WebThings Gateway Goes Global | Hacker News Reader

WebThings Gateway Goes Global

hacks.mozilla.org

My understanding is that Ben Francis (one of the main individuals behind this effort) is no-longer at Mozilla given the recent layoffs/restructuring. Any idea on how this impacts this project long-term?

As far as I understand, WebThings Gateway is sort of like Home Assistant.

Why would I use WebThings when Home Assistant already has a much bigger community?

I've become a bit disillusioned with HA recently and am keen to give this a try. Competition/options are always good.

What changed your view on HA? I was about to get started with it...

Maybe go read the source code. It's... messy :)

UX/UI is also really not the greatest.

What makes you think it's messy?

If you're fine with dealing with breaking changes every few updates, you're good to go. If not, you should probably wait until v1.

I've had a couple upgrades over the years that cost me days of time to get my automations caught up or where I had to re-add my (50+) devices to get things working properly.

Also I used to get miserably slow start up times waiting for ZWave to initialize, which I'm not seeing on zwave2mqtt. My guess was the interaction between HA and OpenZwave.

This may have been fixed by now. I've been off for about 6 months.

HA is moving fast and breaking things and I don't blame them because it's an excellent tool and they're trying to get it "right". But automating my home is a small hobby for me and I don't have the time to keep up with the changes.

I've found using zwave2mqtt and plain old JavaScript has been plenty for me. It's fast, stable, and completely customized to my needs. I haven't put together an automation ui or anything, but I'd much rather just write my automations in JS over using yaml or dragging things around with Node-Red.

WebThings Gateway is the main implementation of "Web Thing API" https://iot.mozilla.org/wot/ - their push for using HTTP for IoT devices and use cases. They maintain a lot of IoT "adapters" with an impressive/modern codebase too.

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