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The little smart home platform that could (www.theverge.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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  • 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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[–] 65 points 2 years ago (16 children)

I took it to mean they're going to put it in prettier packaging, simplifying its use for the average Joe.

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  • [–] 40 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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).

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago*

    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

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    I love my HA dashboard but it took seemingly far too much effort to get it sensible. I had to know how to ssh in and edit a locked YAML file and create new template sensors just so I could have some temperature sensors show as “50” instead of “50.0028472” or some shit.

    I think they fixed that in an update though. But there’s always something that requires multiple extra layers of digging around.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Recently had to manually reinstall HA then restore from a backup manually because there was no GUI option. As software, HA is great, as a product usable by laypeople it still needs work

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    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

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    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

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