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Comment by balloob | Hacker News Reader

Founder of Home Assistant here. Happy to answer any questions.

My initial experience with Home Assistant has been very frustrating. I filled my house with HomeSeer HS-WD100+ and HS-WS100+ wall dimmers/switches. I thought I was safe as they are best sellers in zwave devices. But Home Assistant doesn't seem to support them without elaborate workarounds that, as a noob, I haven't been able to penetrate. The forums have been talking about a solution coming soon ... for years now. In the meantime I'm stuck with a house full of home automation that I can't automate.

I may be too dumb for this, but I do manage to survive as a full time developer, in linux, using yaml daily. Yet the learning curve on Home Assistant has been brutal.

Can Home Assistant improve on this? Can we someday buy best selling devices and expect them to work with it? I realize that Home Assistant is not intended to be and will never be as noob friendly as the proprietary consumer hub software. But can it at least get friendly enough for a professional dev to figure out how to turn on a light without several weeks worth of head banging?

On the YAML front: we've added support for configuring integrations via the UI, no YAML involved[1]. However each integration will need to be adopted individually for this. YAML will still be around for power users and people who like to use version control.

For Z-Wave: the current integration is based on openzwave, a reverse engineered implementation of the Z-Wave protocol with an irregular release interval. As we depend on their releases, it's out of our control.

However, there is hope :) Sillicon Labs (owner Z-Wave) has recently published an official SDK for Z-Wave[2]. Once Home Assistant Cloud is generating money, the plan is to pay a developer to integrate it into Home Assistant. Once we're on an official stack, I expect our Z-Wave story to improve significantly.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qpKe-FW9Yk [2]: http://zwavepublic.com/developer

Glad to hear there are plans to improve it. I'd be willing to do a patreon or monthly donation just for better zwave!

Keep up the great work!

My experience has been a bit different to yours but has included a fair bit of headbanging 8)

Zwave support seems to be really good to me. This: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00YETCNOE/ref=oh_aui_de... works passed through to a VM after a vMotion to another host! All Zwave devices I've tried seem to simply work but to be fair I have not done anything like an exhaustive set of tests.

The support on the forums is awesome - one of the best communities about. I'm not quite there yet to really give decent advice but I'm close.

Home Assistant is being developed at a breakneck pace. That means that you must be careful and treat your project with respect. Backups and backout plans and testing must be taken seriously. You have to read everything you can get your eyes on - the forums and docs are very, very, very good. If you do all that then you will be richly rewarded.

I would be happy to contribute $ towards an improved Z-Wave implementation in HA if its based on an official SDK. I'm pretty sure I know a few others who would do the same if you set up a funding campaign somewhere.

Home Assistant should offer basic support (on/off/dim) for your switches out of the box - I've also got a house full of them. The work around should only be required if you want to use multi-tap gestures that the switches support. What's not working for you?

The multi-tap workaround is not terribly involved. If I recall correctly, it consisted of pasting a couple of lines of XML in the "zwcfg" file for each switch.

I can't get specific because my house was struck by lightning a month ago and fried my pi and a half dozen switches (among lots else), and I don't remember the details. Replacements are on the way. Important tip for home automators: don't get struck by lightning. The affected switches didn't just turn off, they started to strobe the lights in the connected fixtures. I had to turn off the circuit and pull them out of the wall to stop the disco dance party.

I did get a few other zwave devices connected, and these do pair with the zwave hub, but otherwise Home Assistant can't see them at all. I messed with zwcfg with no difference.

I've struggled with this as well. I actually find the YAML harder to write than a full programming language would be. For example, conditional logic such as "Turn on this light when the sun goes down only if this person is home" get complicated quickly. The breadth of options and plugins available is impressive but the documentation presents a lot of small snippets and not many explanations of how to design a coherent system.

I have a feeling that my next step will be reading the source code to get a better sense of how the YAML is translated into the internal state machine, but an official "beginners guide" would go a long way to making this not necessary.

See my reply to the parent

... and find the alert module.

Thanks, I hadn't heard of AppDaemon. It looks a lot like what I found lacking the last time I tried to set up Home Assistant.

Have you looked at AppDaemon [0] [1] or Node-Red [2] [3] as alternatives to using YAML to write automations? AppDaemon allows you to write automations in Python, and Node-Red allows you to do it in a visual workflow editor. I haven't made the switch from SmartThings to Home Assistant yet because I haven't been limited by SmartThings yet and it was simple to set up, but when I do switch, I will probably start with those tools since the paradigm is more familiar to me. You can't get away from YAML completely since you would still need to build your sensor and device definitions in YAML, but I think the YAML structure works better for that use case anyway.

