- cross-posted to:
- smarthomes@feddit.uk
- homeassistant@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- smarthomes@feddit.uk
- homeassistant@lemmy.world
- Home Assistant is now part of the Open Home Foundation, a non-profit aiming to fight against surveillance capitalism and offer privacy, choice, and sustainability.
- The foundation will own and govern all Home Assistant entities, including the cloud, and has plans for new hardware and AI integration.
- Home Assistant aims to become a mainstream smart home option with a focus on privacy and user control, while also expanding partnerships and certifications.
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Is HA not already the mainstream option for privacy and user control? Maybe I just live in a bubble, but it seems like it’s already the go-to if you care about those things.
I took it to mean they’re going to put it in prettier packaging, simplifying its use for the average Joe.
I’m totally cool with that. Even as a more technically-minded user, I see a lot of things that could be way more streamlined.
Yeah I’m not using it yet, partly because I’m not at the home server level of Linux competency, but I do want to move towards it at some point
If you want to skip ahead, there are also a few ways to get Home Assistant running that don’t need any level of Linux competency:
- They sell their own devices that are more or less plug & play.
- Installing Home Assistant OS on a Raspberry Pi is just flashing the image onto an SD card.
- Installing Home Assistant OS onto a dedicated device involves shortly booting into Linux from USB to flash Home Assistant OS onto the internal disk.
If you don’t want to run Home Assistant OS, and instead want to run Home Assistant as one of several applications running on a Server, that’s when you need to start getting comfortable administrating a Linux server.
I didn’t realize their devices are plug and play. I’ve considered one before and probably will go that route if it’s that easy when the wife and I have more than a pair of light bulbs to control
Just do it. Quick and easy, and not that complex. Even if you only have a couple of light bulbs, now you can schedule them, automate them, integrate them with any voice assistant you may use
You may find you already have a lot more than just a pair of lightbulbs. Mine sees my router and stats, printer status, TV, speakers, thermostats, my phone, among things I got before HA
For me, I crossed the threshold when I decided to treat it as an appliance (Raspberry Pi 4) rather than one more thing that depended on me setting up a lab. I still haven’t made progress in the lab, but HA just works
Well you have successfully doomed me to a day of attempting to deal with the same dang server error.
And here I thought that this might be a nice way to set up a few things my wife would like
If you want the awesomeness of self-hosting with somewhat less drama, give unraid a look-see! Although if you are looking to just host HA and not have a full media center and other stuff, it could be overkill.
My attempts at self hosting have been mostly an attempt to set up jellyfin, *arr, and foundryvtt on an old computer at which point I realized I don’t really understand terminal or networks. I’m getting a bit more comfortable with my terminal in my desktop, but I’m going at a reasonable pace nowadays. I don’t have a ton of time or money to sink into it
I totally agree! They’ve come a long way, but making it easier to use can only help grow support for the project.
I have been using it for years and still find some things confusing. Like idk why it’s so hard to figure out how to customize the dashboard and create new widgets for it. I’ve been a professional web dev for 8 years and if I’m struggling with it, you can bet most people aren’t even going to bother. Idk what’s so hard about providing simple html, css, and js like every other web framework.
yeah nothing ever makes me feel stupider than my home assistant, which half-works for random reasons, even though like, I can actually develop things. Woe unto anyone wading into that without any coding background/inclination or interest. I hadn’t really ever encountered YAML before working with HA (I’ve been using HA now for like 6 or 7 years I just realized).
I have a lengthy coding background, back to the days when it was common for spacing and line length and line endings to be significant to the code. Maturing out of that was one of the major advances in programming! I can’t comprehend people bringing that back: a pox on yaml, and python, and similar, for bringing back the nightmares
I’ve been running HA for two years and barely understand YAML, let alone the main YAML config, which is keeping me from accomplishing a few things I want to do, like taking better control of my air filter.
Because it’s either full-auto, or full-manual, with no wiggle room in between. That being said, they have made the right moves in hiring the right people in the community to be ICs on the project to fix stuff like this, and they are killing it. Ex: they hired the Rhasspy dev a year ago, and he has already revamped the entire voice assist workflow in HA. Great work.
I run it in a docker container and it works great.
I hope it won’t go closed source
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Home Assistant is known for its unmatched power and flexibility, but so far the platform, which has an estimated one million users, has struggled to reach the mainstream.
The foundation will also advocate for the development of “better” smart home products, says Schoutsen, “Devices with local APIs and that are built sustainably.
The launch of the for-profit Nabu Casa five years ago provided a revenue stream for Home Assistant through an optional cloud computing service that now supports 33 full-time employees.
Nabu Casa will continue as a for-profit entity running the cloud and selling Home Assistant hardware and will operate as a commercial partner of the foundation.
