Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

> In an ideal world, Hub owners would be free to point their devices at a different central server, run by a third-party competitor or a trusted friend, or even run such a server on their own. They would likewise be free to collaborate on improved software that would unlock the potential of the Hub hardware or purchase such software from a competitor to Nest.

This ideal world exists, and it is glorious. I somewhat recently set up a Raspberry Pi 2 with https://home-assistant.io and a cheap z-wave USB stick. The interface is through a webpage (not an app), and I access it remotely using a OpenVPN server on my router.

It's interfacing with door sensors, motion sensors, wall switches, cameras, my stereo, HUE lights, etc. It can email me or send me SMS for notifications. When I wake up and walk past a motion sensor, the lights come on in a dim scene. When I come home and open the door, the lights turn on. I have tons of rules and it's super fun. Totally self-hosted, and the main server is completely open-source (written in Python3).

I haven't set it up with a thermostat but lots of other people have.

Author here. Thanks for the shout out.

As AcidBurnNSA said, Home Assistant is free, fully open-source and fully community driven - no company involved. We have over 240 components and platforms to include a wide range of products and services: https://home-assistant.io/components/

If you're attending OpenIoT Summit in San Diego, I'll be speaking tomorrow about Home Assistant 1:35pm - 2:25pm in Harbor Ballroom F: http://openiotelc2016.sched.org/event/6DBd/automating-your-h...

Man, I work about a block from there and would've registered in a heartbeat had I known about the conference. The talk sounds fantastic. Any idea if they sell day-of tickets? I don't see them anywhere but figured I may as well ask.

I don't know if they sell day tickets.

All videos will be recorded so you should be able to watch it online. I'm planning to give a similar talk soon at a Python SD user group meeting to practice for my PyCon 2016 talk.

You can find my sliders for tomorrow here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1P2WsmwGSSni4gAriY5IA...

That's so cool! Something about the slides not being released yet made me want to read them more. It's Wikileaks of legitimate content =)

Good luck with your work, it looks really useful and interesting. I feel this is what we all dreamed up in the early internet years while watching Star Trek. Digital controls for everything, and not being beholden to others for the way in which we manage the controls.

I'm also interested in electricity monitors but I think that's a separate thing.

from both the slides and the demo UI, you've got a much stronger design sense than the average open source project. Lucky users!

Damnit. I also would love to attend, had I known about it in advance enough to take the coaster in.

Site looks great. Loving that it's Polymer.

Even if this is complex for the average homeowner theres an opportunity to start your own business setting this up for no tech savy homeowners in your locale.

Home Assistant user here, too. After my house got robbed it was either $1000-$2000 for commercial, cloud-locked systems or Home Assistant with $200 worth of X10 devices and IP cameras.

The commercial options couldn't automatically arm when I went to work. Nor could they use Pushover. Nor did they accept pull requests :)

I don't think you can compare anything Raspberry Pi with a polished consumer product. The ideal world does not exist for those who already spent $300 on the hub.

Nest isn't a polished consumer product unless your bar for "polished consumer product" starts and stops at the industrial design budget. If they didn't look nice anyone with sense would call these products what they are: trash.

And, anyone who wasted money on one... did in fact waste their money. They can still get on board with a working, non-Nest solution at any time.

Yeah, the article says the devices weren't fully operational when it was launched, and now never will be.

If that's commercial polish, I'll stick with the Pi!

Unfortunately, this is a huge market gap nobody's currently filling. "I want an open source platform, but I don't want to put together my own wiring" is a surprisingly open field. I saw an advert for ONE such device that claimed to be fully open source, but you can't buy it yet, so that doesn't really mean anything yet.

Maybe that's because this demand is much lower than you imagine? Nobody cares about open source.

We already have huge widespread popularity for things like the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino. The former is nearly a household name, even if people have no idea what to do with them. And even if you don't know what open source does, is, or means, the benefits of such a product will prove itself over on it's own.

Yeah, Open Source / Open Hardware in IoT is a step back in the direction of how things always were and how they are supposed to be - you buy the device, you own it. People understand that. They expect their washing machines and microwave ovens to work until the hardware itself breaks (let's forget for a moment about the sick practice of planned obsolescence). They expect to be able to repair them or find a third party that can.

