How Home Assistant Leads a 'Local-First Rebellion' (github.blog) 100
It runs locally, a free/open source home automation platform connecting all your devices together, regardless of brand. And GitHub's senior developer calls it "one of the most active, culturally important, and technically demanding open source ecosystems on the planet," with tens of thousands of contributors and millions of installations.
That's confirmed by this year's "Octoverse" developer survey... Home Assistant was one of the fastest-growing open source projects by contributors, ranking alongside AI infrastructure giants like vLLM, Ollama, and Transformers. It also appeared in the top projects attracting first-time contributors, sitting beside massive developer platforms such as VS Code... Home Assistant is now running in more than 2 million households, orchestrating everything from thermostats and door locks to motion sensors and lighting. All on users' own hardware, not the cloud. The contributor base behind that growth is just as remarkable: 21,000 contributors in a single year...
At its core, Home Assistant's problem is combinatorial explosion. The platform supports "hundreds, thousands of devices... over 3,000 brands," as [maintainer Franck Nijhof] notes. Each one behaves differently, and the only way to normalize them is to build a general-purpose abstraction layer that can survive vendor churn, bad APIs, and inconsistent firmware. Instead of treating devices as isolated objects behind cloud accounts, everything is represented locally as entities with states and events. A garage door is not just a vendor-specific API; it's a structured device that exposes capabilities to the automation engine. A thermostat is not a cloud endpoint; it's a sensor/actuator pair with metadata that can be reasoned about.
That consistency is why people can build wildly advanced automations. Frenck describes one particularly inventive example: "Some people install weight sensors into their couches so they actually know if you're sitting down or standing up again. You're watching a movie, you stand up, and it will pause and then turn on the lights a bit brighter so you can actually see when you get your drink. You get back, sit down, the lights dim, and the movie continues." A system that can orchestrate these interactions is fundamentally a distributed event-driven runtime for physical spaces. Home Assistant may look like a dashboard, but under the hood it behaves more like a real-time OS for the home...
The local-first architecture means Home Assistant can run on hardware as small as a Raspberry Pi but must handle workloads that commercial systems offload to the cloud: device discovery, event dispatch, state persistence, automation scheduling, voice pipeline inference (if local), real-time sensor reading, integration updates, and security constraints. This architecture forces optimizations few consumer systems attempt.
"If any of this were offloaded to a vendor cloud, the system would be easier to build," the article points out. "But Home Assistant's philosophy reverses the paradigm: the home is the data center..."
As Nijhof says of other vendor solutions, "It's crazy that we need the internet nowadays to change your thermostat."
That's confirmed by this year's "Octoverse" developer survey... Home Assistant was one of the fastest-growing open source projects by contributors, ranking alongside AI infrastructure giants like vLLM, Ollama, and Transformers. It also appeared in the top projects attracting first-time contributors, sitting beside massive developer platforms such as VS Code... Home Assistant is now running in more than 2 million households, orchestrating everything from thermostats and door locks to motion sensors and lighting. All on users' own hardware, not the cloud. The contributor base behind that growth is just as remarkable: 21,000 contributors in a single year...
At its core, Home Assistant's problem is combinatorial explosion. The platform supports "hundreds, thousands of devices... over 3,000 brands," as [maintainer Franck Nijhof] notes. Each one behaves differently, and the only way to normalize them is to build a general-purpose abstraction layer that can survive vendor churn, bad APIs, and inconsistent firmware. Instead of treating devices as isolated objects behind cloud accounts, everything is represented locally as entities with states and events. A garage door is not just a vendor-specific API; it's a structured device that exposes capabilities to the automation engine. A thermostat is not a cloud endpoint; it's a sensor/actuator pair with metadata that can be reasoned about.
That consistency is why people can build wildly advanced automations. Frenck describes one particularly inventive example: "Some people install weight sensors into their couches so they actually know if you're sitting down or standing up again. You're watching a movie, you stand up, and it will pause and then turn on the lights a bit brighter so you can actually see when you get your drink. You get back, sit down, the lights dim, and the movie continues." A system that can orchestrate these interactions is fundamentally a distributed event-driven runtime for physical spaces. Home Assistant may look like a dashboard, but under the hood it behaves more like a real-time OS for the home...
