Someone posted that URL as a separate submission shortly after this was submitted, but rather than splitting the discussion, we've merged the comments here so it can all be discussed as one topic.
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.
> I donated Home Assistant to it[1]. It's fully funded by users. There are no investors involved.
I cannot thank you enough for this. It was a bit risky adopting Home Assistant for everything ~two years ago, but that you guys did this move really makes me feel less scared about eventually having to replace it with something else.
I'm subscribed to Home Assistant Cloud (via Nabu Casa) even though I don't use it just because it seems to be one of the few ways to financially support you, is there any way of doing one time donations to the foundation itself?
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.
I didn't get the begging feeling from using Blender, though it has been some years ago. IIRC they focused on donations for specific features and showpieces like their movies.
As a very happy Home Assistant user, hopefully you can manage something similar so you have enough money to stay afloat and keep up the good work.
Well clearly he did not look under the hood ... I did. A few technical decisions are ... questionable. But it's prohibited to ask why in the forum.
HA could do well in cleaning up its community that can be particularly toxic, especially toward advanced user and start accepting critics.
The hostility one face when they don't want to follow the "dumb down version, do as we say" installation process is really off-putting.
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.
The real magic is in my opinion in ESPHome. The fact that you can amateur solder some aliexpress $2 sensors together and have that actually work in HA with no coding except some yaml that you found on the internet is wild.
>It would be interesting to see what would happen to a pull request adding support for, say, OpenThings Cloud as an alternative. The fate of that request would say a lot about how open the project really is.
I kinda hope nobody tries. Their attempts at monetization have been pretty friendly and tame thus far & if something spooks them that could change.
Yeah ESPHome is magic. I set up a full home humidity monitoring setup for the cost of a soldering setup + approximately $0 on components. No subscription bullshit, no proprietary interface bullshit, just exactly the setup I want and it was fun and easy to build!
Same. I had a couple extra ESP boards from an order where I only needed one, an extra breadboard and humidity/temp sensor and decided to finally measure the temp out in the greenhouse. It's amazing to have all that in a grafana dash running on a r pi.
> I kinda hope nobody tries. Their attempts at monetization have been pretty friendly and tame thus far & if something spooks them that could change.
To be fair to them they've been making a big push on adding backup support recently. Their Nabu Casa subscription has built in support for this and was a major selling point for me getting the subscription (I have Wireguard for remote access already).
At the same time they implemented first class support for their own subscription, they added the hooks for other integrations to provide the same level of backup support. Now you can easily choose to use Google Drive, S3, BackBlaze and others just as easily as Nabu Casa. In some ways it's "better" as Nabu Casa only supports a single latest backup.
From this they seem pretty friendly and not too interested in lock-in.
Even though ESPHome has warnings about using WiFi and Bluetooth proxy together being unstable, I've found it to be much better in terms of stability and performance than the Intel Bluetooth adapter connected to my Home Assistant system.
BlueZ is probably more complex and less mature.
I have it in docker a d use supervised mode (which seems discouraged, but I want my machine for other uses also). The one thing I struggle with is updating, I'm concerned if I update it'll break. Is there a way to fully snapshot a container state and it's disk state, so I can 100% restore to it if something goes wrong ? I'm still running HA from 2020 because of this.
The other think I'm not a huge fan of is it's template language, it's clunky to say the least, but overall it's a great amd flexible system
I’m running it with docker compose for the same reason and it never failed an update, but there was an occasional config tweak required. For the most part it’s compose pull, compose up, check back in a couple weeks for the point release.
Updating from that far is probably risky but you don’t need to backup everything, just the config directory. Automated backups to Google drive are worth the upgrade alone.
It used to have a steep learning curve, I’d say. Once I’ve had a long complicated manually written configuration of all my devices, integrations, automations etc, which gradually got replaced by simple clicking in the gui. On the other hand, this also meant a lot of breaking changes over the years, when I had to re-configure my staff the new way
My friend uses self-hosted open-source software to monitor all his home IoT devices[1] and copies important information to the cloud. I'm using StarFive VisionFive 2 to host my database for monitoring, but also have a copy of the data of a chip hetzner arm vps, as well as hosting backups on the two different clouds. I know users who are running[2] for years to monitor Solar panels, lawn watering and vegetable garden watering.
My question is: is it really convenient to use only SaaS now if there is always the possibility of losing your data? I am referring to the case described in the article.
in recent podcast episode with the found of your company ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xkCykuJwKs , От стартапа до международного бизнеса: история VictoriaMetrics и её уроки | Александр Валялкин | #36) he explicitly described the path VictoriaMetrics has come and one of the early steps was trying to sell SaaS, while quite a lot of users/customers want to have on premise/own setup for such tooling.
So, answering your question:
> My question is: is it really convenient to use only SaaS now
Is there anywhere that compiles a database of local control capable smart home devices? I tried briefly to search and I found databases of smart devices but none seemed to have that as a filter.
Just wondering why anyone would go through the hassle of installing home assistant on Linux when the fantastic hassOS exists which will run perfectly virtualized.
Because we want to run more than just Home Assistant on the same OS?
Because traditionally OS and application layers were separated?
Because we trust mature Linux distros more when it comes to LTS and security patches?
Because we already know our way around Debian/Ubuntu/Nix/etc.?
I used to use Home Assistant via Docker, but I've since switched to Proxmox with HAOS in a VM and a second Debian VM for everything else. My main reason for this is that it seems like the more supported scenario. For example, when the Voice Assistant stuff first came out the setup was only really documented via HAOS add-ons. I managed to get it working with standalone Docker containers but it was a pain to figure out. It really is simpler to just use HAOS IMO.
Using Proxmox with lxc containers, there is no second kernel. It uses the host kernel’s native cgroups and namespaces for process isolation. You can actually achieve the same with just systems and namespaces.
Having said that, I think if you prefer traditional distro packaging, you should absolutely stick to that.
I'm also running dozens of things alongside HA and I don't have to use proxmox.
It's not hard to run HA in unsupported mode. The only real difference is an annoying reminder that you're unsupported. Everything else works, including plugins/add-ons.
I've run HA a bunch of ways. It doesn't really matter all that much. Use HACS to fill any gaps.
Absolutely this. Once you get into the game of running apps at home with certain quality assumptions you end up having to bolt on various things (VPN, DNS, log aggregation etc) that are better wrapped around the application instead of having them run within it. And having an AppOS typically just gets in the way of all that plus what edejong said that you already know how to do it on the typical production OSes and learning to do it for every AppOS is just cumbersome.
As was already mentioned, people rarely want to run a dedicated physical server for just a single purpose. The concept of Home Assistant Operating System requires exactly that.
Also, it is Debian-based. It uses the `apt` package manager which is slow. Some people may prefer something faster and more modern, like `pacman` or `dnf`.
> run perfectly virtualized
Fair enough.
But that obviously requires virtualization being set up on the server. If people do not use virtualization for anything else on their server, they may as well set up Home Assistant directly.
Finally, I think there is one more issue.
Many of the integrations which are possible with Home Assistant Operating System require physical hardware being connected to that server. A reader, a receiver, something like that.
But these home servers are often placed in some inaccessible locations, like an attic, where the data from sensors is unavailable. It may be impractical to run cables there. And the wireless devices may be too far away for a receiver located there to be able to read them.
So people need to come up with work-arounds to get their data to their server. They set up various signal proxies and thin clients which receive the data from the sensors on the spot where they are available and then send them over network to the Home Assistant server.
Unfortunately, from my experience, many integrations completely ignore this usecase. They are likely focusing on a happy path where everything is connected locally to "the one" server. And only then they behave nicely and work out of the box. But as soon as you need any special step or behavior, it is necessary to dig deeper and create custom layers to transport the data from your devices to the server.
Home Assistant Operating System does not make any of that simpler. Perhaps on the contrary, it forces you to use a specific Debian-based distribution with possibly outdated packages that you cannot easily upgrade without breaking Home Assistant.
Which is why it makes little sense to bother with it, in my opinion, for these kind of installations.
> Also, it is Debian-based. It uses the `apt` package manager which is slow. Some people may prefer something faster and more modern, like `pacman` or `dnf`.
Do people really care if it takes 5 seconds to parse a package index vs 1? I don't get this argument at all.
Yes, you are right. There is one more abstraction layer.
Home Assistant Operating System uses Buildroot which uses Docker to run container with Home Assistant Supervisor. And only that container is Debian-based [0].
I just installed python3 on Debian and Alpine. It takes 16s vs 4s (I ran the test three times, and kept the fastest measurement for Debian and the slowest measurement for Alpine).
Sure a one-time wait of 12s doesn't change my life. But I won't use apt/apk _once_; I'll use it every single time that I install something. It low-key bothers me when my flow is interrupted by having to wait for machines to do their job, increasing that by 300% doesn't help.
This wouldn't be a deciding factor for me. But it doesn't add points for the Debian-based approach.
A couple weeks ago I powered a laptop that had been sitting unused for several months. It had Ubuntu 22.04 installed. The initial `apt-get update` took some time to download new indexes, and almost 3 minutes to process them all afterwards, while I was right there staring at the screen wondering why I was there staring at the screen for so long, because this experience always happens as soon as any of my machines stay off for more than a couple weeks. apt is indeed very slow.
I tried HA back in the day and got YAML-bound trying to get various sensors and controllers to integrate and work reliably. I revisited HA a couple of times over the years, but by then had become cosy with Node-RED and saw no strong reason to change. I understand HA's now more configurable through the front-end GUI, which is nice.
I've just integrated an office UPS with the Node-RED stock dashboard to log status, mains voltage and battery charge state - it took all of 5 mins, including the time to install the UPS NUT plugin for Node-RED via the GUI.
I love the ease of the visual, block-based configuration, and the ability to add codable function blocks to process and modify data.
The only things that are not so great in Node-RED are the dashboard look and feel, and the dashboard setup tools.
I tried to install it on a raspi 4 with touchscreen for my wife. The raspi worked fine with Debian, esp. it's installer asks for the wifi and ssh keys, and therefore you can trivially connect to it.
Not so with the homeassistant installer. No wifi setup, no ssh access at all. You really need to cable it, nmap the new IP, and then I got stuck because the web server doesn't show up. Attaching the keyboard brought me into a restricted ha> prompt, where I cannot fix anything.
Much respect to Home Assistant for making everything as accessible as it is, but it’s inherently a complex project. It also has to deal with trying to be everything to everyone, which makes it hard to identify the easy path through setting it up among all of the options.
