Home Assistant Has a New Foundation, Goal To Become a Consumer Brand (arstechnica.com) 33
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Home Assistant, until recently, has been a wide-ranging and hard-to-define project. The open smart home platform is an open source OS you can run anywhere that aims to connect all your devices together. But it's also bespoke Raspberry Pi hardware, in Yellow and Green. It's entirely free, but it also receives funding through a private cloud services company, Nabu Casa. It contains tiny board project ESPHome and other inter-connected bits. It has wide-ranging voice assistant ambitions, but it doesn't want to be Alexa or Google Assistant. Home Assistant is a lot.
After an announcement this weekend, however, Home Assistant's shape is a bit easier to draw out. All of the project's ambitions now fall under the Open Home Foundation, a non-profit organization that now contains Home Assistant and more than 240 related bits. Its mission statement is refreshing, and refreshingly honest about the state of modern open source projects. "We've done this to create a bulwark against surveillance capitalism, the risk of buyout, and open-source projects becoming abandonware," the Open Home Foundation states in a press release. "To an extent, this protection extends even against our future selves -- so that smart home users can continue to benefit for years, if not decades. No matter what comes." Along with keeping Home Assistant funded and secure from buy-outs or mission creep, the foundation intends to help fund and collaborate with external projects crucial to Home Assistant, like Z-Wave JS and Zigbee2MQTT.
Home Assistant's ambitions don't stop with money and board seats, though. They aim to "be an active political advocate" in the smart home field, toward three primary principles:
- Data privacy, which means devices with local-only options, and cloud services with explicit permissions
- Choice in using devices with one another through open standards and local APIs
- Sustainability by repurposing old devices and appliances beyond company-defined lifetimes
Notably, individuals cannot contribute modest-size donations to the Open Home Foundation. Instead, the foundation asks supporters to purchase a Nabu Casa subscription or contribute code or other help to its open source projects. Further reading: The Verge's interview with Home Assistant founder Paulus Schoutsen
After an announcement this weekend, however, Home Assistant's shape is a bit easier to draw out. All of the project's ambitions now fall under the Open Home Foundation, a non-profit organization that now contains Home Assistant and more than 240 related bits. Its mission statement is refreshing, and refreshingly honest about the state of modern open source projects. "We've done this to create a bulwark against surveillance capitalism, the risk of buyout, and open-source projects becoming abandonware," the Open Home Foundation states in a press release. "To an extent, this protection extends even against our future selves -- so that smart home users can continue to benefit for years, if not decades. No matter what comes." Along with keeping Home Assistant funded and secure from buy-outs or mission creep, the foundation intends to help fund and collaborate with external projects crucial to Home Assistant, like Z-Wave JS and Zigbee2MQTT.
Home Assistant's ambitions don't stop with money and board seats, though. They aim to "be an active political advocate" in the smart home field, toward three primary principles:
- Data privacy, which means devices with local-only options, and cloud services with explicit permissions
- Choice in using devices with one another through open standards and local APIs
- Sustainability by repurposing old devices and appliances beyond company-defined lifetimes
Notably, individuals cannot contribute modest-size donations to the Open Home Foundation. Instead, the foundation asks supporters to purchase a Nabu Casa subscription or contribute code or other help to its open source projects. Further reading: The Verge's interview with Home Assistant founder Paulus Schoutsen
Home Assistant is awesome (Score:4, Interesting)
So many 'smart home' items are nice toys that only work if they can connect to the manufacturer's servers. With Home Assistant, you can build a home automation and security system that is entirely local if you like. It still takes a bit of work because you have to do your research when choosing new devices to add, but it works.
The voice assistant is adequate and rapidly improving, though the recommended hardware is listen-only - voice response is currently mainly available via a phone app.
Anyway, even if you have nothing to plug into it but have an old computer somewhere, it's worth downloading and playing with. Link it to the phone app and suddenly you have family tracking, common calendars, and a weather app. When my kids were in school, I added an RSS feed parser and had it telling me if buses were cancelled or not before we'd even had breakfast. Now I use it wake me up with a weather report and tell me if it's time to put out the garbage and recycling.
