5 Reasons Not to Build a Smart Home on home Assistant
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- čas přidán 19. 06. 2024
- In this video, I am doing something a bit different.
We have talked a lot about Home Assistant and using some different ways to build a smart home using Home Assistant. But It's not for everyone, no matter how much I think everyone SHOULD be using it.
So if you are considering whether home Assistant is the right platform for you, here are 5 Reasons I think might give you pause. The purpose of this video is not to convince either way. I simply want you to have as much information as possible so you can make the best decision for yourself.
And with that... let's get to it.
Video Sections:
00:00 5 Reasons you may not want a Home Assistant Smart Home - Intro
00:49 Home Assistant Makes You Choose Your Own Adventure
02:00 Home Assistant isn't Always Easy
03:12 Home Assistant requires more Attention
04:00 Home Assistant Breaks from Time to Time
05:18 Home Assistant is built for Tinkers
06:14 Wrapping up
Things Mentioned / Referenced in this video:
Home Assistant - www.home-assistant.io
Amazon Echo - amzn.to/3upkUec
#homeassistant #smarthome #homeautomation
Who am I?
My Name is Jeff. I am a DIY-er and Automator of boring things. And, of course, a huge Home Assistant fan. Oh, I also live in a house that tweets.
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Github - github.com/thejeffreystone
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Thank you for keeping it real and honest.
I agree with all your points. It can definitely be very intimidating in the beginning but what a reward when everything finally works together.
Stick with it and it's worth it in the end.
I agree. For me I think I deleted and reinstalled Home Assistant 3-4 times in the first 2 weeks of using it because it was just easier to delete all my work and started over than digging myself out of whatever corner I had gotten myself into. But yeah, if you stick with it....it is an awesome platform.
Problem for new people is that they keep changing things and the documentation is horrible at best...... the forum is great for about 2 questions before people start treating you like dog s***. Hard to stick with something you're trying to learn and aren't a programmer and documentation is horrible and very little to no examples to go by.
Yea. This is why I rarely hangout in the forums. Would rather just share stuff on CZcams, discord, or twitter
Home Assistant was made for tinkerererererers. Got it.
Home Assistant is perfect for us that are into mental self-mutilation 👍
Thank you SO much for this. I've been wondering if I should re-think my setup recently, as I'm looking at video doorbells. I currently run everything off of Homeseer... it's "OK" and gets the job done, but I'm looking for something with a higher WAF that will better integrate my thermostat (ecobee), home theater (logitech), lights/sensors (zwave), and doorbell/security cameras (undetermined but leaning amcrest). It seemed like Home Assistant has made a lot of progress since i first set everything up, but i'm definitely having cold feet seeing this video. I used to like to tinker, but with kids and less free time - i don't any more. I just want things to work and work well, but i also don't want to get locked onto a platform where i have to buy specific devices. I set up my current Homeseer setup a few years ago on an RPi and haven't touched it, so there are major points for stability there!! But they are slow as molasses for updates and lots of new technologies just don't have plugins, at all.
What do you think -- can home assistant be stable enough to work well or is it, in its current form, still requiring code and other stuff to work well?
Ultimately, honesty is needed rather than being obessed with a platform. If all you need is some automated lights, a few motion sensors and a thermostat then honestly you don't need Home Assistant. If you mainly want voice assistants to do the job, you don't want Home Assistant. Thank you for your honesty. So many get obsessed with a platform and think everyone should use it no matter what. It's good to see people who love the platform, but know when it is not the best solution.
Came straight to the comments section even before watching the video.
All these comments made on this video seem so familiar! Very strange how you have to first climb a mountain of sleepless nights before finally reaching the heavenly dream called home assistant. Very happy I did climb that mountain, because HA heaven is o so sweet.
Good video, Thanks for sharing your experience.
Clear words - good advice for users that are not makers / tinkerers
You're pretty funny dude. I have spent a few evenings beating my head against some HA code (non programmer) and gone to bed with the sun coming up and the birds beginning to chirp outside, lol. damn birds!
Oh yeah. I have sat down thinking I was going to just tweak an automation. And then found myself down some rabbit hole the whole time muttering I should go to bed.
Jeff, Thanks from another Georgian (I'm not far from you in Bethlehem) who's been working on home automation for a while. I only recently found Home Assistant and your videos have helped me thru some of the things that I have had issues with.
Hi neighbor! If you run into things that give you issues let me know! It's been a while since I was starting out and I can't remember all the things that tripped me up in the beginning.