There are two ways to get through Home Assistant:
1. Identify the easy path instructions, get equipment that matches perfectly, and follow the instructions to the letter. Use only equipment known to have great integration. Upgrade only when necessary. Change nothing as soon as it’s all working.
2. Be willing to spend a lot of time tinkering and debugging. There’s a big Home Assistant channel in one of the big Slacks I’m in where everyone eventually hits something that takes days or weeks to figure out.
Many companies have tried to package or use Home Assistant as the foundation for plug and play IoT hubs, but they all seem to end up with the same realization that it really needs a capable and willing human in the loop as soon as you deviate even slightly from the list of devices with excellent support. This isn’t even entirely Home Assistant’s fault: Most of these devices were never designed for third party control.
I did this a few months ago for a test home assistant setup and had the opposite experience. I forget exactly what I did, but it involved editing a file with the wifi settings and dropping my public ssh key on the SD card before installation.
If you use ethernet, no editing required. Web interface goes into setup mode automatically.
Worth noting that ha cli[0] (ha>) does have a `network` command to configure this as well.
Mind that you should not use a Pi with SD card for HA. I'm not sure what the official stance is, but: In my peer group failing SD cards were responsible for a vast majority of issues. Causes are probably a mixture of heavy logging and power outages; either from the grid, or user error not shutting down the Pi before disconnecting power.
At our house I run HAOS in a VM (on a beefy server). My wife uses the app on her phone (as do I), and we have a cheap tablet with the app for guests. On the laptops/desktops we also have access to the web UI.
As the article points out, remote access for the phones can be done via the commercial offering or a VPN (as in our case: wireguard on the OpnSense).
Wholly depends on how much stuff you’ve got. I’ve started having issues with the Linux io scheduler when the auto backups got large (1G+), the thing just hung and needed a power cycle.
Also what SD card you have, the durability between different models differ a lot. The SD card I use for my dashcam been working for years (A "SanDisk MAX ENDURANCE" card), some other cheaper SD cards can stop working properly after just months if you're using them for write-heavy stuff.
Anecdotal agree, but I only use it for my lights (about 20 smart bulbs + 5 sensors + 4 remotes) and I never tinker with it. At least 4 years later, that little Raspberry Pi 3 + ZigBee dongle + sdcard are kinda forgotten about.
If you type "login" at the ha> prompt, you'll get a root shell.
This is something I also had to accept about HA. It runs in a VM in my case so it worked out-of-the-box, but you don't just ssh to it after installing it, and the ha> prompt is just a bit different. So far, it hasn't been in the way, although it occasionally takes time to find out how to do things.
It's very flexible though, and apart from devices in your house there are many outside sources of data to use, like weather data, sun elevation or trash pickup dates. The HA app on your phone gives you many sensors usable in a flow.
The time spent on it usually results in something worthy of that time, in my experience.
I’d suggest that you use a docker instance. The setup is trivial.
Not having HAAS has made little difference to me being able to do all sorts of stuff - and HACS gives you access to a whole bunch of additional stuff, and works in docker.
At some point a company is going to start making hackable, local connection devices (cloud optional) with published APIs and sell them at a higher price tag, and they’re going to be fabulously wealthy, commanding higher margins than the others.
> hackable, local connection devices (cloud optional) with published APIs and sell them at a higher price
This business model doesn’t work.
Many have had this idea. They all run into the same problem: The target audience for hackable home automation devices doesn’t like paying a premium for anything they think they could DIY.
If you have a $70 nicely designed, documented IoT sensor but the DIY home automation people think they can put ESPHome on a $10 Amazon device and accomplish nearly the same thing, which one do are they going to buy?
If you go through the forums you can already find some semi-premium devices that are a little better constructed and might have better feature sets. They’re always followed by comments from people recommending a cheaper option.
The number of companies that does this _is_ growing.
Shelly was early, the cheep chineese stuff was easy to hack but they eventually moved to cheaper and more esoteric chips where custom firmware is non existent or not as mature. This is changing back, though! The number of ESP-32 powered LED light controllers that I've seen on Ali that feature a USB port for reprogramming / have all the GPIO labeled ... even have a HA/ESP-Home/WLED logo on them is infinitely more than I saw in years past (a few is infinitely more than zero, right?)
Buyer beware - There's a mountain of products on the market that are advertised as "open source" which lures many of us in, but many of those products have poor quality hardware.
My heuristic for anything operating at mains voltages is "If I can find a product that looks just like this on Temu/Aliexpress, I'm not buying it". They're probably white label products sourced from the same factories and suffer from the same quality issues.
Relays found in smart plugs are often sketchy in my experience. About half of the ones I bought or set up for others make unsettling noises that made me worried about poor electrical connections and risk of fire. I only have two Shelly plugs but those don't suffer from these issues.
> but many of those products have poor quality hardware.
Absolutely. Cheap hardware means corners cut... regardless of how open the software is.
Shelly devices are quite open and well made but easily 2x the cost of other wifi relay devices. Belkin WeMo devices are similar price to shelly and about as well made but their software leaves literally everything to be desired.
Knowing what risk is acceptable and how to identify if a particular component is built to a spec that obviates that risk or not is probably going to _always_ be part of the DIY scene.
Tuya and their rebranded versions fall into that area too. Their power switches die early and they actually went from easily reprogrammable to hostile firmware. They have own cloud service you can't leave, only get an access code to - and the firmware prevents downgrades. Terrible company.
> Just buy the ZigBee versions, they work beautifully with HA
802.15 does have it's place but some of us prefer 802.11 unless battery requirements dictate lower power PHYs. Zigbee is also depreciated; if possible, seek devices using Matter for their interop.
Tuya is just an IoT platform used by many cheap devices but I agree, it's low cost and cloud based which is a terrible combination. I wouldn't touch it.
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)
I am not a practitioner, but instead someone that looks at the ecosystem from time to time and has been waiting for a while, because I dont see the stack + DX/UX that I want yet.
Zigbee never reached critical mass and requires a hub. Z-wave seems to be the same. Thread over wifi (IIRC different protocols/transports are just fine) is what I think will be the future.
IMO Thread wins out, support gets put into routers, and I can just have a thread enabled router which MAY have other
I don’t want to buy an IoT hub. Many IoT devices I want to control are powerful enough to run Wifi, and I want to control them with a standard networking stack with high adoption and familiar tooling. Thread seems to fit this use case the best.
Please feel free to rip apart the above opinions, they’re loosely held. I’d love to learn how wrong I am today!
> 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.
Thanks for the recommendation! Appreciate the disclosure and apologize for the blast of relatively uninformed opinions.
One more side question — why is it so hard to get a simple IoT button that runs local Wifi (really hoping for no base station) only and is battery chargable?
Buildable with an ESP32 clearly but I just want to buy this.
> I don’t want to buy an IoT hub. Many IoT devices I want to control are powerful enough to run Wifi,
Having a lot of career experience in this area, I greatly prefer to keep my IoT devices off of my WiFi.
You don’t need a separate hub device for Zigbee or Z-Wave, just a simple USB adapter that you plug directly into your device controlling everything.
Keeping the low bandwidth IoT devices off of the main WiFi had a lot of advantages. It’s also much easier to rotate your WiFi password when you can do it all without reconnecting every light switch in your house, for example.
Does the hub requirement matter that much though? I mean if you want truly peer to peer, then yeah, but if you're already using Home Assistant you can plug a cheap ZigBee usb dongle into that.
So the bit I'm missing: how do you control them purely over WiFi? Do you run software on your phone that can control the target? Eg: app talks directly to the device over your network, instead of via a browser + Home Assistant running on a Pi. I can't think of any examples of a product that works this way without being cloud enabled (IE: there is a hub but you don't own it)
> Does the hub requirement matter that much though? I mean if you want truly peer to peer, then yeah, but if you're already using Home Assistant you can plug a cheap ZigBee usb dongle into that.
Maybe not, but I don't really want to actually run Home Assistant, I want the basics to hack on, really. Trying to pick the most open thing that will be easy to program without relying on using something like Home Assistant (not that its bad or anything).
> So the bit I'm missing: how do you control them purely over WiFi? Do you run software on your phone that can control the target? Eg: app talks directly to the device over your network, instead of via a browser + Home Assistant running on a Pi. I can't think of any examples of a product that works this way without being cloud enabled (IE: there is a hub but you don't own it)
Yeah that's my goal -- basically I want to be able to control the devices from anything web connected (and ideally, the same program running in multiple places).
My thinking is that I can build this without being cloud enabled if I "just" (famous last words) had Thread/Wifi.
With all the excellent feedback in this thread (thanks HN!), it's looking like a small SBC + a Thread/Zigbee/BLE dongle[0] is the way forward, and hooking that up to my router via USB so it's always powered and follows the router around (maybe velcro it on).
SBC (or something smaller maybe, but probably the SBC) so I can program it myself.
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
thread and matter will, in my opinion, never matter for consumers. Why? It’s basically a walled garden.
Think HomeKit but a tiny bit more open, the open bit is, that a vendor can allow it to communicate with devices of other vendors. But they don’t have to.
Thread also needs more expensive SOCs, with Zigbee you only need a tiny micro controller with a few MHz of clock speed and a few KB of RAM. Thread and matter on the other hand can require megabytes of RAM.
Vendors which nowadays sell HomeKit devices can reuse their SOCs for thread matter, keeping their 3-4 times higher prices compared to devices with the same functionality from Zigbee vendors.
> thread and matter will, in my opinion, never matter for consumers. Why? It’s basically a walled garden.
I'd counter with the fact that walled gardens are incredibly popular, and in particular to consumers. Consumers don't care if the gate is locked or not, they care if the flowers are pretty and the tea at the garden party is nice.
> Thread also needs more expensive SOCs, with Zigbee you only need a tiny micro controller with a few MHz of clock speed and a few KB of RAM. Thread and matter on the other hand can require megabytes of RAM.
IMO prices of SOCs are going to zero. ESP32s are a great example of this. Once RISCV is more widely used and capable things will accelerate even faster.
> Vendors which nowadays sell HomeKit devices can reuse their SOCs for thread matter, keeping their 3-4 times higher prices compared to devices with the same functionality from Zigbee vendors.
I think we agree here...? I think that HomeKit device that is just a bit more open is going to win. But I think that HomeKit device gets adopted faster if it's just a router -- I can understand updating a router to get a smart home. What I don't want is confusion around whether I need a hub or not, or whether devices work together or not.
Buying a single router that acts as a hub + Wifi "repeaters" (IIRC that's what they're called) that can "extend" the signal (and along the way give other devices a point to connect to) makes perfect sense to me as a consumer. I already know what WiFi is, and I want better coverage, not worse. The smart home stuff just falls out of tech I am already familiar with, efficiency by damned.