The local-first architecture means Home Assistant can run on hardware as small as a Raspberry Pi but must handle workloads that commercial systems offload to the cloud: device discovery, event dispatch, state persistence, automation scheduling, voice pipeline inference (if local), real-time sensor reading, integration updates, and security constraints. This architecture forces optimizations few consumer systems attempt.
"If any of this were offloaded to a vendor cloud, the system would be easier to build," the article points out. "But Home Assistant's philosophy reverses the paradigm: the home is the data center..."
As Nijhof says of other vendor solutions, "It's crazy that we need the internet nowadays to change your thermostat."
I grew up in an automated home (Score:5, Interesting)
In the 70's and 80's I grew up in an automated home. My father, and electronics engineer, designed a custom PLC that controlled items throughout the house. You would hear automated vents throughout the duct work doing their thing as heat was transferred around the house on winter days. The system would switch over to a large battery bank when power would go out, fire up the generator in the shed, and then switch over to the generator when warmed up (that saved our bacon during the blizzard of '78). When more automation was needed my father would simply build another card and plug it into a free S-100 looking slot in his custom PLC. Home Assistant is the modern version of this. Keep everything local and under your control. The only thing I didn't like about it was if you tried to take a shower longer than 15 minutes the alarm would go off at the control center in the kitchen warning that water was running too long some where, LOL.
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Who pissed in your dinner?
HA is pretty remarkable. When ever you hear the refrain "The S in IoT stands for security", HA is doing its damndest to fix that.
Mine (I have lots of them) provide single panes of glass for a lot of apps. My home one alone covers at least 15 phone apps, including eleccy supplier and even my car. There is a school in Dorset which is gradually rolling out ... ... anyway, I think HA is absolutely belting and I'm not sure what your snags actually are with it. Why not flesh out your
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Your dad sounds amazing. I have multiple programming languages and NodeRED to fiddle with and your old man managed to do way more than me now, back in the day with PLCs and the like.
Good skills.
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He did some pretty cool shit. He was once hired by a liquid waste disposal company to replace the relay logic systems the tanks and pumps used to a custom designed PLC solution. I remember the large schematics he made to reverse engineer the relay logic boards (which were huge wall-mounted monsters). I remember how excited he was showing me a Popular Electronics magazine cover with a DIP chip image on it (early 70's). He said this was the future. I was only about six or seven at the time but I was fascinate
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Were the Apple II's sound all that different from the PC speaker? I think they're both 1-bit square wave, and the PC speaker can do speech via PCM.
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My dad also did something similar. He integrated X10 modules and a TRS-80 computer into the automation mix sometime in the early 80s. All the sudden we could control or sense damn near anything. He then integrated a Zenith weather system and the weather reports and forecasts generated and displayed on the control panel screen in the kitchen were often more accurate than the local TV station meteorologists.
and vendors are raceing to lockout any control not (Score:3)
and vendors are racing to lockout any control not part of their shit clould
Re:and vendors are raceing to lockout any control (Score:4, Informative)
Some are, others are adopting Matter which is local only and an open protocol. Vote with your wallet.
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The Matter protocol may be open, but it cannot be said to be local-only. Initial device commissioning requires access to the DCL for attestation. As far as I know, there are not commercially available Matter devices you can setup without ever connecting them or your hub to the Internet.
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The DCL isn't mandatory though. Home Assistant only needs it for device firmware updates, but it's always going to be the case that those come from the internet.
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The hub is by definition local. Or am I misunderstanding what you are talking about.
Re: and vendors are raceing to lockout any control (Score:2)
Yes, the hub is local. However, it may or may not have direct access to the internet, thanks to firewall rules. Same goes for other IP connected devices. What i was alluding to is that you might struggle to provision Matter devices in this case. Whereas you could operate HA with zwave devices, and never have it, or your LAN, connected to the internet.