“Our articles state ‘There will be no direct distribution to members in return for activities performed for the association or as any other form of gratuity in any kind,’’’ he says.
In the meantime, Matter is also providing other platforms — such as Aqara, Homey, and Hubitat — the tools to expand and grow into more viable alternatives to big tech in the smart home.
The original article contains 1,317 words, the summary contains 172 words. Saved 87%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I had it briefly up and running and can only say… it’s a bear, at least if you are trying to use it as a drop-in replacement with existing hardware. I’m sure I’ll go back and sort it out at some point, but it left me just feeling tired and frustrated even when I had it doing most of what I wanted.
If you were thoughtful about hardware from the ground up, maybe it would be more straightforward, but I tried getting it running on just an old workstation with ubuntu installed on it that I use for very basic stuff like syncthing and it was just painful. Mix of Kasa/Wyze/Philips devices that are just what I’ve somehow collected over time.
It would be nice to see better first-class add-on support. I found myself needing to SSH into a VM to get stuff into it, and even then it was twitchy in all the wrong ways. Would also be nice to see better support for the containerized version, because that’s so much easier to distribute and execute compared to a VM. Next time I’ll probably just try to do it all with docker and see if it hurts less, since I don’t think any addons I was using were critical to begin with.
That said, if you’re doing HA, get a dedicated piece of hardware for it. I suspect it vastly simplifies things.
I installed it in a VM that’s running Unraid. It was pretty simple to set up that way. The hardest part was figuring out how to pass through the USB controller to the VM. Side note: if you’re building a home server, you should look into getting an extra PCI USB controller so you can dedicate them to different VMs if needed (or leave one for the host to use).
For routing to the open Internet, there’s a handy addon in HA to connect to Cloudflare Tunnel. It works great. The only catch is you need a domain name registered with Cloudflare. Of course, not needed if you only want to control it from LAN-connected devices.
That was the point that hit my limit, now that you mention it – getting it to show up on a duckdns address on the https public internet. Not being able to make that work after fiddling with all kinds of contradictory guides nor with 2 or 3 completely different reverse proxy tools just left me mad. Especially since a regular ngix reverse proxy manager container works fine on the same computer, but for some reason was just refusing to connect to HA (SSL issues, I think).
Having HA just working locally didn’t really make it a replacement for the big tech solutions that already work fairly smoothly. I’m sure I’ll go back to get it the way I want one day, but the learning curve on any selfhosting is still pretty rough.
If you don’t want to deal with remote access hosting (which can be pretty involved), their cloud service Nabu Casa is $5 and this is exactly the functionality it provides - they don’t host your instance (you still need somewhere to run it locally, like a Pi or one of their devices) but it tunnels your instance out to their managed hosting and you can access it from any Internet connection.
It’s not really a “bear”, but it IS highly configurable down to the tiniest detail, so requires a certain level of technical expertise. Definitely not for a novice, but that’s what Amazon, Apple, and Google try to cover. I will say there are other options out there that are great for offline home automation, but HA is the most competent and complete.
I’d argue it’s a bear and I still use it. YAML is just fucking awful and I’m glad they’ve been hiding it more and more over the years but it’s still there. Zwave is still wildly confusing compared to something like a Habitat which is just plug and play (guess who has to just rebuild his zwave stuff from scratch). It’s also insanely organized where add ons are different than integrations.and are hidden in different menus, as are system functions and just… It’s a mess from UX POV. It’s also a nightmare to try to interact with the codebase or documentation or even ask questions, much less make a suggestion. As an aside to address the point of the article, I have absolutely zero worry that they will ever forget about power users, because I, and many other power users who have interacted with Paulus on boards before agree he is kind of an asshole who absolutely does not understand why anyone would want to do anything different than how he imagines it - including documentation or UX or whatever. Home Assistant is totally safe for power users.
Now of course I’m not trying to say it’s bad, just that it is kind of a bear even for the tech savvy. You can’t beat HA for being able to interface with absolutely anything. There’s almost always already an integration written. It can do anything, and if you’re persistent enough you can kludge together a solution that works in exactly the way you need. You might even be able to hide all the kludge from your spouse. It’s also all free, because Paulus and a hundred other devs contribute their time for free and they’re amazing for it. Absolutely awesome for power users. But being simple or easy just isn’t one of its many, many pros.
First off:
If you can’t grasp YAML, you’re in trouble in the future. It’s been around for decades at this point, and it’s a helluva lot more readable than JSON, which is the currently most transmitted format over the wire on the planet.
YAML is also used by all the big configuration languages out there, Infrastructure as code frameworks, and even novice stuff like Square space.
Second: ZWave is a protocol. HA supports that as well. Had nothing to do with HA as a platform, they just support it. You have no idea what you’re talking about. Example: I run Zigbee for everything on my HA. I could switch everything to ZWave tomorrow if I wanted.