Thread is a WiFi replacement, the devices talk IP over thread.
And it has an encrypted pairing process to your vendor controlled hub. Said vendor can allow or disallow it which other vendors may speak with said hub.
Here is the landscape we have:
HomeKit: fully closed, requires certification from Apple. Very expensive and limited functionality.
Zigbee: fully open, anyone can make Zigbee devices and sell them without any restriction. Operates on the same frequency all over the world. Devices are super cheap. You can expand the protocol however you like as a vendor.
Z-wave: fully closed, several incompatible frequencies, requires certification to sell devices.
Thread and matter: semi closed, same ieee standard as Zigbee for data transfer. Vendors can allow it to talk to devices of other vendors. Requires certification. Same price tag as HomeKit, aka 3-4 more expensive than Zigbee.
All of them require hubs. And only with Zigbee you are guaranteed to have interop between all vendors and all devices sold across the globe. Thanks to Home Assistant.
With thread the vendor can simply disallow you to use your devices with HomeAssistant, which is unacceptable by me.
Thanks for all this context/explanation -- also the follow up. Automatic range extension (i.e. actually being a mesh and forwarding along messages) is an excellent feature.
> All of them require hubs. And only with Zigbee you are guaranteed to have interop between all vendors and all devices sold across the globe. Thanks to Home Assistant. With thread the vendor can simply disallow you to use your devices with HomeAssistant, which is unacceptable by me.
This is the one I want to push back on -- Thread over Wifi doesn't require a special Hub right? Taken with other info from this thread clearly in the real world it's not so simple to find the right hardware... but it's possible to just buy a thread device and use it over regular old wifi.
Sounds like Zigbee is closer to ideal than Thread or Thread/Wifi.
Maybe this is the startup someone needs to do -- some reasonably powered device to attack to a router/connect close to a router which supports Thread and Zigbee, has completely local management and call it a day. Is this just over-complicating a smart hub? Don't know.
Thread is using the same protocol as Zigbee, which requires specialized hardware to talk to it. You can’t get around a centralized hub when wanting to use them on your WiFi network.
Thread just adds an IP layer above Zigbee. Zigbee is on the same protocol layer as Ethernet or WiFi.
> Thread is using the same protocol as Zigbee, which requires specialized hardware to talk to it. You can’t get around a centralized hub when wanting to use them on your WiFi network.
>
> Thread just adds an IP layer above Zigbee. Zigbee is on the same protocol layer as Ethernet or WiFi.
AH, I've just realized that I've been using the wrong terminology.
I've been meaning to say Matter over Thread vs Matter over Wifi!
Matter seems like a decent way forward, and it can work only over wifi which is what drew me in to focusing on Matter. IIRC Matter/Zigbee isn't a thing (though it technically should be possible, Zigbee is just a transport as far as Matter is concerned right?).
[EDIT] works -> can work, Thread/Zigbee -> Matter/Zigbee
But here comes the tricky bit, when you buy either Zigbee or matter devices each vendor will add its own extensions.
In the Zigbee ecosystem vendors out right refuse to communicate with devices from other vendors even though Zigbee is an interoperable standard.
That lead to the birth of zigbee2mqtt, literally hundreds of years of development time went into it to have full feature support for every Zigbee device that exists.
For thread and matter devices each vendor would have to do the same. And that won’t happen, leading to a fragmented ecosystem.
Thanks again for laying this out -- I've been seeing zigbee2mqtt everywhere and this explains why someone would add mqtt to the mix. Sounds like this is another thing that needs to be run/managed on the software side to be robust.
This is an insane goal (and who knows when I'll actually get to work on this project), but what I want to build is an all in one something that "just works". So roughly:
1. Pick a good enough physical comms stack to hit most things
2. Write software to fill in the rest
It's going to be difficult but it feels like the setup for all these tools is just hard, when it doesn't have to be if you could pin down the hardware/install instructions, then write a really decent software layer to pull it all together without making people go homelab.
That said, that's probably what home assistant devs thought before they reached the current level of complexity, I'm probably preparing to attack a windmill here.
I think my secret sauce here will be WebAssembly -- if I can nail down the hardware below, build/convert a ton of adapters via WebAssembly, and then build a compelling/easy to add/install/manage/configure UI on top of that, I might have myself something worth posting to HN someday.
IMHO, thread and matter will probably be as mature as homeassistant and zigbe2mqtt in the 2030ies. At the moment, Zigbee devices can work without any hub as long as you stick to one vendor.
Aka buy lightbulbs and switches from ikea and you can right out start using them, I believe you only need a hub to create groups of devices which then can get controled with one switch. You then could unplug the hub and still use them, only needing a hub for ethernet bridging and automations.
> Aka buy lightbulbs and switches from ikea and you can right out start using them, I believe you only need a hub to create groups of devices which then can get controled with one switch. You then could unplug the hub and still use them, only needing a hub for ethernet bridging and automations.
Yeah thanks for pointing this out -- just need a single Zigbee coordinator (if my light research has been correct so far) and I'm ready to go.
Different expectations. I don't want my things to know that wifi exists. It stops vendor lock-in, it ensures local communication, it means things work even if network goes down. It also makes sure they will never autoupdate or join Mirai botnet.
I've got a mix of zwave (fibaro), ZigBee (Ikea) and ble at home and I'm ok with that.
Same boat here, I like knowing that none of of my devices can get network access, all they can do is communicate with HomeAssistant.
And with Zigbee bindings most of my inputs are set up in a way that they still work even if HomeAssistant goes down.
Not that HomeAssistant has ever down, but I can imagine its SSD or something failing and not bothering moving it to a different computer for a few days while I get a replacement in.
Yeah I think so -- I like to think I can control my router at least, so I don't have to worry about it. That said, probably not protected from the botnet case.
Also, unfortunately up until now I've been saying the wrong thing -- I mean Matter over Thread versus Matter over Wifi. Matter over Wifi seemed like a winner to me because I could just use it.
It looks like going forward I'll be plugging a small SBC into my Router's USB (+ ethernet) and connecting a Zigbee + Thread dongle. That should cover me for most communication options, then from there it's "just" a software problem :)
> why is it so hard to get a simple IoT button that runs local Wifi (really hoping for no base station) only and is battery chargable?
Battery life is atrocious and latency from deep sleep will be very bad. I’ve got Zigbee buttons from ikea that run on nimh batteries for a couple years now and only used like half of the charge. The hub is an usb dongle attached to the home assistant server, no issues.
> Battery life is atrocious and latency from deep sleep will be very bad. I’ve got Zigbee buttons from ikea that run on nimh batteries for a couple years now and only used like half of the charge. The hub is an usb dongle attached to the home assistant server, no issues.
So what do you consider to be "bad" battery life? I've got quite the tolerance, but the problem is that they don't even exist. Everyone seems to stop out on this at "it would never be worth it".
> Zigbee buttons from ikea that run on nimh batteries for a couple years now and only used like half of the charge.
This is intense for me, I'm happy with replacing batteries every 6 months if I could simplify deployment by 10x.
> The hub is an usb dongle attached to the home assistant server, no issues.
Maybe deployment isn't as hard as I'm making it out to be! That said, nothing easier than sending some packets to an IP address. I assume Zigbee APKs are easy... But for example if I search on crates.io (https://crates.io/search?q=zigbee) I don't see any obvious choices.
To restate what I want (and hopefully is sounds a bit more reasonable) I want to be able to buy one smart light bulb, configure it over BLE to connect to Wifi and for the rest of it's live configure it/change it via Wifi. I want that for basically every device, and I'm fine with swapping batteries every 1 to 6months if I could have that!
BLE should also work but you also want a dongle, so hardware wise it’s the same; ideally you also want a couple gateways (Shelly devices can do that out of the box btw, and new Shellies will be supporting Zigbee.)
ZWave is the most stable radio-based standard right now. It's not great, and it's not very extensible, but it's OK-ish. There's one hackable device: https://z-uno.z-wave.me/technical/ but its SDK is not that great.
Pure ZigBee is... spotty because there are no certification requirements. Matter is stuck in development hell, but is slowly getting better.
And the problem with WiFi is energy efficiency (or a lack thereof) compared to ZWave/ZigBee/Thread.
So far, I've tried probably most of the home radio standards. Lutron was the most reliable, but it's also super-proprietary. My next house will just have conduits with low-voltage cables running to all the light switches, so I can use something like KNX instead of the radio-based stuff.
> And the problem with WiFi is energy efficiency (or a lack thereof) compared to ZWave/ZigBee/Thread.
This is a problem I'd really like to solve the old fashioned way/I think it prevents too much building. Energy density, rechargability, etc are like CPU speed to me -- it will eventually be solved, and I can deal with replacing a device every month or swapping a rechargable battery (especially if the device can tell me it's low).
I really do think it will be Thread+Wifi routers that eventually get a built-in Thread antenna that win (at least wining me over).
If either ZWave or ZigBee had managed to get into the home router space, they would have won already IMO. There are probably annoying reasons they couldn't until now.
> So far, I've tried probably most of the home radio standards. Lutron was the most reliable, but it's also super-proprietary. My next house will just have conduits with low-voltage cables running to all the light switches, so I can use something like KNX instead of the radio-based stuff.
Thanks for sharing this and your other experience!
> I really do think it will be Thread+Wifi routers that eventually get a built-in Thread antenna that win (at least wining me over).
That actually had been the case for a while. A lot of WiFi routers had a built-in Thread (ZigBee) radio, but then nobody actually used them and the manufacturers stopped bothering with them. So now pretty much only Eero access points still have it.
> Also TIL KNX.
My dream is to have _actuated_ switches, that have full tactile feedback. So that the paddle will physically flip when switched remotely.
I commissioned an engineering company to look into that, but apparently this is not feasible at all with the NEC and UL requirements in the US. The only way is to use low voltage wiring to the switches and then use them to control line-voltage relays. This kind of system is popular in Europe, so you might as well just go with something like KNX.
> That actually had been the case for a while. A lot of WiFi routers had a built-in Thread (ZigBee) radio, but then nobody actually used them and the manufacturers stopped bothering with them. So now pretty much only Eero access points still have it.
Thanks for this context -- when I searched I only found "thread border routers" -- I couldn't find a router made by a well known brand that included thread functionality -- it always seemed to be "buy a router AND buy a thread border router".
Really surprised that I missed the wave on this and wonder if it was a "we want people to buy two things" rather than no one actually using it. Maybe I just have to wait for it to come back around?