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Not really. For the most part vendors only lock down their own app. In the back end many are quite open to interactions with most of the large players offering bridges to local control or integration into Home Assistant via various open protocols. Under the hood and behind the shitty app, many devices are actually quite open.
Never buy any product that... (Score:4, Informative)
...requires connection to a server
The cloud is a trap
Run away
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That's kind of my take on the story, but my wording would be more along the lines of "What are the success criteria?" Or perhaps "Would I donate to support this?" (Surely I would not donate on the basis of the description here and not even feeling motivated to learn more.)
But that's also why I wouldn't donate to support the project. You could think of it as a kind of paradox of choice. There are LOTS of things I could donate money to, but in general the success criteria are almost never clear. Whatever I do
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Pretty sure OP meant an external server given they mentioned the cloud
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but that's not what he said.
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Sometimes people aren't completely clear on the Internet and you have to use context clues from the rest of their post to understand the meaning, even if it's not exactly what they wrote
Re:Never buy any product that... (Score:5, Interesting)
The devices generally do not connect to Home Assistant as a server, the Home Assistant connects to them as a client. The devices are generally oblivious about Home Assistant and it's nature.
I have z-wave thermostats. They have no idea what internet even is. They presumed they would be sold into some partner's hub ecosystem, but as a consequence Home Assistant can talk to it direct.
I attached an open firmware based controller to my garage door opener. The garage door opener doesn't know what networking is, and even the open source controller is oblivious to home assistant, just providing a general, locally accessible HTTP api. Home assistant connects to it.
If you are careful, you can generally find networkable components that do not expect to connect to any server, but can be connected to. Matter over Thread is *generally* a safe bet the device in question is friendly to local usage.
However, a lot of devices have firmware hard coded to connect only to their suppliers internet presence. Without an account you can't control them. Sometimes they start charging a subscription. Sometimes they discontinue allowing a device to connect and operate, suggesting you buy the new model after a couple of years. Meanwhile their 'cloud' doesn't add anything that you couldn't have added yourself. Get a free domain and a let's encrypt certificate and you can connect to your house from anywhere, if you want. Or keep it closed off to anything outside your house. Or 'shadow' select stuff into remote access while keeping some things local.
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Like an X-Windows architecture, then.
Re: Never buy any product that... (Score:2)
Some of them do. I run Infinitive on two Raspberry Pi, connected to my furnaces via MQTT. They publish messages to the Home assistant Mosquitto broker. This is not common. Most of my >600 smart devices don't operate that way.
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If Home Assistant isn't a server, what is it?
It's a second job. Possibly also a religion.
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...requires connection to a server
The cloud is a trap
Run away
The cloud is the trap that you, and I, and the tech gurus on Slashdot forced upon the world by constantly promoting the idea of NAT and breaking end-to-end connectivity principles of the internet.
Cloud provisioning is a minimum requirement for any smart device precisely because we have made it either too hard or impossible for any non-tech person to provision their hardware themselves. Congrats, you're never going to have an automated home with your requirements.
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Re: Unfortunately, Home Assistant changes very lit (Score:1)
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There's a few places it's changing things.
For power users it's been a long standing way to tie together devices, but HomeAssistant also release ready to go products that can be plugged in and then easily accessed on a phone or computer.
HomeAssistant started a "works with HomeAssistant" program where vendors can certify their devices meet certain standards of compatibility (something that's advertised a benefit for sellers)
Many smart home devices run on local mesh networks like Zigbee, Zwave, or Thread (with
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Re:Unfortunately, Home Assistant changes very litt (Score:4, Informative)
I've build my own Matter thread routers and devices. It doesn't need internet access.You can commission new devices completely isolated from the internet. IP don't mean internet access, it's only a transport protocol.
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Sure, it's tech-bros only now. again. Too much winning.
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Yes HomeAssistant can check for firmware updates for devices and install them if permitted. Or you can ignore the updates.