[0] https://appdaemon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ [1] https://github.com/home-assistant/appdaemon [2] https://diyfuturism.com/index.php/2017/11/26/the-open-source... [3] https://nodered.org/

I only tried Node-Red, it was good enough that I felt no need for AppDaemon, even though as a programmer it probably is even easier than Node Red.

One huge problem with YAML compared with Node Red is the turnaround, node-red restarts blazingly fast. HA, not so much....

I had a similar experience with home assistant. The yaml configuration was so obtuse.

I basically just ended up writing my own python scripts and/or batch files and then I would have Home Assistant simply execute them.

That's how I managed to do some of my more complex, un-supported integrations with Home Assistant, anyways.

Is it possible to combine this with snips.ai? So you have voice control on the device it self or run snips on another device and let it send commands to the home assistant device?

You can flash our operating system Hass.io[1] to a Raspberry Pi, install an MQTT broker and Snips via the Hass.io UI, connect a microphone and speaker to the Pi, upload your Snips assistant and you should be good to go. See the instructions [2]

[1]: https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/ [2]: https://www.home-assistant.io/addons/snips/

Awesome, thanks for the reply!

Yeah curious to know too if Home Assistant is compatible with snips.ai? They're also heavy on privacy and essentially developed from the ground up with privacy being built into it BY design

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17827484

Thank you! Snips is the bomb, been tinkering around with it past week or so and really enjoying it.

What are your thoughts / experiences towards snips? Anything cool I should try out

Depends on how experienced you are with raspberry Pi. Good to start with their more basic tutorials? Found this https://snips.gitbook.io/getting-started/

I am using it for basic stuff mostly and the experience was very positive. Also have a dev friend that introduced me to snips, who ordered a maker kit and can’t wait to code some stuff for the platform

If only there were giveaways or competitions to win one. It's not too pricy but my wallet disagrees atm

Thank you so much! We work hard to give the best open-source VoiceAI platform for hackers and makers like you guys!

I can't thank you enough for what you have started. I have been using HA for over a year now and enjoy it more every month.

Have you guys thought about, or talked with anyone else who has thought about trying to make HA, or a subset of the HA functionality, accessible to non-technical people? I often show my setup to friends and family and the first thing they ask is "how do I do this?", and I normally have to tell them they can't really do it themselves.

It's in progress. We added a framework to allow integrations to be configured via the UI and are working on adopting the integrations to work with this. We're also adding users to limit permissions for certain accounts. These things take time, but we'll get there. I hope 2019 :-)

Are there plans for an Android app similar to the iPhone app? It's the one thing I miss about Smart Things

I don't expect an official app. There are some 3rd party ones.

Our frontend is a PWA which integrates very well into Android.

Actionable push notifications can be achieved with the notify.HTML5 platform[1]. Nice writeup what you can achieve here[2].

The only thing that cannot be achieved with the PWA is sending location updates for presence detection. But that can easily be achieved with OwnTracks [3] sending updates over HTTP.

[1]: https://www.home-assistant.io/components/notify.html5/ [2]: https://blog.usejournal.com/how-i-use-home-automation-for-wo... [3]: https://owntracks.org/ [4]: https://www.home-assistant.io/components/device_tracker.ownt...

Not much to add other than thanks!

Home Assistant was a key piece of not having to fiddle with lights while moving to a living room to do an early morning feeding for a baby.

First, I wanted to say I really enjoy Home Assistant!

I was wondering, how has development been since you have been with Ubiquiti?

Being paid by Ubiquiti to work full time on Home Assistant is awesome. I no longer work early mornings, late evenings and weekends. It has allowed me to start larger projects (user system, Lovelace) and able to break them down in smaller pieces that can then be picked up by both me and contributors.

Still struggling a bit with finding the right work/life balance now that my hobby has become my job but it's going in the right direction.

Try going the left direction. Way more fun.

It shows. I pointed my new HA at our Unifi controller and suddenly a huge number of attributes were available on each wifi connected device.

I don't care who pays for it but Ubiquiti are not daft: Amazon, Apple, Google etc have all got their feet under the table with their hardware "assistants". UBNT can't compete directly with that but they sponsor Home Assistant. Your salary plus a few other bits and pieces is not much cash in the grand scheme of things but the value gained is close to priceless (I would suggest).

Oh and did I say thanks for your work? Absolutely bloody awesome.

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