Maybe the answer here is a USB powered device with an extra 2.4Ghz radio (running like.. OpenThread or whatever I need to do thread over an available antenna?) attached to the router?
What I don't understand is why I just use the existing router's 2.4Ghz antenna for this? The amount of confusion in the space and inability of devices to do multiple things is really annoying, to be frank. I can only surmise the reason this stuff is not easy/obvious is profit-incentive (outside of the difficulty of designing good standards of course!).
[EDIT] OK, so the antennas aren't the same, despite being the same frequency -- clearly this is to ensure speedy operation at the hardware level.
So the add-on antenna would probably work if I bought some parts from mouser:
[EDIT2] Nope, more confused. Multi-protocol antennas exist. Why is this not a set-and-forget option for all the routers??? Someone clue me in to the politics/power struggle or whatever the real reason is here.
And then connected + taped something to my router.
> Really surprised that I missed the wave on this and wonder if it was a "we want people to buy two things" rather than no one actually using it. Maybe I just have to wait for it to come back around?
It's worse. There are _no_ new stand-alone Thread Border Routers on the market. You might find old stock of GL.iNet routers, and I believe there were a couple of other experimental devices.
If you want a robust Matter network, your best bet is to use Apple or Google devices as border routers. Or you can use a USB ZigBee stick with HomeAssistant.
> [EDIT2] Nope, more confused. Multi-protocol antennas exist. Why is this not a set-and-forget option for all the routers???
No market demand, so router manufacturers just don't bother. The initial versions of Matter were a burning trash fire.
There is a crucial difference here, though: the Home-Assistant integration for Refoss devices, which interfaces directly with the monitor and needs no cloud connectivity, is written and provided by Refoss itself. Home-Assistant compatibility is the first bullet item on the above-linked product page.
Lots of “smart” products come with BK7231x chips that are flashable to esphome, nobody needs another custom protocol (even if open) since esphome currently supports local encrypted transport that’s going to be better than 99% of what the Chinese (or even western) companies are going to design for local communication.
Oh, and hobbyists mostly aren’t going to pay premium for those either, unless those come preflashed with esphome and sponsor hass project, and even then 90% people are still going to buy the cheapest option on the market:)
For a long time I was running home automation using individual scripts and was happy with it. Then I found myself in a remote place where the ISP gave a shitty modem which hangs when there's no heavy usage ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I had to automate restarting the modem when the Internet is down by power cycling a smart plug[1], Home Assistant turned out to be extremely useful for that. Official HW integrations and Node-RED was very straightforward to solve my problem. Since then I'm managing and monitoring various hardware devices in my home through HA.
What's interesting is that there are manufacturers who are not only fine with HA but work with developers of HA integrations which enable offline usage of their IoT products even though their official apps are completely enshittified.
Nowadays I checkout HA compatibility before I buy a IoT device.
I started using home assistant when it first came out, found it too clumsy, returned years later, and found it too bloated.
A lot of volunteer work has gone into it but it lacks overall coordination of efforts and a usage model that is simple and consistent. That’s one of the downsides of open source: too many cooks and you get mediocrity, but accidentally when everyone is good hearted about it.
I had to do so much research on appliances I was adding that it was easier to just roll my own gateway and cloud. Now it is a vastly smaller code base that I control and can easily debug issues.
Maybe HA could refactor into a smaller set of modules that doesn’t require a huge set of assets from the get go?
Home Assistant is great, I have been able to push it to do things I wasnt expecting it to permit. Just running Python within a container arbitrarily interacting with the network and sensors. I used it to backend my own home web application.
I believe a lot of people who are upset with the product have radically incorrect expectations.
Funnily, I had the opposite journey: I got plainly frustrated with everything OpenHab and was delighted with the versatile integrations and ease of setup with Home Assistant...
Looking forward to the day we might have home appliances without on board cpus, they will just be LAN wifi firmware devices. Something like HA could be used to make them as smart or as dumb as the user wants without giving the manufacturer any control over the UX
I've never had HA itself fail. I've had it installed for 10 years and the only true failures were hardware (server, iot devices) or my own config mistakes.
If you choose your hardware wisely, it's incredibly reliable. Most of my house is automated and I all I've done with it in the past year is add a few devices.
I will admit that low (or zero) maintenance is easier to accomplish if you know your way around a little bit.
Home Assistant is a very popular home automation platform used by many. Most articles and posts fail to mention concerns regarding the user experience, security and long term stability. The most common complaints are related to the ease of use and to the backwards incompatible changes. The ease of use complaints are usually about setting it up, putting together automations and setting up dashboards.
Home Assistant is described as a home automation solution which runs locally on your hardware inside your home. Its current development process has many issues.
https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549 is a serious privacy concern. Nabu Casa and the owners of the CDN can collect the following information about the users of a Home Assistant installation: the integrations they use, the IP address of all devices which use the particular Home Assistant installation, the user agent of the device opening the dashboard, the precise location based on IP address, the user's ISP and possibly very specifically the people through a combination of IP address associated with a specific set of integrations configured for an installation. Nabu Casa employees can claim that the data isn't sold or used. The people who run the CDN can do as they please without Nabu Casa's knowledge. It's not possible to load these icons without an Internet connection.
The recent changes made to the backups in Home Assistant OS aren't user friendly. It's no longer possible to make an unencrypted backup without resorting to manual work by invoking an action. This arbitrary change wasn't necessary. It shows that the development process is chaotic and without a clear focus on making Home Assistant a more polished solution with the user in mind. It's just what they want to do.
Security is yet another weak point for this project. Home Assistant is a Python monolith with 1000 direct Python dependencies and countless other indirect dependencies https://github.com/home-assistant/core/blob/dev/requirements.... All these Python packages and their dependencies are bundled in everyone's Home Assistant installation. This is likely the biggest Python monolith in existence. You can compromise this project by compromising any dependency. Some of these packages are provided by Chinese companies for cloud based integrations.
Some addons can only be run with net: host on Home Assistant OS. This is one more potential vulnerability if one of these addons is compromised.
Bugs and regressions frequently get ignored on their tracker. There's a bot which closes tickets for which the developers have no interest. They choose to implement new features and to refactor without concern for people who can no longer do what was once possible. Features can change from month to month without any regard for the user's experience or for the overall stability. The graphs are one such example. New or changed functionality appears to lack thorough design before implementation. Unstable changes make it into stable releases every month.
Paulus has recently stated that Home Assistant is the best home automation solution out there. It's not really the best because it's very good. It just happens to be the most popular among people with some technical skills. It's the best because the others are very bad, support less hardware, require a cloud connection, have poor security, are privacy invasive, require a subscription, are extremely expensive, are updated once per year or for several of the mentioned reasons.
Home Assistant's advantage over commercial solutions is its large number of integrations, that it's open source and that there's a large community behind it. I wouldn't call it better at all. It's very similar to commercial solutions when privacy, security and usability concerns are ignored. The advantage of some cloud free commercial solutions is that they're likely to be more stable without breaking something once per month or every other month.
Those who still want to run Home Assistant may want to run it as a Docker container without Home Assistant OS, to use a separate network for the smart home devices, to avoid cloud connected cameras, to avoid cloud based integrations and to isolate Home Assistant from the other non-IoT devices found on the network. It can be a high value target for hackers and for companies who want to sell your data. I wouldn't recommend running it if one's not tech savvy. It's not something one sets up for someone else who's not tech savvy either. Things will break. It's just a matter of time.
I'm concerned about privacy also, especially with Home Assistant integrations that "dial home" to vendor's clouds. Your data is not private. Check out my project that puts privacy as a main feature: https://merliot.io.
Please note this is a two-part series. The second part can be read here:
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1017945/93d12d28178b372e/
Someone posted that URL as a separate submission shortly after this was submitted, but rather than splitting the discussion, we've merged the comments here so it can all be discussed as one topic.
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-...
> I donated Home Assistant to it[1]. It's fully funded by users. There are no investors involved.
I cannot thank you enough for this. It was a bit risky adopting Home Assistant for everything ~two years ago, but that you guys did this move really makes me feel less scared about eventually having to replace it with something else.
I'm subscribed to Home Assistant Cloud (via Nabu Casa) even though I don't use it just because it seems to be one of the few ways to financially support you, is there any way of doing one time donations to the foundation itself?
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.
I didn't get the begging feeling from using Blender, though it has been some years ago. IIRC they focused on donations for specific features and showpieces like their movies.
As a very happy Home Assistant user, hopefully you can manage something similar so you have enough money to stay afloat and keep up the good work.
It seems that's the only way according to their "support us" page.
https://www.openhomefoundation.org/organization/#support-our...
Well clearly he did not look under the hood ... I did. A few technical decisions are ... questionable. But it's prohibited to ask why in the forum. HA could do well in cleaning up its community that can be particularly toxic, especially toward advanced user and start accepting critics. The hostility one face when they don't want to follow the "dumb down version, do as we say" installation process is really off-putting.
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-...
Is it possible to donate to your foundation via some kind of a subscription?
I have a Nabu Casa subscription, but I don't really need it.
> I have a Nabu Casa subscription, but I don't really need it.
Shame there’s no way to donate it.
The real magic is in my opinion in ESPHome. The fact that you can amateur solder some aliexpress $2 sensors together and have that actually work in HA with no coding except some yaml that you found on the internet is wild.
>It would be interesting to see what would happen to a pull request adding support for, say, OpenThings Cloud as an alternative. The fate of that request would say a lot about how open the project really is.
I kinda hope nobody tries. Their attempts at monetization have been pretty friendly and tame thus far & if something spooks them that could change.
Yeah ESPHome is magic. I set up a full home humidity monitoring setup for the cost of a soldering setup + approximately $0 on components. No subscription bullshit, no proprietary interface bullshit, just exactly the setup I want and it was fun and easy to build!
Same. I had a couple extra ESP boards from an order where I only needed one, an extra breadboard and humidity/temp sensor and decided to finally measure the temp out in the greenhouse. It's amazing to have all that in a grafana dash running on a r pi.
> I kinda hope nobody tries. Their attempts at monetization have been pretty friendly and tame thus far & if something spooks them that could change.
To be fair to them they've been making a big push on adding backup support recently. Their Nabu Casa subscription has built in support for this and was a major selling point for me getting the subscription (I have Wireguard for remote access already).
At the same time they implemented first class support for their own subscription, they added the hooks for other integrations to provide the same level of backup support. Now you can easily choose to use Google Drive, S3, BackBlaze and others just as easily as Nabu Casa. In some ways it's "better" as Nabu Casa only supports a single latest backup.
From this they seem pretty friendly and not too interested in lock-in.