People don't have to understand "open source". They will understand the concept of "works until hardware dies", or "can be taken to a repairman for fixing", or "I can go to a mall and buy an extension from some random vendor and it will work".

People do NOT expect to repair their home appliances anymore. Repair costs more than replacement.

Maybe in the US.

This is doubtful. Nobody buys a new furnace when it has a problem. Ovens, fridges, and dishwashers are all generally far cheaper to repair with a local repairman than replace.

A lot of house or condo sales now come with "home warranties", where a flat fee guarantees your appliances for a year, and repairs only cost a $100 deductible.

Computers in most cases, even, are now appliance-like. They get replaced less often, and it's often more affordable to repair them than replace them.

Huge as compared to? Yep, on HN you will get a sizeable proportion of those interested. The world is not HN though.

I think people care about open standards a lot, even if they don't know it. EG: When someone buys a USB device, they expect that they can plug it into any computer and (for non-specialized devices) have it Just Work.

A lot of the home automation world is a closed, proprietary mishmash right now. (Although there are some open standards ranging from old school stuff like X10 to newer Zigbee stuff, I don't think products like Nest use them).

I also think people expect that when they buy a device, some corporate decision isn't going to brick it. (Stories in this line in my opinion will eventually kill the current hype on the "cloud").

"Open source" is probably less important to most end users, but it can be quite important to developers, power users, and tinkerers. And enthusiasts can drive products.

For those curious, this is the one I found. They're advertising this campaign on Facebook and crud. You can't search it, because it's all images, but they say they're open source.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/protonet-zoe-start-your-s...

Once you start doing the numbers it becomes obvious. There is no margin in this. So many crowd funding projects start out like this only to find out months or years later it's impossible to build a sustainable company by selling pre-assembled open source devices. Especially because who care about the 'open' thing will download the image and burn an SD card themselves.

No margin, and you're in for your research. However OSS on IoT could be a huge competitive advantage, if you can persuade consumers not to buy knock-offs.

When Tesla and Nest created a high-end market, they created self-contained objects. They sold because they were good, not because they had a competitive edge on the closed-source software running them. I set Apple apart because they have high margins on accessories, so open APIs would be a drawback here. My point is: We spend that much money for those products because the're good quality in themselves.

The fact that they're closed source means knock-offs can't copy the internal design and will be crap. The only thing required for an open-source IoT company to lead is to persuade us that knock-offs will be crap too (e.g. "uncertified", then spread stories about knock-offs exploding, or shorter length of life, or other leaks of PII, or illegal). The rest of open-source is a huge competitive advantage for relevance in the long term, ecosystem, customer recognition, etc.

Knives are quite open-source but we still buy €200 knives from time to time.

Hardware is relatively difficult to knock off well. And with hardware, manufacturing quality is a huge point. Are their cheaper round Wi-Fi thermostats than Nest? Absolutely.

...I have yet to see a single one that even compares on build quality. And it's not like you can't take one apart and see how it's designed.

"Knives are quite open-source but we still buy €200 knives from time to time."

The exact metallurgical details (chemical composition, manufacturing process) of high-end knives are closely guarded trade secrets. Making greats knives requires a lot of research, knowledge and experience, it's not something every joe schmoe with 100k can start a business in.

'Open source' is just not a competitive advantage. I have a drawer full of junk whose main selling point was 'it's open source!' to prove it. Starting from an open source project gets you 90% of the functionality; the other 90%, you have to do yourself. In the mean time, the 'community' (read: the 5 guys on your mailing list/forum who shout the loudest) demand that the 'company' 'gives back' (by sponsoring, blog posts on every minute detail, hand-holding everybody with a 5-line patch, ...) because now you're making money off 'other peoples' work'. But the moment you commit any code you wrote, there are a dozen Chinese (and non-Chinese) vendors who will take what you made and put it into their own product; which is usually just one of dozens; they are smart and diversify. In the mean time, you are left fighting the marketing game where you essentially have to convince every single customer to pay a 20, 30, 100% markup for - what really? Being the one who 'wrote it first'? Good luck. The Kickstarter graveyard is full of dreams like this.