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That's as it should be. If you don't want to use the app you don't need to but it shouldn't be dictated to update devices a certain way
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If the vendor's device doesn't support standards based management then I will just ignore them if at all possible. HomeAssistant can update firmware in any of my devices in my house.
The devices don't have a gateway set so they can't 'phone home' anywhere and if that's a deal breaker for them then it's a deal breaker for me.
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The CSA provides a feature for vendors to publish firmwares.
Some vendors use it and some donâ(TM)t.
HA use only the CSA list to provide updates, AFAIK.
https://webui.dcl.csa-iot.org/ [csa-iot.org]
https://www.home-assistant.io/... [home-assistant.io]
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I built my own thread border routers and compiled the software myself. I know exactly what's happen. They have no internet access, period...
My systems Linux firewall and dhcp servers have black-hole lockouts for anything not matching my allowed list.
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Keep telling us how ignorant you are.
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False. Matter is internet agnostic. The ability to connect to the internet is not a requirement to connect to the internet.
Regular users can do whatever instructions they want to follow. For many that will whatever cloud instructions they are given. That doesn't mean that is a requirement, and the inability for complex high tech solution to cater for the ignorant doesn't mean that something doesn't work.
You're conflating two very different concepts. Matter very much is the solution you are looking for, even
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Was more making the point that Thread is a mesh network. Once you connect all these devices to a border router which also has internet connectivity then it's of course possible to connect to the internet if it's configured.
It makes sense that the big companies be involved in creating these standards. They're often building hardware and software that uses it. In theory Matter should be a better protocol that will give users more freedom to switch between (or support multiple) controllers
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Hard to say if it would have gone in a more locked down direction without OHF involvement. If you're fine with Apple Home or manual switches, Home Assistant might not be for you
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Sure.
Thing-App is "write once, run everywhere" on IoT controllers and devices, covering billions to trillions of CPUs/MCUs.
Thing-App offers various design guarantees, including guaranteed UI, performance, and safety assurances.
Thing-App covers billions of people, enabling building arbitrarily complex machines without writing a single line of code.
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Now who is doing something "tech bro" that "isn't suitable for regular users"?
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I suppose my question is if you are going to go on at some length at how Home Assistant is some techbro nonsense, what do you see as the alternative that hits the same use cases:
- Centralized 'smart home' device management
- Does not lock you into a cloud connected dependency
- Does not lock you into a particular device or phone vendor
- Can implement various local automations without the device itself having to support things like schedules and so forth. E.g. turn off all lights still on at midnight, or reduc
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I don't see anything there that Home Assistant can't do
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Like running arbitrary IoT Apps on IoT devices?
Huh? what would be the point of that? Sounds like something the IoT device would need to support. Can look into ESPHome if that's a feature you need.
More advanced data structures have always been a little challenging to abstract for end-users. HA has a pretty good balance and of course if you want to do something more complicated you can always implement a custom component (or official one if it's something others might need).
If you can't even explain what makes your product better to someone technical, i
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Ah that sounds similar to ESPHome or Tasmota. They have their uses, but a centralized system is needed for more complex automations.
Most users don't want to be coding to create automations. Systems like HomeAssistant (and NodeRed) have done a good job abstracting the underlying code and data to something that's more user friendly for non-developers. Most people don't even know what an array is
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If you're thinking in arrays, you're thinking too low level. Obviously the underlying code supports arrays and more advanced users can even use them in templates via the front end. The use cases for having a full GUI based abstraction of more complex data structures can probably be counted on one hand so for those cases it's easier to just let the users access via templates or custom components
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Or if you want a solution that doesn't constantly fail, Home Assistant might not be for you.
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I've heard people complain of confusing configuration but reliability has never been an issue with Home Assistant
Re: Unfortunately, Home Assistant changes very lit (Score:2)
It has bugs and regressions, just like any piece of software. You are not forced to upgrade. The showstopper tend to be fixed quickly. Developers are very responsive.
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Your claims might be more interesting if there was any evidence you understood what any of these words mean.
Matter so far has been largely a failure, existing standards provide a great deal more function and won't be going anywhere despite the nonsense you spew. Lastly, you couldn't possibly understand what HA is even claiming, you don't even know what IP is.