Hey neighbors, just your comment, Ga born Bethlehem raised. Small world
I would love to see your take on a semi advanced topic like firmware updates on z-wave devices (i.e like an inovelli or zooz switch). It's so painful in ST as you need to unpair, update on a separate z-stick and then repair. Obviously all automation break as a result. I'm curious if HA makes this easier
I think the update process is recommended to be unpair to update. Not sure why though. I'll have to look at that. But I can tell you that all my device names changed recently, but they are easy to rename in HA, and since the automation are entity id based, you can just update the entity id after you added it to home assistant and all of your automations will work. I've done that just when swapping a device for another. Just remove the old one, add the new one, and then rename the entity id to match the old device and I dont have to touch any automations.
@@SlackerLabs okay so can re-use old entity-ids and then everything continues to work. nice. The only issue with that is with some S2 devices, you have to keep the device key available when re-importing. Like the inovelli switches will make me scan the QR code on the device (which I have to unscrew the face plate to get it). I guess if I were thinking I would have saved that paper with the code on it that said to save (but I don't manage paper well). I asked this question as I just go secondary z-wave controller working in ST and it was a bear (so I should be able to update firmware without the unpair/re-pair). I figured HA might have madde this a bit easier.
One of the best advice I got this year, I wish I had seen your video before I did sank in this misrable journey " Home Assistant "😢
Yeah, good point. I like.
I just read your comment on Smart Home Makers "Ep2 - Complex DYNAMIC Automations" video, so, I jumped over to your channel to find out more. Darn, I've found another nugget to follow. Reason #2 is what interest me, YAML, Python, and Ginja. What is that last one, hold on tight, down the rabbit hole I go, ..... again!
Yep. Home Assistant is a lifestyle. haha
Leaving SmartThings and trying to determine the best platform option to get into HA. Do I wait for the ODROIDs to come back in stock? Grab a Pi? Run it off my laptop (that never leaves and is always on)? I'm definitely a buyer's remorse kind of person that as soon as I pick one, I question if the other one would have been the better choice. Suggestions for a brand new HA nub?
I am like that too. I typically wonder if I made the right decision after buying some piece of tech. The Odroid has really been the one piece I haven't questioned. If would be my top pick. The Pi 4 will work well too. And you could add an SSD for even better performance. I am not sure about the laptop method. If I was in the same boat you are now, I would run the supervised version on the laptop (think it will require a linux OS or VM) then I would install on the laptop while you wait for ODroid. Then once the ODroid comes in, just backup your Home Assistant, and restore backup on the ODroid. That way you can get started to day, and have a path to the ODroid goodness.
@@SlackerLabs that's what I thinking about doing. Thanks for the affirmation.
Doing some research about using Home Assistant and came across your channel and videos. Very helpful and useful information given on your videos I have watched. By the way I love your shirt where did you get it. I still remember that equation for Force because of my high school physics teacher over 30 years ago. Thanks for the great content
I think that shirt was a gift. Maybe from Amazon. When I'm out in public I usually get asked if I'm a science teacher.
If you don't have a clue...... don't do it. My experience so far has been if I didn't have a guy that knows HA the forum treats you terrible if you ask too many questions trying to get understanding. Documentation is a joke..... and examples.... good luck.
Yeah... Not scaring me away haha. Best thing I did was jump in.
Best way to learn for me was people sharing their yaml on Reddit. Plus watching YT guys. Great reasons (not) to switch to HA!
Yea. I learned from all that yaml too. But now I’m thinking through how to redo it using just the UI. So I can share that perspective as much as possible.
@@SlackerLabs good idea! The UI has come a long way as I understand it!
Can you clarify, under "Breaking Changes", it's not changes to Home Automation itself that cause things to break, but changes by product vendors (such as closing loopholes that HA took advantage of) which break the ability for Home Automation to control them?
Yes, these days the breaking chances are typically caused by changes on the other side of the integrations as oppose to changes being made specifically to Home Assistant. And yeah, a big reason is that int he early days Home Assistant used non official ways to make integrations work. These could have been undocumented APIs, or web scaping. But the team has been working hard to remove these in an effort to make it more stable.
having come over from openHAB about 3 years ago can tell you HA is a dream, but I'm a born tinkerer discovered less stuff breaks if you only use open source firmwares and if it does the fix is soon avail
That is for that perspective. I’ve been considering tinker with openhab and hubitat just to get some perspective like that. That makes me rethink openhab. Haha
I have already built an ESP32 based weather station that is reporting to a local Mosquito MQTT broker and a web interface in Node-RED displayed on a Raspberry Pi hanging on the wall in my kitchen. I'm about to start automating some lights with motion sensors, and I think I can do everything I need to with Node-RED. I'm not interested in integrating anything with Google or Amazon right now, so I think MQTT and Node-RED is all I need. Considering my limited scope right now, is there anything I really need Home Assistant for?
