaking changes which make me overhaul my configs a couple of times per year