The ESPHome Bluetooth Proxy is amazing - no faffing with Bluetooth on Linux (which remains a shambles) needed!
Even though ESPHome has warnings about using WiFi and Bluetooth proxy together being unstable, I've found it to be much better in terms of stability and performance than the Intel Bluetooth adapter connected to my Home Assistant system. BlueZ is probably more complex and less mature.
I have HA running for years (in Docker) and it’s very reliable.
It has integrations with allmost all devices or apps I use and the support for DSMR (Smart Electrical Meters) is first class
I plugged a cable into my meter, the usb end into the server and it just works.
It does have a steep learning curve, though. It really seems “by IT people for IT people”
I have it in docker a d use supervised mode (which seems discouraged, but I want my machine for other uses also). The one thing I struggle with is updating, I'm concerned if I update it'll break. Is there a way to fully snapshot a container state and it's disk state, so I can 100% restore to it if something goes wrong ? I'm still running HA from 2020 because of this.
The other think I'm not a huge fan of is it's template language, it's clunky to say the least, but overall it's a great amd flexible system
I’m running it with docker compose for the same reason and it never failed an update, but there was an occasional config tweak required. For the most part it’s compose pull, compose up, check back in a couple weeks for the point release.
Updating from that far is probably risky but you don’t need to backup everything, just the config directory. Automated backups to Google drive are worth the upgrade alone.
In the last few releases they've polished the built in backup and restore features, which are available in the setting menu now.
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/backup/
I just backup the folder (volume) and that’s it.
If I should ever need to rollback I can change the Docker image tag from ‘latest’ to a specific one I guess.
I’ve never had to do it but I do know people sometimes complain about updates breaking things.
> Is there a way to fully snapshot a container state and it's disk state
`docker commit` should help you there, in making a copy of the container
It used to have a steep learning curve, I’d say. Once I’ve had a long complicated manually written configuration of all my devices, integrations, automations etc, which gradually got replaced by simple clicking in the gui. On the other hand, this also meant a lot of breaking changes over the years, when I had to re-configure my staff the new way
My friend uses self-hosted open-source software to monitor all his home IoT devices[1] and copies important information to the cloud. I'm using StarFive VisionFive 2 to host my database for monitoring, but also have a copy of the data of a chip hetzner arm vps, as well as hosting backups on the two different clouds. I know users who are running[2] for years to monitor Solar panels, lawn watering and vegetable garden watering.
My question is: is it really convenient to use only SaaS now if there is always the possibility of losing your data? I am referring to the case described in the article.
[1]: https://vrutkovs.eu/posts/home-infra/ [2]: https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics-Community/homeassistant-a...
PS: I'm working at VictoriaMetrics company
in recent podcast episode with the found of your company ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xkCykuJwKs , От стартапа до международного бизнеса: история VictoriaMetrics и её уроки | Александр Валялкин | #36) he explicitly described the path VictoriaMetrics has come and one of the early steps was trying to sell SaaS, while quite a lot of users/customers want to have on premise/own setup for such tooling.
So, answering your question: > My question is: is it really convenient to use only SaaS now
no, it's not
Is there anywhere that compiles a database of local control capable smart home devices? I tried briefly to search and I found databases of smart devices but none seemed to have that as a filter.
Just wondering why anyone would go through the hassle of installing home assistant on Linux when the fantastic hassOS exists which will run perfectly virtualized.
Because we want to run more than just Home Assistant on the same OS? Because traditionally OS and application layers were separated? Because we trust mature Linux distros more when it comes to LTS and security patches? Because we already know our way around Debian/Ubuntu/Nix/etc.?
I used to use Home Assistant via Docker, but I've since switched to Proxmox with HAOS in a VM and a second Debian VM for everything else. My main reason for this is that it seems like the more supported scenario. For example, when the Voice Assistant stuff first came out the setup was only really documented via HAOS add-ons. I managed to get it working with standalone Docker containers but it was a pain to figure out. It really is simpler to just use HAOS IMO.
Proxmox adds very little overhead. I'm running dozens of things alongside HAOS.
The OS is the path of least resistance and gives you the best experience for low maintenance.
https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=hao...
> Proxmox adds very little overhead.
It's still running a second kernel and entire userspace stack. In my world that's not "very little overhead".
ProxMox supports both VMs and LXC containers. You would use LXC containers for low overhead. No second kernel.
Using Proxmox with lxc containers, there is no second kernel. It uses the host kernel’s native cgroups and namespaces for process isolation. You can actually achieve the same with just systems and namespaces.
Having said that, I think if you prefer traditional distro packaging, you should absolutely stick to that.
I'm also running dozens of things alongside HA and I don't have to use proxmox.
It's not hard to run HA in unsupported mode. The only real difference is an annoying reminder that you're unsupported. Everything else works, including plugins/add-ons.
I've run HA a bunch of ways. It doesn't really matter all that much. Use HACS to fill any gaps.
Absolutely this. Once you get into the game of running apps at home with certain quality assumptions you end up having to bolt on various things (VPN, DNS, log aggregation etc) that are better wrapped around the application instead of having them run within it. And having an AppOS typically just gets in the way of all that plus what edejong said that you already know how to do it on the typical production OSes and learning to do it for every AppOS is just cumbersome.
Seconded. My home server does many things, one of which is homeassistant.
> we trust mature Linux distros more when it comes to LTS and security patches
This. If I have to trust some huge container or custom OS where is the benefit of open source?
> fantastic hassOS
That is a very subjective opinion.
As was already mentioned, people rarely want to run a dedicated physical server for just a single purpose. The concept of Home Assistant Operating System requires exactly that.
Also, it is Debian-based. It uses the `apt` package manager which is slow. Some people may prefer something faster and more modern, like `pacman` or `dnf`.
> run perfectly virtualized
Fair enough.
But that obviously requires virtualization being set up on the server. If people do not use virtualization for anything else on their server, they may as well set up Home Assistant directly.
Finally, I think there is one more issue.
Many of the integrations which are possible with Home Assistant Operating System require physical hardware being connected to that server. A reader, a receiver, something like that.
But these home servers are often placed in some inaccessible locations, like an attic, where the data from sensors is unavailable. It may be impractical to run cables there. And the wireless devices may be too far away for a receiver located there to be able to read them.
So people need to come up with work-arounds to get their data to their server. They set up various signal proxies and thin clients which receive the data from the sensors on the spot where they are available and then send them over network to the Home Assistant server.
Unfortunately, from my experience, many integrations completely ignore this usecase. They are likely focusing on a happy path where everything is connected locally to "the one" server. And only then they behave nicely and work out of the box. But as soon as you need any special step or behavior, it is necessary to dig deeper and create custom layers to transport the data from your devices to the server.
Home Assistant Operating System does not make any of that simpler. Perhaps on the contrary, it forces you to use a specific Debian-based distribution with possibly outdated packages that you cannot easily upgrade without breaking Home Assistant.
Which is why it makes little sense to bother with it, in my opinion, for these kind of installations.
> Also, it is Debian-based. It uses the `apt` package manager which is slow. Some people may prefer something faster and more modern, like `pacman` or `dnf`.
Do people really care if it takes 5 seconds to parse a package index vs 1? I don't get this argument at all.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. This is one of the most bizarre arguments against it that I've ever come across.
And that's even before you realise it's based on fiction:
> Home Assistant Operating System is not based on a regular Linux distribution like Ubuntu.
https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system
There is no apt or any other package manager on HAOS.
Yes, you are right. There is one more abstraction layer.
Home Assistant Operating System uses Buildroot which uses Docker to run container with Home Assistant Supervisor. And only that container is Debian-based [0].
[0] https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/blob/0c75...
And that's entirely inconsequential, since it's in an immutable container where `apt` will never be used.
I just installed python3 on Debian and Alpine. It takes 16s vs 4s (I ran the test three times, and kept the fastest measurement for Debian and the slowest measurement for Alpine).
Sure a one-time wait of 12s doesn't change my life. But I won't use apt/apk _once_; I'll use it every single time that I install something. It low-key bothers me when my flow is interrupted by having to wait for machines to do their job, increasing that by 300% doesn't help.
This wouldn't be a deciding factor for me. But it doesn't add points for the Debian-based approach.
A couple weeks ago I powered a laptop that had been sitting unused for several months. It had Ubuntu 22.04 installed. The initial `apt-get update` took some time to download new indexes, and almost 3 minutes to process them all afterwards, while I was right there staring at the screen wondering why I was there staring at the screen for so long, because this experience always happens as soon as any of my machines stay off for more than a couple weeks. apt is indeed very slow.
> Do people really care
I suppose it depends. I do care because I typically need to do it regularly. And it is nice to have it done quickly.
What about the ones running it in Kubernetes? ^^;;
I tried HA back in the day and got YAML-bound trying to get various sensors and controllers to integrate and work reliably. I revisited HA a couple of times over the years, but by then had become cosy with Node-RED and saw no strong reason to change. I understand HA's now more configurable through the front-end GUI, which is nice.
I've just integrated an office UPS with the Node-RED stock dashboard to log status, mains voltage and battery charge state - it took all of 5 mins, including the time to install the UPS NUT plugin for Node-RED via the GUI.
I love the ease of the visual, block-based configuration, and the ability to add codable function blocks to process and modify data.
The only things that are not so great in Node-RED are the dashboard look and feel, and the dashboard setup tools.
I tried to install it on a raspi 4 with touchscreen for my wife. The raspi worked fine with Debian, esp. it's installer asks for the wifi and ssh keys, and therefore you can trivially connect to it.
Not so with the homeassistant installer. No wifi setup, no ssh access at all. You really need to cable it, nmap the new IP, and then I got stuck because the web server doesn't show up. Attaching the keyboard brought me into a restricted ha> prompt, where I cannot fix anything.
So far it's horrible
Much respect to Home Assistant for making everything as accessible as it is, but it’s inherently a complex project. It also has to deal with trying to be everything to everyone, which makes it hard to identify the easy path through setting it up among all of the options.
There are two ways to get through Home Assistant:
1. Identify the easy path instructions, get equipment that matches perfectly, and follow the instructions to the letter. Use only equipment known to have great integration. Upgrade only when necessary. Change nothing as soon as it’s all working.
2. Be willing to spend a lot of time tinkering and debugging. There’s a big Home Assistant channel in one of the big Slacks I’m in where everyone eventually hits something that takes days or weeks to figure out.
Many companies have tried to package or use Home Assistant as the foundation for plug and play IoT hubs, but they all seem to end up with the same realization that it really needs a capable and willing human in the loop as soon as you deviate even slightly from the list of devices with excellent support. This isn’t even entirely Home Assistant’s fault: Most of these devices were never designed for third party control.
