Home Assistant OS Release 8
Very frequently discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=home-assistant.io
I haven’t used home assistant much in earnest, but I have some gripes after dabbling:
- to get the most out of it, it wants to be installed as an “OS” on a dedicated device (like a raspberry pi). Without doing this, you can’t install add ons from the store. I’m guessing this might be because the add-ons themselves are packaged with docker?
- I went ahead and did what they wanted, and dedicated an entire raspberry pi to home assistant. But from there, it seemed extremely GUI oriented… I had to install an add on just to see my config files! I know plenty of people have had success keeping their configs in version control, but that seems to be fighting the current.
So as a particularly advanced user, I don’t think Home Assistant is for me. Which is perfectly fine!
Does anyone have any recommendations on home automation software for people who write code for a living? The main thing I’m after is a decent library of supported devices that I don’t have to reverse engineer and write SDKs for myself. I’d also like to dump any/all sensor readings and switch states into Prometheus and view data with grafana.
HASS makes it to the top of HN about once a month for good reason!
Probably one of the most well developed open source projects I've seen, both from core contributors finding a way to get paid for what they do every day with nabu casa as well as a large and thriving community.
Over the past two years there's been a ton of work put into making things more plug and play and GUI for folks, but all the technical wiring under the boards is still there for doing just about anything you want.
I have basically everything off the cloud, except for a few things I want on there. If you want everything off the cloud you'd be wise to do a bit of research and get a zigbee and or zwave stick.
Don't blame HASS for IoT providers that are routinely pushing up firmware that breaks anything that interfaces with their products without going through their cloud, but for most things there are things out there that work great without it.
I have been using home assistance for a few years now, having migrated from the SmartThings eco system.
Over all I am happy with it, but it is increasingly harder to find devices that are not cloud encumbered, even some things that have integrations with HA are basically HA interacting with the OEM cloud API, which not local control.
I prefer zigbee, but I fear the migration from Zigbee to "Matter" is going in the wrong direction, as Amazon and Google are really pushing cloud based control over Local Control...
I've been bitten by HA twice now. One time the Pi it was on simply slowed to a crawl all of a sudden; killing HA fixed that issue, including for large-ish writes to the SD, but that's hardly an option. Second time it broke on me it simply started throwing tons of errors after an upgrade. Both incidents at a time when I had other things to do than spend hours fixing the light switches. Also that terrible YAML DSL was a huge pain since I need this sort of thing infrequently enough to never remember how it works. I definitely can see the appeal but I don't want things like light switches to depend on something that flaky.
Currently running an instance of deconz for all the zigbee essentials which is a lot less powerful but has been rock solid. I have a bunch of Go apps running on the living room Kubernetes, one that streams all events from Deconz and a few other sources to Kafka running on a Raspberry Pi and a few more that add automations that deconz can't do. I'd expected this to be flaky as hell, so the apps running there aren't critical, but it's been rock solid for over a year even though Kafka isn't even supposed to run on ARM.
I wanted to jump in and praise this project. After INSTEON suddenly shut down last month, I was able to set up Home Assistant and restore control to the perfectly functional network of devices orphaned by their makers.
Great work, all!
Always seamed to me overengineered. Maybe is because I'm skeptical about automations, and I like physical buttons, one button that does something, and automations made in solid and reliable ways (such as mechanical relays for example). But if I need something "smart", and I have a couple of devices in my house, with a couple of automations (basically for laziness, not something I couldn't have done by pulling some extra wires and with mechanical timers and relays), I do them in the most simple and clean solution.
Now all the automations rely on a local MQTT server where my devices connects to an a ~300 lines python program, that communicates with the MQTT server and applies all the automations, and also exposes a simple REST API to do things with a simple `curl` if I need so. Everything (MQTT server and python script) runs on my home router that has OpenWRT on it. I find it simpler to express automations with code than with complex web interfaces or yaml configuration files that are as complex as a program.
My biggest issue with HomeAssistant at the moment is the refusal of the Devs to support Single sign on methods. Several have been submitted via pull requests and almost gone through and then dropped based on very poor reasoning in my opinion. There is an auth header addon in HACS but without official support the android app is a buggy mess to get working.
HA is the only service I am running now that isn't hooked into my SSO and it's a niggling frustration to say the least.
I’ve been using a Pi 4 with Home Assistant for the last 2 years, but I’ve accumulated so many devices in its dashboard that just turning a light off felt too cumbersome.
Sure, I’ve automated everything I could, but humans are not predictable so I often need to adjust brightness or volume of some device.
I had some keyboard shortcuts in BetterTouchTool using the HA REST API but it felt too fragile. In the end I created my own app to make this easier, called Volum (https://lowtechguys.com/volum)
It gives you macOS keyboard shortcuts and a really simple UI on iOS and iPadOS to control your HA devices and it’s completely free if you want to try it.
I’ve also made a short unprofessional demo video here about it: https://youtu.be/nzz-xrEon7g
“ About Home Assistant
Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server”
I wish there were something that opens the windows automatically at the right time to keep the heat* and humidity out. I'm sure other people will have had that idea, too. But I haven't come across easy-to-use hardware controls. That's not even talking about the full optimal control problem, i.e. weather forecast, the heat capacity and heat permeability of the walls, and any cigarette smoke coming in.
*Air conditioning is hard to get permission for as a renter in Germany.
I love HomeAssistant, and use it to power my whole house. I automate most lights, my whole house audio setup, my security system, and more. I highly recommend it.
I recently wrote about how to do a declarative model for automations, which I use throughout the house: http://peterhajas.com/blog/declarative_home_automation.html
I want to want this, but I have never found a use case that made it seem worth it.
Honestly I see exactly NO purpose for such dedicated distro: I use H.A. on my homeserver, deployed via pip, simple, lightweight and effective without the burden of a dedicated distro with the need for security upgrades and enormous integration effort for what? On my homeserver I do many things, there is no point in having many different homeserver or container to run single service if I can consolidate ALL in a single hw, easy to recreate/extend as I with thanks to NixOS/Guix or anything else + some IaC behind.
Such moves have only commercial reasons and normally in practice are commercial fails due to the inevitably low quality of the output. I still have to see ANY dedicated distro with a commercial success behind and without a large number of angry users.
why does this need to be an OS? Why can't it be a set of packages on top of an OS maintained by someone else?
I run home assistant on kubernetetes, but I've been annoyed by things breaking often on updates and reliability issues when running ZHA with a combo USB dongle.
This whole submission seems like a karma grab.
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Can we stop calling custom distros an "OS"?
Like, this is linux. Linux is the OS.
This is home assistant distro.
I quite like Home Assistant, I really don't like their developers.
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