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I don't even think you know what "design" is. And while Matter used IP, it isn't "IP first" nor do I think you know what that even means. Also, I note you didn't mention Thread, I think there's a good reason for that...and it's because you don't understand what these terms even mean.
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all of this is rather irrelevant if you simply have a very long stick you can use to turn devices on and off.
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"Many smart home devices run on local mesh networks like Zigbee, Zwave, or Thread (with Matter) that can't be connect to a cloud server even if they tried. "
You don't understand the first thing about this. Every local "mesh network" can trivially be connected to a "cloud server".
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Of course any devices can connect to a cloud server if you have the proper interface. I can "trivially" connect my dumb light bulb to a cloud server using a smart switch.
The point is that a zigbee device cannot connect to the internet unless the gateway is configured in a way to do so, but if you're running HomeAssistant as your zigbee coordinator then it won't do that.
Re:Unfortunately, Home Assistant changes very litt (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, there is innovation in it. I've designed several solar energy systems with it using my own PCB designs and software.
https://forum.allaboutcircuits... [allaboutcircuits.com]
I just gave a complete system (loaded mini-pc and matter-thread devices) to one of my kids for their house.
They are very much not tech-bros.
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I do know that there are devices consistent with 'off-cloud' usage, whether Home Assistant is at all responsible I don't know and don't really care.
To address the 'not for regular folks', they made a 'home assistant green' which is fairly decent at being an accessible, self-maintaining package. One of my relatives had a Nest thermostat that Google made stop working, and so I gave them an alternative together with Home Assistant green and they've been pretty happy.
"Only for tech bros" would be nothing but A
Re: Unfortunately, Home Assistant changes very lit (Score:2)
I mean - most of them are local first (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong, Home Assistant is an excellent bit of kit with lots of standardisation and automation. But this article is pushing the wrong part of its strengths - local-first isn't unique. Pick the right ecosystem and it's all local-first anyway.
I have many different smart vendors in my home - Google (originally Nest), Philips, Meross, Aqara, Eve, Ikea, LightwaveRF, Shelly, Eufy, Switchbot...none of them require the internet. All of them can work locally. All of them work in the same ecosystem. Then I have oddities which I use HomeBridge [homebridge.io] for to bridge the gap - Roomba (older, non-Matter, Worx Landroid (robot lawnmower), Dyson Hot'n'Cool thingy, Logitech Harmony...even plugins for Synology which show the NAS's temperature and allow shutdown. Through the use of HomeBridge, I can draw them into the same ecosystem too. None of this requires the internet.
The meme is completely overblown and quite often you can tell by people that don't actually use this kind of tech. Obviously if I want to control this kit from outside the home then I need an internet connection, and if I want to update any of the kit then I need to download the updates from the internet for that too, but operation from within the house? Just a HomeKit/Matter hub, that's all.
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Re:I mean - most of them are local first (Score:4, Insightful)
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You mean the claims you understand are void, but you don't understand their claims. And interestingly, your previous post proved you don't understand firewalls and IoT networks.
HA offers automation that is local-only. It's not the only product that does so. You think that IP means not local-only, that's how ignorant you are.
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And you don't understand any of those narratives either.
HA cannot prevent devices from connecting to the cloud, that's what a firewall does. "Firewall", there's another term you can use that you don't understand.
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The quality of the narrative is similar to the quality of the software, it's as good as Home Assistant can do.
There are solutions that use the cloud, including a service that HA's parent company sells. But there are many local-only solutions, the problem is that home automation is not foolproof and provides insufficient value for its cost and effort. The average guy is completely uninterested and Home Assistant is easily the least important "most important open source" project out there.
My most recent HA
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Nabu Casa isn't really HA's parent company, it's a commercial service that employs the devs, but doesn't own the product. The main advantage of subscribing to Nabu Casa is remote access and tie-ins to services like Alexa and Google. HomeAssistant by itself is still run locally.