I did this a few months ago for a test home assistant setup and had the opposite experience. I forget exactly what I did, but it involved editing a file with the wifi settings and dropping my public ssh key on the SD card before installation.
If you use ethernet, no editing required. Web interface goes into setup mode automatically.
Worth noting that ha cli[0] (ha>) does have a `network` command to configure this as well.
[0] https://github.com/home-assistant/cli
Mind that you should not use a Pi with SD card for HA. I'm not sure what the official stance is, but: In my peer group failing SD cards were responsible for a vast majority of issues. Causes are probably a mixture of heavy logging and power outages; either from the grid, or user error not shutting down the Pi before disconnecting power.
At our house I run HAOS in a VM (on a beefy server). My wife uses the app on her phone (as do I), and we have a cheap tablet with the app for guests. On the laptops/desktops we also have access to the web UI.
As the article points out, remote access for the phones can be done via the commercial offering or a VPN (as in our case: wireguard on the OpnSense).
Completely anecdotal experience but I've been running HA on a Pi from SD for quite a few years now with no issues.
Wholly depends on how much stuff you’ve got. I’ve started having issues with the Linux io scheduler when the auto backups got large (1G+), the thing just hung and needed a power cycle.
> Wholly depends on how much stuff you’ve got
Also what SD card you have, the durability between different models differ a lot. The SD card I use for my dashcam been working for years (A "SanDisk MAX ENDURANCE" card), some other cheaper SD cards can stop working properly after just months if you're using them for write-heavy stuff.
Anecdotal agree, but I only use it for my lights (about 20 smart bulbs + 5 sensors + 4 remotes) and I never tinker with it. At least 4 years later, that little Raspberry Pi 3 + ZigBee dongle + sdcard are kinda forgotten about.
If you type "login" at the ha> prompt, you'll get a root shell.
This is something I also had to accept about HA. It runs in a VM in my case so it worked out-of-the-box, but you don't just ssh to it after installing it, and the ha> prompt is just a bit different. So far, it hasn't been in the way, although it occasionally takes time to find out how to do things.
It's very flexible though, and apart from devices in your house there are many outside sources of data to use, like weather data, sun elevation or trash pickup dates. The HA app on your phone gives you many sensors usable in a flow. The time spent on it usually results in something worthy of that time, in my experience.
You don’t need to nmap; instead head to http://homeassistant.local:8123
I’d suggest that you use a docker instance. The setup is trivial.
Not having HAAS has made little difference to me being able to do all sorts of stuff - and HACS gives you access to a whole bunch of additional stuff, and works in docker.
+1. I know the parent reads like “do it my way” but ha in docker really is simpler.
At some point a company is going to start making hackable, local connection devices (cloud optional) with published APIs and sell them at a higher price tag, and they’re going to be fabulously wealthy, commanding higher margins than the others.
At least, that’s what I like to tell myself.
> hackable, local connection devices (cloud optional) with published APIs and sell them at a higher price
This business model doesn’t work.
Many have had this idea. They all run into the same problem: The target audience for hackable home automation devices doesn’t like paying a premium for anything they think they could DIY.
If you have a $70 nicely designed, documented IoT sensor but the DIY home automation people think they can put ESPHome on a $10 Amazon device and accomplish nearly the same thing, which one do are they going to buy?
If you go through the forums you can already find some semi-premium devices that are a little better constructed and might have better feature sets. They’re always followed by comments from people recommending a cheaper option.
The number of companies that does this _is_ growing.
Shelly was early, the cheep chineese stuff was easy to hack but they eventually moved to cheaper and more esoteric chips where custom firmware is non existent or not as mature. This is changing back, though! The number of ESP-32 powered LED light controllers that I've seen on Ali that feature a USB port for reprogramming / have all the GPIO labeled ... even have a HA/ESP-Home/WLED logo on them is infinitely more than I saw in years past (a few is infinitely more than zero, right?)
Buyer beware - There's a mountain of products on the market that are advertised as "open source" which lures many of us in, but many of those products have poor quality hardware.
My heuristic for anything operating at mains voltages is "If I can find a product that looks just like this on Temu/Aliexpress, I'm not buying it". They're probably white label products sourced from the same factories and suffer from the same quality issues.
Relays found in smart plugs are often sketchy in my experience. About half of the ones I bought or set up for others make unsettling noises that made me worried about poor electrical connections and risk of fire. I only have two Shelly plugs but those don't suffer from these issues.
> but many of those products have poor quality hardware.
Absolutely. Cheap hardware means corners cut... regardless of how open the software is.
Shelly devices are quite open and well made but easily 2x the cost of other wifi relay devices. Belkin WeMo devices are similar price to shelly and about as well made but their software leaves literally everything to be desired.
Knowing what risk is acceptable and how to identify if a particular component is built to a spec that obviates that risk or not is probably going to _always_ be part of the DIY scene.
Tuya and their rebranded versions fall into that area too. Their power switches die early and they actually went from easily reprogrammable to hostile firmware. They have own cloud service you can't leave, only get an access code to - and the firmware prevents downgrades. Terrible company.
Just buy the ZigBee versions, they work beautifully with HA
> Just buy the ZigBee versions, they work beautifully with HA
802.15 does have it's place but some of us prefer 802.11 unless battery requirements dictate lower power PHYs. Zigbee is also depreciated; if possible, seek devices using Matter for their interop.
Tuya is just an IoT platform used by many cheap devices but I agree, it's low cost and cloud based which is a terrible combination. I wouldn't touch it.
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)
> There is Zigbee, Z-Wave and Matter.
I am not a practitioner, but instead someone that looks at the ecosystem from time to time and has been waiting for a while, because I dont see the stack + DX/UX that I want yet.
Zigbee never reached critical mass and requires a hub. Z-wave seems to be the same. Thread over wifi (IIRC different protocols/transports are just fine) is what I think will be the future.
IMO Thread wins out, support gets put into routers, and I can just have a thread enabled router which MAY have other
I don’t want to buy an IoT hub. Many IoT devices I want to control are powerful enough to run Wifi, and I want to control them with a standard networking stack with high adoption and familiar tooling. Thread seems to fit this use case the best.
Please feel free to rip apart the above opinions, they’re loosely held. I’d love to learn how wrong I am today!
> 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.
Thanks for the recommendation! Appreciate the disclosure and apologize for the blast of relatively uninformed opinions.
One more side question — why is it so hard to get a simple IoT button that runs local Wifi (really hoping for no base station) only and is battery chargable?
Buildable with an ESP32 clearly but I just want to buy this.
> I don’t want to buy an IoT hub. Many IoT devices I want to control are powerful enough to run Wifi,
Having a lot of career experience in this area, I greatly prefer to keep my IoT devices off of my WiFi.
You don’t need a separate hub device for Zigbee or Z-Wave, just a simple USB adapter that you plug directly into your device controlling everything.
Keeping the low bandwidth IoT devices off of the main WiFi had a lot of advantages. It’s also much easier to rotate your WiFi password when you can do it all without reconnecting every light switch in your house, for example.
Does the hub requirement matter that much though? I mean if you want truly peer to peer, then yeah, but if you're already using Home Assistant you can plug a cheap ZigBee usb dongle into that.
So the bit I'm missing: how do you control them purely over WiFi? Do you run software on your phone that can control the target? Eg: app talks directly to the device over your network, instead of via a browser + Home Assistant running on a Pi. I can't think of any examples of a product that works this way without being cloud enabled (IE: there is a hub but you don't own it)
> Does the hub requirement matter that much though? I mean if you want truly peer to peer, then yeah, but if you're already using Home Assistant you can plug a cheap ZigBee usb dongle into that.
Maybe not, but I don't really want to actually run Home Assistant, I want the basics to hack on, really. Trying to pick the most open thing that will be easy to program without relying on using something like Home Assistant (not that its bad or anything).
> So the bit I'm missing: how do you control them purely over WiFi? Do you run software on your phone that can control the target? Eg: app talks directly to the device over your network, instead of via a browser + Home Assistant running on a Pi. I can't think of any examples of a product that works this way without being cloud enabled (IE: there is a hub but you don't own it)
Yeah that's my goal -- basically I want to be able to control the devices from anything web connected (and ideally, the same program running in multiple places).
My thinking is that I can build this without being cloud enabled if I "just" (famous last words) had Thread/Wifi.
With all the excellent feedback in this thread (thanks HN!), it's looking like a small SBC + a Thread/Zigbee/BLE dongle[0] is the way forward, and hooking that up to my router via USB so it's always powered and follows the router around (maybe velcro it on).
SBC (or something smaller maybe, but probably the SBC) so I can program it myself.
[0]: https://sonoff.tech/product/gateway-and-sensors/sonoff-zigbe...
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
BTW, just bought a bunch of Shelly stuff. Looks like that project might happen sooner than I thought! The Shelly 1 also looked like a good option :)
Thanks again for the rec.
Thanks for the recommendation! This definitely makes it easier. IIRC BLE power mode + wake on BLE + wifi would probably work for easy use!
Sounds like a far off weekend project
thread and matter will, in my opinion, never matter for consumers. Why? It’s basically a walled garden.
Think HomeKit but a tiny bit more open, the open bit is, that a vendor can allow it to communicate with devices of other vendors. But they don’t have to.
Thread also needs more expensive SOCs, with Zigbee you only need a tiny micro controller with a few MHz of clock speed and a few KB of RAM. Thread and matter on the other hand can require megabytes of RAM.
Vendors which nowadays sell HomeKit devices can reuse their SOCs for thread matter, keeping their 3-4 times higher prices compared to devices with the same functionality from Zigbee vendors.
> thread and matter will, in my opinion, never matter for consumers. Why? It’s basically a walled garden.
I'd counter with the fact that walled gardens are incredibly popular, and in particular to consumers. Consumers don't care if the gate is locked or not, they care if the flowers are pretty and the tea at the garden party is nice.
> Thread also needs more expensive SOCs, with Zigbee you only need a tiny micro controller with a few MHz of clock speed and a few KB of RAM. Thread and matter on the other hand can require megabytes of RAM.
IMO prices of SOCs are going to zero. ESP32s are a great example of this. Once RISCV is more widely used and capable things will accelerate even faster.
> Vendors which nowadays sell HomeKit devices can reuse their SOCs for thread matter, keeping their 3-4 times higher prices compared to devices with the same functionality from Zigbee vendors.
I think we agree here...? I think that HomeKit device that is just a bit more open is going to win. But I think that HomeKit device gets adopted faster if it's just a router -- I can understand updating a router to get a smart home. What I don't want is confusion around whether I need a hub or not, or whether devices work together or not.