This is a “you” problem, not the rest of the world.
it’s a helluva lot more readable than JSON
Maybe for you, but definitely not for everyone. I can use it if I have to, but I find it very annoying to deal with significant whitespace.
Bit of a detour but Companies need to realise that AI needs to work FAST and have access to ALL the periphery that is available to the user to effectively put itself in our situation. This requires insane trust. This and the fastness aspect requires AIs to work offline only.
That could what?? 🥺
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
First time I’m seeing this
I like the idea of Home Assistant. I just can’t be arsed to set it up.
I was of the same mindset for a long time; SmartThings, Hue and Google Home all worked well enough together to do what I wanted. But holy shit, Home Assistant is on another level and I only wish I’d installed it sooner.
The only real downside is that it makes home automation somewhat addictive and, by extension, expensive. I spend quite a lot of my time thinking about how to automate more of the things, and have a never ending list of stuff that I want to add to my setup.
If you’re down on the “editing YAML until you’re blue in the face” part, they’ve pretty much transitioned entirely to a good UI for that. Going into the yaml is rare now. I was of the same opinion a year or so ago, but tried it and it’s improved immensely in the last year for configuring things. There’s room left for improvement, but it’s usable now.
Yeah, Well, everybody’s day only has 24 hours, need to pick the battles, right.
I finally did and it runs everything, from my lights to my energy and heating management. Worth the saved money, literally.
By any chance are you using Matter in your home? If so, does HA handle that well?
I was too early for that, it’s mostly Shelly, Modbus TCP and EnOcean here, plus some custom API via Ethernet. So, sorry, no experience with Matter, but I’m watching it.
Matter devices are so few and far between that you probably won’t find anyone really making use of it yet as it is mostly promises of firmware updates and future products.
Matter very much seems to be the “there are 14 competing standards” joke personified.
Matter’s biggest problem is that it launched behind everything else. You’re already starting to see a lot of support for it just because it allows companies to support Apple Home without implementing the whole HomeKit stack & pay the licensing fees to Apple. SwitchBot, Hue and IKEA already have Matter support in their hubs in beta.
But it won’t be relevant to non-Apple users until Thread radios start being more pervasive and the spec reaches v2 and supports more stuff. Then most devices will be Matter, because a company can support all 3 major vendor apps with one standard. Right now it’s:
- Amazon/Google - most low end devices or devices made by those companies
- Apple Home - devices specifically for homekit
- Amazon/Google/Apple Home - devices for all 3
- Amazon/Google/Matter - devices for all 3 that use Matter to support Apple Home
Some will still go those routes, but eventually it will just make sense to support Matter and do away with all of those separate devices and support paths.
I think the analogy is faulty because none of what exists is any sort of standard. It’s just a bunch of proprietary vendor implementations. Matter is the first front end Smart Home standard.
I’ve dabbled a little with it, but I really want something that’s as easy to use & set up as the commercial offerings like Google Home and Amazon Echo. I want to have an interface where I can connect my light bulbs, and have little hockey pucks that will listen for a wake word and do what I ask of it, and play my music. I also want to be able to get under the covers and do something that solves an odd problem that might come up.
I’m very hopeful for the project and I do think it will get there eventually.
Isn’t that something like what this product is solving for? https://www.espressif.com/en/news/ESP32-S3-BOX-3
You can get your smart speaker and wake words with this. Integration with a voice recognition model and home assistant and you’re golden.
I’ll take a look at that, thanks. It’s been a year or so since I last looked at it but back then there was a push button that you could use but I couldn’t get it going.
Check out the FutureProofHomes youtube channel. He’s developing a better presence/speaker puck, but the previous episodes get you something like an Alexa experience with voice assist. There’s also a good thread in the HA forums about voice assist hardware ideas set up as a contest.
The problem is that commercial entities have the leverage to get hardware makers to design stuff for their environnement. It’s the same issue Linux has vs. Windows. Mostly, it works great when you use things that conform to standards. But sometimes you’ll hit an edge case. All in all, it’s a small price to pay.
Sure, but if I had a Pi (or similar board) with a speaker and a mic, I’d hope to be able to do the same thing. A Pi Zero would definitely be able to do the job.
Ease of setup in exchange for google/amazon spies in your house and your data. Seems like a very bad deal to me.
It’s really not that hard to setup for a basic setup and after that it’s working problem free with all kinds of manufacturers devices, not just one brand.
Privacy issues aside, for wider adoption the user experience needs to be better. Most people don’t want to be a sysadmin for their house, they just want to live in it.
Uh oh…
They have the ‘Nabu Casa’ entity, which I thought was doing well. Last I heard, all their subscriptions were doing well, as were the dedicated devices they sell. Don’t see them doing anything but accelerating growth as interest in this space, availability of useful devices grows.
I wish it had better SSO integration with keycloak