Add in a $20 SDR module and it can check your tire pressure for you, maybe pick up signals from a neighbour's weather station. Then you can start extending it with really inexpensive door sensors. This summer I'm adding a floating sensor to my pool to track the water chemistry and temperature and expecting to save a ton of money scheduling the filter pump (with a $20 smart light switch) to run just long enough during non-peak hours to cycle the water and keep it healthy.
I also route inexpensive cameras through it so I can check them from anywhere I want without having them connect to a server in China or wherever.
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Stay away from Wyze. Great hardware... terrible walled garden.
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Globe is another brand you'll find on the discount shelves. Total garbage.
My general rule is to start with Zigbee devices for anything I want secured because they cannot route to the Internet. 433MHz devices for anything I'm OK sending data in the clear (like my weather station).
I fall back to WiFi if I must, a lot of that stuff you can get to work by configuring it with the manufacturer's app, THEN blocking it from further communications with the Internet. I don't like it, and I'm definitely boned if I
Re: Home Assistant is awesome (Score:2)
Zigbee has very limited range, in my experience. My Smartmeter uses it, and I have to place my rainforest eagle3 in the garage, as close as possible to the outside meter. Otherwise, no signal.
I live in a very large place. I have 43 Z-wave devices. Those work pretty well.
I also have Yolink devices. 15 of them. The range is better than Z-wave. But the HA integration requires cloud.
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Zigbee does mesh net, so you can plan your device placements to help with range. Though that only applies to line powered devices, so trying to chain the power-miser battery sensors won't work. I have a smart outlet I use to help some sensors that are at the edge of useful range from the hub.
I do kind of wish I'd initially chosen Z-Wave for my low-power encrypted wireless for the extra range, but Zigbee has been adequate for my uses so far and I like to keep things as homogeneous as possible, so I'm not s
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If your lighting is Zigbee, then you've probably already got extensive coverage of your home with the mesh network, such that adding new Zigbee devices will never have range issues. That's my situation, where all my lightbulbs were already Zigbee, so when I wanted to add some Zigbee temperature sensors, no matter where I put them, they were always near a Zigbee node.
Re: Home Assistant is awesome (Score:2)
The mesh feature or Zigbee might work indoors, but won't help as much outdoors. I have a mailbox motion sensor. Even Z-wave does not work inside a metal box. But it is not a perfect Faraday cage, as my Yolink motion sensor does work in the mailbox. Same for temperature sensors inside my multiple refrigerators/freezers. Yolink works where others don't.
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Every smart device manufacturer is a walled garden, how is Wyze any different? They're priced fairly, at least.
Disclaimer: I use 3 Wyze cameras with no cloud subscription and find them adequate.
Re: Home Assistant is awesome (Score:2)
Not true. Z-wave is not a walled garden. There is open source software, and multiple manufacturers making devices. No cloud required.
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Every smart device manufacturer is a walled garden, how is Wyze any different? They're priced fairly, at least.
Disclaimer: I use 3 Wyze cameras with no cloud subscription and find them adequate.
Wyze still doesn't support RTSP without loading a separate beta firmware version. It has been "beta" since Wyze 2 cameras despite being one of the most heavily requested features. Instead, they chose to focus on everything and the kitchen sink.
Without a cloud subscription, you still have to be able to log in to Wyze servers in order to view the content recorded on your cameras. If Wyze is down, you'd have to manually pull your SD cards as opposed to having your home NVR record the feed.
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Quite.
I started tinkering with it as nothing more than a hobby, and I have some countless dozens of sensors on it now. And most of those are actually just operated in-house and don't require cloud integration at all.
I put three different SDRs on it and it captures multiple weather stations, fridge and freezer sensors, and even passing aircraft (using FlightAware). As well as the other useful integrations like what bin-day is today and what I need to put out.