Buying a single router that acts as a hub + Wifi "repeaters" (IIRC that's what they're called) that can "extend" the signal (and along the way give other devices a point to connect to) makes perfect sense to me as a consumer. I already know what WiFi is, and I want better coverage, not worse. The smart home stuff just falls out of tech I am already familiar with, efficiency by damned.
Thread is a WiFi replacement, the devices talk IP over thread.
And it has an encrypted pairing process to your vendor controlled hub. Said vendor can allow or disallow it which other vendors may speak with said hub.
Here is the landscape we have: HomeKit: fully closed, requires certification from Apple. Very expensive and limited functionality.
Zigbee: fully open, anyone can make Zigbee devices and sell them without any restriction. Operates on the same frequency all over the world. Devices are super cheap. You can expand the protocol however you like as a vendor.
Z-wave: fully closed, several incompatible frequencies, requires certification to sell devices.
Thread and matter: semi closed, same ieee standard as Zigbee for data transfer. Vendors can allow it to talk to devices of other vendors. Requires certification. Same price tag as HomeKit, aka 3-4 more expensive than Zigbee.
All of them require hubs. And only with Zigbee you are guaranteed to have interop between all vendors and all devices sold across the globe. Thanks to Home Assistant. With thread the vendor can simply disallow you to use your devices with HomeAssistant, which is unacceptable by me.
Thanks for all this context/explanation -- also the follow up. Automatic range extension (i.e. actually being a mesh and forwarding along messages) is an excellent feature.
> All of them require hubs. And only with Zigbee you are guaranteed to have interop between all vendors and all devices sold across the globe. Thanks to Home Assistant. With thread the vendor can simply disallow you to use your devices with HomeAssistant, which is unacceptable by me.
This is the one I want to push back on -- Thread over Wifi doesn't require a special Hub right? Taken with other info from this thread clearly in the real world it's not so simple to find the right hardware... but it's possible to just buy a thread device and use it over regular old wifi.
Sounds like Zigbee is closer to ideal than Thread or Thread/Wifi.
Maybe this is the startup someone needs to do -- some reasonably powered device to attack to a router/connect close to a router which supports Thread and Zigbee, has completely local management and call it a day. Is this just over-complicating a smart hub? Don't know.
Thread is using the same protocol as Zigbee, which requires specialized hardware to talk to it. You can’t get around a centralized hub when wanting to use them on your WiFi network.
Thread just adds an IP layer above Zigbee. Zigbee is on the same protocol layer as Ethernet or WiFi.
> Thread just adds an IP layer above Zigbee
To clarify this: Thread is not building on top of Zigbee, they are both independently built on 802.15.4
> Thread is using the same protocol as Zigbee, which requires specialized hardware to talk to it. You can’t get around a centralized hub when wanting to use them on your WiFi network. > > Thread just adds an IP layer above Zigbee. Zigbee is on the same protocol layer as Ethernet or WiFi.
AH, I've just realized that I've been using the wrong terminology.
I've been meaning to say Matter over Thread vs Matter over Wifi!
Matter seems like a decent way forward, and it can work only over wifi which is what drew me in to focusing on Matter. IIRC Matter/Zigbee isn't a thing (though it technically should be possible, Zigbee is just a transport as far as Matter is concerned right?).
[EDIT] works -> can work, Thread/Zigbee -> Matter/Zigbee
But here comes the tricky bit, when you buy either Zigbee or matter devices each vendor will add its own extensions.
In the Zigbee ecosystem vendors out right refuse to communicate with devices from other vendors even though Zigbee is an interoperable standard.
That lead to the birth of zigbee2mqtt, literally hundreds of years of development time went into it to have full feature support for every Zigbee device that exists.
For thread and matter devices each vendor would have to do the same. And that won’t happen, leading to a fragmented ecosystem.
Welp that's depressing.
Thanks again for laying this out -- I've been seeing zigbee2mqtt everywhere and this explains why someone would add mqtt to the mix. Sounds like this is another thing that needs to be run/managed on the software side to be robust.
This is an insane goal (and who knows when I'll actually get to work on this project), but what I want to build is an all in one something that "just works". So roughly:
1. Pick a good enough physical comms stack to hit most things
2. Write software to fill in the rest
It's going to be difficult but it feels like the setup for all these tools is just hard, when it doesn't have to be if you could pin down the hardware/install instructions, then write a really decent software layer to pull it all together without making people go homelab.
That said, that's probably what home assistant devs thought before they reached the current level of complexity, I'm probably preparing to attack a windmill here.
I think my secret sauce here will be WebAssembly -- if I can nail down the hardware below, build/convert a ton of adapters via WebAssembly, and then build a compelling/easy to add/install/manage/configure UI on top of that, I might have myself something worth posting to HN someday.
IMHO, thread and matter will probably be as mature as homeassistant and zigbe2mqtt in the 2030ies. At the moment, Zigbee devices can work without any hub as long as you stick to one vendor.
Aka buy lightbulbs and switches from ikea and you can right out start using them, I believe you only need a hub to create groups of devices which then can get controled with one switch. You then could unplug the hub and still use them, only needing a hub for ethernet bridging and automations.
> Aka buy lightbulbs and switches from ikea and you can right out start using them, I believe you only need a hub to create groups of devices which then can get controled with one switch. You then could unplug the hub and still use them, only needing a hub for ethernet bridging and automations.
Yeah thanks for pointing this out -- just need a single Zigbee coordinator (if my light research has been correct so far) and I'm ready to go.
I think IKEA bulbs will also be in my future.
Thread and Zigbee implement the same IEEE standard.
Matter would be correctly the application layer protocol of thread and could be spoken over any transport. Like HTTP
Oh and, Zigbee has automatic range extension as part of its standard. Every device with a plug expands your network.
> I don’t want to buy an IoT hub.
Different expectations. I don't want my things to know that wifi exists. It stops vendor lock-in, it ensures local communication, it means things work even if network goes down. It also makes sure they will never autoupdate or join Mirai botnet.
I've got a mix of zwave (fibaro), ZigBee (Ikea) and ble at home and I'm ok with that.
Same boat here, I like knowing that none of of my devices can get network access, all they can do is communicate with HomeAssistant.
And with Zigbee bindings most of my inputs are set up in a way that they still work even if HomeAssistant goes down.
Not that HomeAssistant has ever down, but I can imagine its SSD or something failing and not bothering moving it to a different computer for a few days while I get a replacement in.
Yeah I think so -- I like to think I can control my router at least, so I don't have to worry about it. That said, probably not protected from the botnet case.
Also, unfortunately up until now I've been saying the wrong thing -- I mean Matter over Thread versus Matter over Wifi. Matter over Wifi seemed like a winner to me because I could just use it.
It looks like going forward I'll be plugging a small SBC into my Router's USB (+ ethernet) and connecting a Zigbee + Thread dongle. That should cover me for most communication options, then from there it's "just" a software problem :)
> why is it so hard to get a simple IoT button that runs local Wifi (really hoping for no base station) only and is battery chargable?
Battery life is atrocious and latency from deep sleep will be very bad. I’ve got Zigbee buttons from ikea that run on nimh batteries for a couple years now and only used like half of the charge. The hub is an usb dongle attached to the home assistant server, no issues.
> Battery life is atrocious and latency from deep sleep will be very bad. I’ve got Zigbee buttons from ikea that run on nimh batteries for a couple years now and only used like half of the charge. The hub is an usb dongle attached to the home assistant server, no issues.
So what do you consider to be "bad" battery life? I've got quite the tolerance, but the problem is that they don't even exist. Everyone seems to stop out on this at "it would never be worth it".
> Zigbee buttons from ikea that run on nimh batteries for a couple years now and only used like half of the charge.
This is intense for me, I'm happy with replacing batteries every 6 months if I could simplify deployment by 10x.
> The hub is an usb dongle attached to the home assistant server, no issues.
Maybe deployment isn't as hard as I'm making it out to be! That said, nothing easier than sending some packets to an IP address. I assume Zigbee APKs are easy... But for example if I search on crates.io (https://crates.io/search?q=zigbee) I don't see any obvious choices.
To restate what I want (and hopefully is sounds a bit more reasonable) I want to be able to buy one smart light bulb, configure it over BLE to connect to Wifi and for the rest of it's live configure it/change it via Wifi. I want that for basically every device, and I'm fine with swapping batteries every 1 to 6months if I could have that!
BLE should also work but you also want a dongle, so hardware wise it’s the same; ideally you also want a couple gateways (Shelly devices can do that out of the box btw, and new Shellies will be supporting Zigbee.)
You should look into zigbee2mqtt IMHO.
With Thread+WiFi, can devices talk to the internet? Because denying them that ability is a lot of why I like Zigbee/Z-Wave.
Wifi yes. Thread depends on the settings on the Thread Border Router. Ours defaults to no internet access.
I’m sure I’m speaking to the choir here but access to Wifi != access to the internet!
Why I’m excited about thread over wifi is that I don’t need any extra specialized gear and possibility one device could run by itself
ZWave is the most stable radio-based standard right now. It's not great, and it's not very extensible, but it's OK-ish. There's one hackable device: https://z-uno.z-wave.me/technical/ but its SDK is not that great.
Pure ZigBee is... spotty because there are no certification requirements. Matter is stuck in development hell, but is slowly getting better.
And the problem with WiFi is energy efficiency (or a lack thereof) compared to ZWave/ZigBee/Thread.
So far, I've tried probably most of the home radio standards. Lutron was the most reliable, but it's also super-proprietary. My next house will just have conduits with low-voltage cables running to all the light switches, so I can use something like KNX instead of the radio-based stuff.
> And the problem with WiFi is energy efficiency (or a lack thereof) compared to ZWave/ZigBee/Thread.
This is a problem I'd really like to solve the old fashioned way/I think it prevents too much building. Energy density, rechargability, etc are like CPU speed to me -- it will eventually be solved, and I can deal with replacing a device every month or swapping a rechargable battery (especially if the device can tell me it's low).
I really do think it will be Thread+Wifi routers that eventually get a built-in Thread antenna that win (at least wining me over).
If either ZWave or ZigBee had managed to get into the home router space, they would have won already IMO. There are probably annoying reasons they couldn't until now.
> So far, I've tried probably most of the home radio standards. Lutron was the most reliable, but it's also super-proprietary. My next house will just have conduits with low-voltage cables running to all the light switches, so I can use something like KNX instead of the radio-based stuff.
Thanks for sharing this and your other experience!
Also TIL KNX.