I don’t think so. You might be able to get it all done especially that you could use Shelly relays to automate your dumb switches and connect them to mqtt. You wouldn’t need home assistant for anything that I can think of. And now you got me wondering if node red could be my backup solution. I need to take another look.
@@SlackerLabs Thanks for the advice. I'll try to remember to update this comment once I get one of my lights automated.
So I built a motion sensor with a PIR/AM312 sensor and an ESP8266-01 and loaded Tasmota on it. I also did an OTA load of Tasmota on a Gosund-WP5 wall plug. The custom console command to have the motion sensor update my MQTT topic was a little tricky, but I was able to set up the automation in Node-RED and now my desk lamp turns on when I walk into the room. So all I really need is Mosquitto and Node-RED to accomplish what I wanted to do. Still need to come up with a naming convention and figure out how to rename all the Tasmota stuff to meaningful names.
I really need to get into esp devices.
Hass works really well as a compatibility layer between node red and the physical devices. It can act as an easy to use server for node red and mosquito with official integration with both of them. The web UI makes it easy to manage the server.
I’ve Smart Home units based on WiFi, BlueTooth, Z-wave, Zigbee and Philips Hue and I would love to gather them all in Home Assistant, but it isn’t exactly and easy task.
I already have a Home Assistant account and a running installation on a Raspberry Pi, but I’ve never really got started using it.
Currently I have something that work … somehow, and I don’t really have the patience spending long nights surfing the internet to find a solution on how to make none-generic units work with HA.
I’m not a novice in this field. I have been designing hard- and software for more than 40 years and it was fun back then, in the mid 70’ties, to mess around with this kind of stuff ... magic almost. These days I just want my gear to work out-of-the-box.
I’ll continue to follow the development for Home Assistant and maybe one day I’ll make the transition to Home Assistant.
I can understand this. And yeah, the project still has a way to go to making it easier. I am hopeful we will see some big strides this year to making it work out of the box.
Liked the vid for the shirt
Do you think it is suitable to use Home Assistant in a system that needs to be reliable all the time like a Smart Hotel Room for example? If not, what would you suggest?
I think it could work. My only concern is you would want a monitoring system to let you know if for some reason it locked up and wasn't working. But other than that it is rock solid.
@@SlackerLabs Thanks a lot!
@@SlackerLabs was looking for this comment. Thinking of building the whole system with industry standard KNX technology and then using the home assistant for the dashboard and user access controls. If home assistant locks up, then the system still works autonomously. What do you think?
@@MrGatya2 I like that pattern, although I haven't used any of the KNX stuff. I believe there is a KNX integration which could make that easy. I think my only question would be how well is the automation capabilities with the KNX technology. Back when I was running on a Raspberry Pi3 I thought about abstracting the user interface to another system and using MQTT to bridge the two systems just to reduce to processing load. And definitely allows you to build a redundant automation system for sure...which I think is probably the biggest risk to all of this home automation stuff.
@@SlackerLabs KNX works autonomously without a centralised hub I believe, and you can program scenes on this mesh network with ETS software so technically Home Assistant is not needed. But the software to build dashboards seems to me a bit limited, so that's why I thought HA can improve that. Even if HA goes down that would only impact the dashboard feature.
I've tried setting up home assistant on spare PC and it's horribly not user friendly. I'm not one to enjoy tinkering. Is there any alternative to it which is more user friendly and needs very little tinkering? I don't mind paid solutions either.
Yeah, I think getting Home Assistant setup on a spare PC or even in a container like Docker is pretty rough for those just starting out. Going with a Home Assistant based install on a Raspberry Pi, Home Assistant Blue, or Home Assistant Yellow is easier to get up and running, but to get serious smart home stuff it still requires a lot off tinkering. But at this point I don't think there is a user friendly alternative on par with Home Assistant.
If you are ok with just some basic home automation I think your best option might be Smartthings. The platform comes with both Zwave and Zigbee radios, and has a large range of compatible devices. And as long as you stick with Works with Smartthings devices it shouldn't require any tinkering.