It's a shame you got a bad setup, but that's the case with computers sometimes. The good thing was that when a commercial device breaks down people just toss it, but in this case it sounds like you were able to fix it!
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Alexa and Google are always hooked into Google's stuff, whether there's some at least partial local control still available in an outage or not.
I'd say local-first is *fairly* unique. Yes Homekit/Matter devices *can* be controlled locally in a peer-to-peer manner right from handsets, but Thread radios are fairly rare and I don't know if any non-apple handsets support directly talking to those devices without an intermediary.
If you don't have Apple devices, then HomeKit is a mixed bag, as sometimes the onbo
Been using it for ~ 8 years ... (Score:2)
I am a Home Assistant user for at least 8 years.
Initially, it was for automating a few things, including existing door/window sensors from a legacy alarm manufacturer. Using RTL-SDR and rtl_433 I was able to intercept the messages, have them decoded, and into Home Assistant over MQTT.
Then it started to be essential for things like: if you leave a door or window open for more than x minutes, it will complain, unless you turn off that automation temporarily.
Now it does many things: Outdoor temperature, humidi
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I've been meaning to move to Home Assistant for years, but most examples are like yours and I'm not sure if my seemingly simple use case is covered. Would you mind providing some additional insight?
My use case is to get off of my Alexa devices. The main feature I want is voice control of the lights. As far as which smart bulbs are supported, I'm comfortable dealing with that (I know half of mine are unsupported by Home Assistant and will need replaced). So my biggest question is, what's the easiest way to a
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Lately, HA has focused on voice control, and there seem to be a strong push that yielded some tangible results.
I don't use it myself, so I don't have first hand experience.
But the web site now has a section on voice control [home-assistant.io].
And there was blog post on it [home-assistant.io] too.
If you search Youtube, you will find people implementing the above too.
Not the only one chek put Hubitat (Score:1)
Home assistant is an amazing project (Score:4, Informative)
I have been using it for nearly 4 years. I spend most of my life inside my giant home. I have added a lot of smart devices - over 600 - to perform dozens of tasks. Some of the most important ones, such as lighting and HVAC, operate fully locally, meaning everything still works if I unplug the cable from the Comcast modem.
Some unfortunately still rely on cloud, but are less important.
The strength of HA is its ability to mix devices of different technologies, brands, and so on.
There is no single vendor that makes every category of devices, let alone best of breed devices.
In some cases, there is unavoidable vendot lockin from the utility company for my PG&E smart meter, for example.
Even if you only use a handful of devices, if they happen to be of different vendors, you can leverage HA fairly easily through its GUI for common tasks, without programming.
It is still for technology enthusiasts, though.
No home smart devices, problem solved, no hacks (Score:2)
Love and hate HA (Score:4, Informative)
Generally a big fan of HA, been using it for ~8 years. They've done a lot to make it as user-friendly as possible. Running your own HA server is not for the faint of heart though, even though they've made the installation and maintenance process as streamlined as they can. Because the choices for running it are pretty limited and all have tradeoffs:
* Docker container (can't use add-ons)
* VM running their OS (you need to know how to operate a VM and deal with issues like passing through USB hardware)
* Install their own OS directly onto a box (can't use it for other stuff, limited by the OS)
I've been running it on a VM over the years variously on a Raspberry Pi, on a Mac Mini with Ubuntu installed on it, and most recently a UGREEN NAS. When it works it works great, but when something breaks - and it inevitably does - then God help you if you aren't some kind of Linux wizard. The error messages tend to be unhelpful (if you can even find a way to view them), and half the time I can't even easily figure out if the problem is on the side of the VM or the host.
Also if you're trying to do anything at all unorthodox or on the fringes of what's supported out-of-the-box, you're going down a rabbit hole of debugging YAML and JSON messages and whatever arcane thing you do is something you're going to have to relearn from scratch when it breaks in a year.
Anyway, overall I think it's an excellent product, but you should be prepared to be your own IT staff if you're thinking of using it.
Home automation is stupid waste of time. (Score:1)
You are gonna spend 10x as much time on setting things up as you save when it works.