> I really do think it will be Thread+Wifi routers that eventually get a built-in Thread antenna that win (at least wining me over).
That actually had been the case for a while. A lot of WiFi routers had a built-in Thread (ZigBee) radio, but then nobody actually used them and the manufacturers stopped bothering with them. So now pretty much only Eero access points still have it.
> Also TIL KNX.
My dream is to have _actuated_ switches, that have full tactile feedback. So that the paddle will physically flip when switched remotely.
I commissioned an engineering company to look into that, but apparently this is not feasible at all with the NEC and UL requirements in the US. The only way is to use low voltage wiring to the switches and then use them to control line-voltage relays. This kind of system is popular in Europe, so you might as well just go with something like KNX.
> That actually had been the case for a while. A lot of WiFi routers had a built-in Thread (ZigBee) radio, but then nobody actually used them and the manufacturers stopped bothering with them. So now pretty much only Eero access points still have it.
Thanks for this context -- when I searched I only found "thread border routers" -- I couldn't find a router made by a well known brand that included thread functionality -- it always seemed to be "buy a router AND buy a thread border router".
Really surprised that I missed the wave on this and wonder if it was a "we want people to buy two things" rather than no one actually using it. Maybe I just have to wait for it to come back around?
Maybe the answer here is a USB powered device with an extra 2.4Ghz radio (running like.. OpenThread or whatever I need to do thread over an available antenna?) attached to the router?
What I don't understand is why I just use the existing router's 2.4Ghz antenna for this? The amount of confusion in the space and inability of devices to do multiple things is really annoying, to be frank. I can only surmise the reason this stuff is not easy/obvious is profit-incentive (outside of the difficulty of designing good standards of course!).
[EDIT] OK, so the antennas aren't the same, despite being the same frequency -- clearly this is to ensure speedy operation at the hardware level.
So the add-on antenna would probably work if I bought some parts from mouser:
https://eu.mouser.com/c/passive-components/antennas/?protoco...
[EDIT2] Nope, more confused. Multi-protocol antennas exist. Why is this not a set-and-forget option for all the routers??? Someone clue me in to the politics/power struggle or whatever the real reason is here. And then connected + taped something to my router.
> Really surprised that I missed the wave on this and wonder if it was a "we want people to buy two things" rather than no one actually using it. Maybe I just have to wait for it to come back around?
It's worse. There are _no_ new stand-alone Thread Border Routers on the market. You might find old stock of GL.iNet routers, and I believe there were a couple of other experimental devices.
If you want a robust Matter network, your best bet is to use Apple or Google devices as border routers. Or you can use a USB ZigBee stick with HomeAssistant.
> [EDIT2] Nope, more confused. Multi-protocol antennas exist. Why is this not a set-and-forget option for all the routers???
No market demand, so router manufacturers just don't bother. The initial versions of Matter were a burning trash fire.
Thanks for the color here -- sad but I get it.
Sounds like we're almost there and Zigbee/Thread are at least supportable with the same hardware. I can work with that I guess!
> No market demand, so router manufacturers just don't bother. The initial versions of Matter were a burning trash fire.
I remember hearing about this -- they fixed/improved it eventually but I guess the damage was done.
The article does mention https://refoss.net/, quote:
Lots of “smart” products come with BK7231x chips that are flashable to esphome, nobody needs another custom protocol (even if open) since esphome currently supports local encrypted transport that’s going to be better than 99% of what the Chinese (or even western) companies are going to design for local communication.
Oh, and hobbyists mostly aren’t going to pay premium for those either, unless those come preflashed with esphome and sponsor hass project, and even then 90% people are still going to buy the cheapest option on the market:)
For a long time I was running home automation using individual scripts and was happy with it. Then I found myself in a remote place where the ISP gave a shitty modem which hangs when there's no heavy usage ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I had to automate restarting the modem when the Internet is down by power cycling a smart plug[1], Home Assistant turned out to be extremely useful for that. Official HW integrations and Node-RED was very straightforward to solve my problem. Since then I'm managing and monitoring various hardware devices in my home through HA.
What's interesting is that there are manufacturers who are not only fine with HA but work with developers of HA integrations which enable offline usage of their IoT products even though their official apps are completely enshittified.
Nowadays I checkout HA compatibility before I buy a IoT device.
[1] https://abishekmuthian.com/restart-modem-automatically-when-...
I started using home assistant when it first came out, found it too clumsy, returned years later, and found it too bloated.
A lot of volunteer work has gone into it but it lacks overall coordination of efforts and a usage model that is simple and consistent. That’s one of the downsides of open source: too many cooks and you get mediocrity, but accidentally when everyone is good hearted about it.
I had to do so much research on appliances I was adding that it was easier to just roll my own gateway and cloud. Now it is a vastly smaller code base that I control and can easily debug issues.
Maybe HA could refactor into a smaller set of modules that doesn’t require a huge set of assets from the get go?
Home Assistant is great, I have been able to push it to do things I wasnt expecting it to permit. Just running Python within a container arbitrarily interacting with the network and sensors. I used it to backend my own home web application.
I believe a lot of people who are upset with the product have radically incorrect expectations.
Thanks! Check out Lars' channel for some interesting insights into Home Assistant with remote sensors: https://www.youtube.com/@LarsKlintTech/search?query=home%20a...
I got frusterated with HA's attempts to make is hard to run outside of their distro and installed openHAB. I find that works good enough for me.
Funnily, I had the opposite journey: I got plainly frustrated with everything OpenHab and was delighted with the versatile integrations and ease of setup with Home Assistant...
If you use openhab as they want it is easier. However if you don't want it it on a dedicated computer it becomes much harder.
Feels like building my own smart Jarvis at home — kinda tricky, but super fun!
Is there a way to contribute to LWN without creating an account or having an ongoing thing? Does nobody use crypto?
Looks like they don't accept donations, sounds like it is much harder to accept them.
https://lwn.net/Articles/828428/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1019619/
You can wait for around two weeks for the article to be free to read, if you don't want to subscribe
Looking forward to the day we might have home appliances without on board cpus, they will just be LAN wifi firmware devices. Something like HA could be used to make them as smart or as dumb as the user wants without giving the manufacturer any control over the UX
That’s literally Zigbee.
The data ownership reminds me a bit of an early business ummm transaction if Dr Phil:
1. Sell the gullible public long-term memberships to a gym, with long-term subscriptions.
2. Sell the subscriptions to a 3rd party.
3. Close gym. Subscription contract still valid.
https://www.celebitchy.com/8971/dr_phil_ran_a_health_club_sc...
Home Assistant is a toy when it comes to automation reliability. It's a good toy though.
I'll stick to my domoticz for the "if it ain't broken..." approach.
I've never had HA itself fail. I've had it installed for 10 years and the only true failures were hardware (server, iot devices) or my own config mistakes.
If you choose your hardware wisely, it's incredibly reliable. Most of my house is automated and I all I've done with it in the past year is add a few devices.
I will admit that low (or zero) maintenance is easier to accomplish if you know your way around a little bit.
I used HA for about a decade without so much as a hiccup.
What makes you think it’s a toy?
Home Assistant is a very popular home automation platform used by many. Most articles and posts fail to mention concerns regarding the user experience, security and long term stability. The most common complaints are related to the ease of use and to the backwards incompatible changes. The ease of use complaints are usually about setting it up, putting together automations and setting up dashboards.
Home Assistant is described as a home automation solution which runs locally on your hardware inside your home. Its current development process has many issues.
https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549 is a serious privacy concern. Nabu Casa and the owners of the CDN can collect the following information about the users of a Home Assistant installation: the integrations they use, the IP address of all devices which use the particular Home Assistant installation, the user agent of the device opening the dashboard, the precise location based on IP address, the user's ISP and possibly very specifically the people through a combination of IP address associated with a specific set of integrations configured for an installation. Nabu Casa employees can claim that the data isn't sold or used. The people who run the CDN can do as they please without Nabu Casa's knowledge. It's not possible to load these icons without an Internet connection.
The recent changes made to the backups in Home Assistant OS aren't user friendly. It's no longer possible to make an unencrypted backup without resorting to manual work by invoking an action. This arbitrary change wasn't necessary. It shows that the development process is chaotic and without a clear focus on making Home Assistant a more polished solution with the user in mind. It's just what they want to do.
Security is yet another weak point for this project. Home Assistant is a Python monolith with 1000 direct Python dependencies and countless other indirect dependencies https://github.com/home-assistant/core/blob/dev/requirements.... All these Python packages and their dependencies are bundled in everyone's Home Assistant installation. This is likely the biggest Python monolith in existence. You can compromise this project by compromising any dependency. Some of these packages are provided by Chinese companies for cloud based integrations.
Some addons can only be run with net: host on Home Assistant OS. This is one more potential vulnerability if one of these addons is compromised.
Bugs and regressions frequently get ignored on their tracker. There's a bot which closes tickets for which the developers have no interest. They choose to implement new features and to refactor without concern for people who can no longer do what was once possible. Features can change from month to month without any regard for the user's experience or for the overall stability. The graphs are one such example. New or changed functionality appears to lack thorough design before implementation. Unstable changes make it into stable releases every month.
Paulus has recently stated that Home Assistant is the best home automation solution out there. It's not really the best because it's very good. It just happens to be the most popular among people with some technical skills. It's the best because the others are very bad, support less hardware, require a cloud connection, have poor security, are privacy invasive, require a subscription, are extremely expensive, are updated once per year or for several of the mentioned reasons.
Home Assistant's advantage over commercial solutions is its large number of integrations, that it's open source and that there's a large community behind it. I wouldn't call it better at all. It's very similar to commercial solutions when privacy, security and usability concerns are ignored. The advantage of some cloud free commercial solutions is that they're likely to be more stable without breaking something once per month or every other month.
Those who still want to run Home Assistant may want to run it as a Docker container without Home Assistant OS, to use a separate network for the smart home devices, to avoid cloud connected cameras, to avoid cloud based integrations and to isolate Home Assistant from the other non-IoT devices found on the network. It can be a high value target for hackers and for companies who want to sell your data. I wouldn't recommend running it if one's not tech savvy. It's not something one sets up for someone else who's not tech savvy either. Things will break. It's just a matter of time.
I'm concerned about privacy also, especially with Home Assistant integrations that "dial home" to vendor's clouds. Your data is not private. Check out my project that puts privacy as a main feature: https://merliot.io.
A link for the first article in this series:
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1017720/7155ecb9602e9ef2/
We changed the URL to this from https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1017720/7155ecb9602e9ef2/ and posted this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44014505, to avoid splitting the discussion between the two parts.
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