Amazon Echo Plus (I think it is called) has a Zigbee radio might be pretty good too. Both Smartthings and the Echo Plus have pretty easy methods of building automations.
If you are an Apple user, and have a newer Apple TV or a Home Pod, Apple Homekit stuff works really well too. Easy to build automations and pretty reliable. Homekit compatible Devices tend to be pricer though, although there are cheap options.
Still pretty rough out there with smart home stuff in terms of the beginner. Hopefully Home Assistant can make some strides on that this year.
Hi , im am using googe home with connex connect and Shelly's, in South Africa we have alot of internet interpretations, and if a come home i can not turn on or off the lights or plugs if the internet is out. is that something i can solf with Home assistant or Hubitat? Or should i rather het a mobile router and keep everything connected?
As long as your local network was working and you could connect to it when you got close to your house then you could use Home Assistant with those shelly's to turn on and off the lights. Home Assistant can integrate with Shelly over the local network so no internet needed as long as both sides are on the same network.
@@SlackerLabs thank you for the response. I was home assistant on , but i crashed the thing and it wont strart up again , so i took everything back to cloud base , il be ordering a hubitat, and se if its works for me , as i dont have the time , nor the skills to fully understand Home assistant
As a user just shot in the nuts by Insteon , I gave thought to going down the HA route. I'm fairly tech savvy but haven't done any coding in decades. I appreciate the breakdown on HA. We're just going to bite the bullet and switch to Lutron. Sigh!
I think Lutron is a good choice. I know lots of people dont' like the extra hub thing, but with Lutron you could have a direct integration with Home Assistant, Smartthings, Amazon, Google, and so many more. And if you have more than one in your house, and one went don or out of business, your switches are already connected to another platform. And I suspect Lutron will be around for a while. Of course...I could be wrong too...
But even then Home Assistant is far less coding than it was when I made this video. And getting better each release.
Why not going for openhab instead, could you give me some strong arguments? I'm starting right now but I cannot take a decision (I'm a firmware engineer and I love to not sleep 8 hours per day) I was a bit mad before the conclusion at the end of the video hehe
The primary reason was the underlying code. I am much more familiar with Python than I am Java. From what I have seen I think OpenHab, and even Hubitat could be good choices. if you are like me the key decision maker might be one with a codebase that you are familiar with tinkering in. My default mode is if I get an off the shelf solution I look at solving it with code. Not so efficient for some things...some times the code is horrible...its just the way I think,
Excellent, thanks for your quick answer. I'll dig a bit and let you know. Really good video mate!
WOAH WOAH WOAH... HOLD UP!!! where did you get that stats card!?! i LOVE THAT!!!
Ha. Just a bunch of template sensors for getting entity counts. And seriously it stresses me out. I can’t seem to reduce the counts. They just go up. Lol
@@SlackerLabs found the sensors in your github! I have added as well :) thanks!!!
Pienamente d’accordo !!
This reminds me, I need to update to release 2021.6
Here's my path... Analog. No AI, no assistance, just my PC and normal electrical
Node-red was mine. Now I have broken home assistant.
I can find so LITTLE information on setting up or getting zigbee (like conbee) running without Home Asst. Everything assumes I want to use HA.
I just want to use BASH and Linux (no friggin docker or GUI or web interfaces).
Checkout zigpy. You might be able to use it to interact with a zigbee stick.
I think the video can be summarized all cons to 1 thing: "I don't want too much freedom, I preferred to give it all away to make it all configured for me."
I would also add Privacy to that and the ability to control it. As far as the YAML code goes, it's no harder than html and you're basically copying and pasting code from the examples in the wiki/docs and then replacing 1-3 lines with your specifics. My system Will Not Be connected to the web. Good sized companies are being hacked with a ransom of bitcoins and in most cases, paying the ransom. Smart phones are not trustworthy when it comes to your personal data which with these systems, includes films of you. I'll take a closed system, thank you.
OK, I'll stick with it.
The electricity and water meters are read by eye and written down in the file with a pencil.
If Hom eAssistance is that bad.
The most important disadvantage is that home assistant is not free like smartthings. I was used to turning on the lights using Alexa, which in home assistant you have to pay for. Home assistant is hopeless compared to smarttings. Examples: sometimes it shows that the lights are on when they are not on, sometimes the thermostats are offline, then after 2 days they are online, Motion sensors sometimes work and sometimes they don't work. I thought it would be faster because it is local compared to smartthings - it is not. I am disappointed with how it works after watching videos praising the home assistant. I think most of these videos are sponsored.