I obtained for Matter smart plugs for free the o
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Any power consumption figures on the SDR? It's probably not a lot, but they do get warm. So far I've been getting dedicated radios for most stuff. Adding weather station decoding was on my very long to-do list.
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No power consumption data for you, but... I just installed the RTL_433 addon with the config wide open and I pull in everything.
It all shows in the MQTT console with the mosquito_sub command. The challenge can be picking out your own stuff if there are a lot of devices in your vicinity.
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Thanks. Would you recommend any particular dongle? I have some cheap TV ones but they aren't very good.
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I purchased a Chinese generic of the Leadingstar USB dongle. It should cost around $20 through Walmart.
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Thanks, I will look for one.
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I want one that works without crushing my CPU.
Via Amazon I bought a highly recommended 'V3 R860 RTL2832U' branded by RTL-SDR.com for $40 in 2022. https://www.amazon.com/gp/prod... [amazon.com]
Lots of articles of it running on a Raspberry Pi.
Tried it on two Raspberry Pi 4, running various software and different OS's: unbearably slow, basically unresponsive.
Tried it on two of my desktop Ubuntu boxes, it was usable but of the applications needed to run it only two would work consistently.
Then I see several posts here say
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I honestly don't know what to say to that. I run my HA in a VM on a grossly over-powered server now, but I started on a PI and never noticed an issue beyond it being difficult to install and configure the RTL_433 addon back in the day.
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That's how it works. It's basically a WinModem. Passes the raw sampled RF to the computer, and the CPU does all the decoding.
Odd (Score:2)
I was about to make a sizeable contribution to the Open Home Foundation... until I read that they don't want your money. I do not support Nubu Casa, so they aren't going to get my money... and the other "causes" kind of miss the point IMO.
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I was about to make a sizeable contribution to the Open Home Foundation... until I read that they don't want your money. I do not support Nubu Casa, so they aren't going to get my money... and the other "causes" kind of miss the point IMO.
Sure you were... Nabu Casa is what supports the entire foundation and its like $6 a month. Why exactly do you not support Nabu Casa if you were willing to donate money?
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The money isn't for something I want or need; it is a service that I think is a poor strategic direction, although there are people it would benefit. The problem with every one of these types of companies is that it becomes cloud-first and it damages local install communities.
Bespoke (Score:3)
How is Raspberry Pi hardware bespoke? That's about as generic as you can get.
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Home Assistant runs my house and there isn't a single Zigbee device on it.
That's just "another module" in their huge libraries of integration modules.
It's "bespoke" because their own hardware that they choose to sell is not just an off-the-shelf device. However it's also just an open-source OS and software that you can put on a commodity Pi or other machine and don't need to buy their hardware or use any given protocol at all if you don't want to.
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The summary is misleading. The custom HW (Yellow, Blue and Green) aren't Raspberry Pi's. Yellow is built around a Raspberry Pi Compute module and Blue/Green is bespoke HW (form factor) and has nothing to do with the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Home Assistant is just a python app, that can be run on any suitable platform, including Raspberry Pi's.
Promise for the rest of us too (Score:1)
Hopefully this will lead to some improvements for those of us who are already fine with setting up HA as it is now.
One of the things that have kept me from really going all in on HA is that it's too unstable between updates. That old saying about the mechanic's car never working? That is definitely true for us running HA. It needs constant tinkering. And I just don't care for that. It's my house, and although I would find it a lot of fun, the family will not.
But they can't do this transition without fixing
Re: Promise for the rest of us too (Score:2)
OpenHAB does not suffer from these problems
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In fact, I put off updates as long as possible. A lot of things can't be backed out of they go wrong, and the devs do this on purpose to avoid having infinite version compatibility issues. It really sucks to update something like that and find people who held back a version are OK... And you just have to deal with having something broken until a dev feels like it should be a priority.
They're pretty good about that, but I just want my system to work.
Typically I back up my entire VM and then spend a day or