There is this, which is built using a raspberry pi but is also very turn-key/works right out of the box:

http://www.amazon.com/Intulon-Z-Command-Controller-Z-Stick-Z...

http://www.seeedstudio.com/wiki/Grove_System ?

It's funny, but that's true of other categories of "products" as well. Sometimes, you can't really buy things that work well. You have to learn and build yourself, or do without.

Another example: security of computer systems.

The common thing here is the widespread demand in addition to the widespread lack of expertise. This results in the market being filled with "products" and "solutions" which are poor quality, but out-compete things which are good quality. Because most buyers can't tell. So if you don't have the expertise to judge for yourself, you'll end up with junk. Sometimes, there isn't a big enough market of buyers with expertise for there to be any decent options available to buy. You just have to cobble it together yourself with hobbyist/non-vendor produced parts.

>I don't think you can compare anything Raspberry Pi with a polished consumer product.

put it in a hummus tub :)

and put a "300$" price tag on it to complete the illusion.

In IoT, Raspberry Pi and a "polished consumer products" are two different categories. The latter usually looks pretty and comes in nice packaging, but it has little in terms of usefulness, adds some user-hostile features (like vendor's cloud dependance) and its actual hardware could be replicated by a hobbyist at 1/10 of the price with said Raspberry Pi and a short visit to Aliexpress.

Sadly, companies learn that spending money on sales&marketing has better ROI than spending it on making an actually useful product. And it seems to me that startups are bigger offenders than established companies here.

Yeah, when I first started playing with smart home stuff I looked at commercial hardware and saw that a lot of it requires a subscription on top of steep up front costs. So I broke out my oscilloscope and soldering iron and made my own for a tiny fraction of the cost and have had great fun doing it.

It used to be really hard to do this because wireless communication with hobbyist microcontrollers was either tedious or expensive (the old Arduino wifi shields were like $30-40). The RasPi and ESP8266 have really made things more accessible; you can build a central hub for $50 with a good wifi antenna and then something like a temp/light/humidity sensor is about $10. Or control lights with the $5 Sonoff switch from Itead (basically an ESP+relay on a well designed PCB, that is hobbyist friendly and lets you put your own firmware on it if you like). Or great free controller tools like Home Assistant and data management like InfluxDB and Grafana.

It's a great time to be an electronics hobbyist. The rise of IoT and smart home applications have produced a surge of new and interesting products for hobbyists that didn't exist before, I'm guessing as a side effect of dissatisfaction with the state of commercial products.

Did you document your hobby activities?

...Eventually. I have notes, but a writeup is in my list of things to do.

Great :-) Do you already have a blog/etc you intend to put it on?

I'll probably do it on Github and post it here.

Oh man. Thank you so much for posting this - it looks really well developed and surprisingly mature. (Or maybe I shouldn't be surprised?)

Anyways, I'm sure my wife will ha^H^H love you for giving me another "fun" home project. :)

I've also been using HA for a while, mostly with custom made devices over MQTT. Can honestly say that it is quite impressive and is remarkably reliable (important when it's controlling your lights or thermostat). My only knock is that there isn't a whole lot of flexibility in customizing the frontend, but the tradeoff is that configuration is more straightforward.

baloob is also very helpful on the issues page and seems to really love the project, so kudos to him.

Also great is the wow factor when you show off the mobile interface. Material design is a big time crowd pleaser.

No prob. I'm in the same boat. My wife rolls her eyes so hard when I show friends everything.

Rolls her eyes - but secretly impressed, am I right??

This is great , but less techie consumers need turnkey solutions, from names they trust. Is there a value-added reseller ecosystem on too of rPi platform? With an open-standards coalition?

I'm so going to set this up in my new flat. Could you please recommend starting guides / reading materials? Thanks

https://home-assistant.io/getting-started/configuration/ https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=configuring+hom...

Good links. Also https://home-assistant.io/cookbook/ has lots of examples which will prove invaluable for setting up various rules.

Curious which router you're using. Time for an upgrade, and am open to advice.

I'm using a Buffalo WZR-600DHP and it's been keeping up pretty well. If you want to go all out, I sent my mom a Nighthawk (Netgear AC1900) because I wanted extra processing power, and therefore extra bandwidth, for remote ham radio operations stuff. It also works well.

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