Reason no.5 taking a toll on me right now. Except not worse than zombified tik tok scrollers that you see all over the place.
Home Assistant:
Sixty percent of the time, it works every time.
When the HARDWARE is chaos, because of "lack" of standardization and the Providers are trying to get a Monopoly position on the market. What is LEFT? Unless you're willing to accept the ONE PROVIDER. This is the same with Microsoft, Apple versus Linux. Open-Source is NOT FOR EVERYBODY. Be glad that there is a CHOICE.
Smartthings is slow and requires handlers that are a pain. Plus Samsung is flaky on their development. Smart thing requires internet to work, not with home assistant. It may be to hard for you..
What is wrong with you? you only have 668 sensors. get your head in the game. haha
I'm up to 705 now. And honestly I dont know what they all do...
Your shirt seems rather redundant. It says
"May the F=m*a be with you", doesn't this read: "May the Force equals mass times acceleration"
Shouldn't it just read
"May the (m*a=) be with you"
Ha...I never thought about it, but that is probably the correct way. Of course with the F=m*a I mostly get people who can't figure out what it says.
@@SlackerLabs oh that's totally fair
Because F=m*a IS the complete equation for “force”
(m*a=) is NOT the complete equation for “force”
A complete equation requires both sides of the ‘=‘ , else it is not ‘equal’
@@ernestgalvan9037 sorry but, correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't it stand for: Force = mass times acceleration? So if mass = 5 and acceleration = 2 then Force = 10.
F is force, whatever the value
@@djtigon …because people are talking about an “EQUATION”. An equation REQUIRES BOTH SIDES OF THE EQUALITY, else it is not an EQUATION.
m*a is the VALUE of force
F=m*a is the EQUATION that ->defines
All good points.
If these points make the integrator uncomfortable - buy a canned product that has the control relinquished from your side to the company's side.
Home Automation is not drop and go simple. If that is what someone thinks that this should be (super simple and no actual understanding of what is going on), then they have no idea what automation actually is.
I just today decided that home assistant is not for me, why did I decide this? because it DOES NOT support my light switches from iotty without alexa integration which costs a monthly subscription, so I cannot even do with home assistant what I can easily do without it...
this sorta is the opposite of your number one, that boasts how there are too many devices and maybe you dont like that.. since it DOES NOT support my device directly. why would I want to pay a monthly sub? so far the only thing I can think of that I would gain I already do with some other apps snapped onto my current system.
the fact that all devices are made to support alexa, and google play means you pretty much do not even need home assistant in the first place, I am not seeing a lot of value added.
I could imagine if you were starting from scratch to build a system and could make sure all your devices support it, but IOTTY are AMAZING SWITCHES there is no comparison so thats a huge loss, Ill have to pass on this.
Your shirt is redundant. It should be May the m * a be with you. Your shirt says May the force = force be with you
Yea I get that. But I'm also pretty sure in a physics exam if the question write force as an equation if you just typed m*a you would get the question wrong.
If I were programming and I used your equation literal my app would fail to compile. Say I wanted to draw some text on the screen say I wanted someone to be able to read "May the force be with you"
Say then I went and created an application where I could achieve this goal.
So I wrote:
"May the BLANK be with you"
where X = "F=m*a"
The resultant text would be "May the F=m*a be with you" Which is recursive. Referencing the object outside of the scope the equation which defines the object.
Or if somehow it was an interpreter your resultant text would be
May the force equals mass times acceleration be with you.
All of these examples are incorrect.
A physics exam would either ask:
1. What is the equation for Force.
2. F= _____
But hey its neckbeard marvel action hero for adult men in their 40s logic so its cool. I'm jus fuknwicha "Slaps knee" Its a cool video though dude.
@@SlackerLabs
@autodidact7127 pretty sure whoever came up with the t-shirt (it wasn’t me) wasn’t trying to ensure their t-shirt slogan would compile. I read it as a physics equation representing force. But it doesn’t really matter. I can tell t-shirts with physics equations is a passion of yours. I bought the t-shirt off Amazon probably 7 years ago. You can always reach out to the sellers there and have them update it. A quick search return several variations using f = equations to stand in for force. I wish you luck!
@@SlackerLabs Nah just giving a hard time to rival home assistant supporter. From a friendly smartthings veteran founder. 😉
This is a very nonsense video that could be a disclaimer as simple as, not everything is optimized and may require alot time to get everything working.
Pienamente d’accordo !!