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Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

I ran a HA system for a couple years at my last place. It was great when it worked, but I found it to be fragile, overly complicated, and not well engineered. I'm biased I guess, as I have mostly worked on embedded software and devices that need to be reliable. It's great if you like 'shake and bake' style open source projects that barely work and have a lot of time to tinker with them. I prefer my home automation to work 99.9% of the time and not require large, periodic time investments.

HA, out of the box, also seems to burn up solid state storage due to the absurd amount of logging.

HA looks sexy though, and I think that entices folks. It's nice to have a star-trek style dashboard running on a tablet or whatever. That's not really appealing to me though. I like my automation to have beautiful software, be well tested and reliable, and disappear into the background of my life. Being a SW guy at my day job, I really don't want to play SW engineer on the nights and weekends.

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> It's great if you like 'shake and bake' style open source projects that barely work and have a lot of time to tinker with them.

I think this is a cool way to relate to technology. Is there a word for technology that people enjoy because it's broken all the time?

I have a good friend who has been in management for twenty years, and he maintains a complicated home network like he was head of IT for a circa-2000 small business. Mail server, printer server, FTP, etc., mostly bare metal with a couple of VMs for things like a Windows domain controller. The most modern thing he has is a media server so he can buy music and movies on physical media.

It takes a moderate amount of tending, and once a year or so, something major breaks and he has to spend a weekend or two tinkering and fixing things, solving a complicated puzzle of software and hardware compatibility. I think it's a therapeutic outlet for him. If you talk to him, he'll give you complicated reasons why the whole thing is extremely practical, but nothing that would justify the dozens of hours per year he puts into it. I've probed for how he feels about it ("I bet it's nice to get hands-on every once in a while, eh?") and from his answers I'm pretty sure he has no awareness of it serving any emotional purpose for him. I bet it drives his wife crazy when she wants to watch a movie and he has to run into his office to tweak some configuration, but from my distance, I think it's pretty cool.

What I can't stand is the subset of people who keep trying to trick the rest of us into using their tinkerware, the "install Linux for your parents in 1999" crowd. When I bought a house seven years ago, I was really excited to set up some home automation, but after a couple of weekends of research I realized it was going to be a full-time hobby. I remember in particular being on Reddit and looking at the comment history of someone who had a pattern of saying "once you get it set up it's relatively pain-free." It was obvious from his history that it had been basically a second job for him for over a year. I decided to live in an unautomated home and invest my energy into other things, and I'm very glad I did. What drives people to lie about things like that to people who won't enjoy it?

I have a pretty decent home automation setup going for the last 5 years at this place with no issues using the hue ecosystem till my hue bridge died last month. Motion battery free buttons and timers for lights and outlets.

Have now made the jump to HA so we will see how long it can go post setup without falling over (and adding some things) but 5 years before the first issue (and so far I have some hue bulbs going on 10 years) is solid enough imho

So it can be done and is not always a lie.

I strongly disagree with anyone saying home assistant is support he’ll.

I enjoy automating and doing sysadmin things for fun, but I have a life and young children. I don’t have time to tinker as much.

Home Assistant has come a long way and has been extremely reliable the last few years. I mostly use it for automating camera detections and motion/contact sensors for security.

You can be as hands on or hands off as you want to be.

In general I’ve found if you want to do any sort of automation whether store bought or tinker-level, you’re going to be wasting some time.

as i said in my experience with the hue ecosystem it ran for years, 5 years, with no issues. it literally was set and forget and just worked. until it died and i moved to HA i hadn't added or changed anything for at least 2 years to the point i had to install the app to my phone when the bridge died lol

My experience was more than five years ago, so if I get the itch again, I'll take another look.

it sounds like HA is far more polished now so i'm hoping it goes well. but hue over the last half decade has been 100% solid and reliable for me till the bridge died

After a reasonable period of things working I just had an issue where some lights wouldn’t respond. At first I thought it was the saturated 2.4G wifi, then it got distracting enough to take up an early morning and it turned out that “for security reasons” HA made a choice to block my MQTT server until it was updated.

Not my favourite discovery and required a whole migration plan. Now I’m seriously reading the above article and thinking after (4?) years it’s time to leave HA.

  Being a SW guy at my day job, I really don't want to play SW engineer
  on the nights and weekends.

That's exactly why I fell out of love with home automation. The commercial stuff isn't better than HA. I don't want to care what brand my zigbee lights are. I don't want to come home and debug Siri or that god awful Hue app. I just want to turn my fucking lights on.

Home automation promises Star Trek and delivers the bastard offspring of 2001 and Galaxy Quest.

It might be neat to voice activate a mood with lights, music, etc. but the amount of effort to set that up and maintain all of that is literally 100x the effort I'd spend flipping a couple switches and turning on a playlist on a speaker. Literally 60 seconds to do it manually (assuming you know/have setup a playlist).

The only "smart" devices I have are for a room where you want a switch for a lamp but there isn't a switched outlet. Add a smart plug and a physical switch, done. No hub, no scripts, no automation. Its cheaper than buying smart bulbs which usually require some manufacturer's hub/app/nonsense.

My lights work pretty reliably, but I've done hours of research on goddamn lightbulbs. And then automating schedules and programming switches is harder than it should be.

I'm in the same boat. I'm running two instances of Home Assistant with Zigbee2MQTT for sensors, lights and switches, a few non-Zigbee devices via built-in integrations, and NodeRed for more complex automations. I find the stack to be a bit of a Sisyphean mess, quite unreliable, and a significant time sink.

I'll give some examples:

- HA occasionally freezes for a few seconds during automation runs, though system load, IO etc. look fine. No idea what's going on. It should have more than enough resources. Both instances do this (on different hardware).

- After every restart, ZigBee switches only work after the second press (the first message shows up on MQTT, but is apparently ignored). This is especially annoying if we're having guests when HA acts up; also, some switches use double-press for special behavior.

- Sometimes an automation or two just don't trigger until HA is restarted, but everything else works (happens about once every two weeks).

- Outlets and sensors may be gone from the network for a week (e.g. accidentally left unplugged) but will never be shown as stale in HA.

- Most automations I want devolve into huge YAML messes or huge NodeRed graphs, since I seem to need a lot more flexibility than other HA users. I've found it's a lot easier to just write a script for these, but the developer experience of the various scripting plugins leaves a lot to be desired. Also, yet more flaky abstractions.

- Why is it that checking whether a scene is active is so hard? That's just the sort of heavy lifting I expect HA to do for me.

- Every release of HA seems to add new little quirks; apparently, lots of people in the community don't even bother updating regularly?

- It's very hard to know what's going on inside HA; it seems to log every last thing except for what I'm looking for. I usually just look if MQTT sees the right things, then restart HA until the issue I'm having disappears. That this strategy usually works is problematic in itself.

All in all, it feels more like training a cat, not the hands-off appliance-style setup I'd like to have, and it takes up way too much of my limited spare time.

I really like HA for the user-facing part, great app, great web interface, even supports Apple Watch. I'm comfortable with writing code, perhaps a bunch of scripts against MQTT and the HA API would be the way to go for me, or perhaps something like AppDaemon.

I've also tried using Apple Homekit with Homebridge, and while that was rock solid, hands-off and very reliable, it doesn't have the flexibility I want either.

You arent wrong, there's a different mindset with a lot of homeassistant.

It feels like there isnt an understanding of something like MQTT - I want automations that listen to events, which include data in the payload.

"Subscribe to a topic" and "filter relevant happenings" seems conceptually so easy.

Building a UI to do this, harder. But adding a (bad) widget system of the actions? Hmm.

Its not IFTTT, it should not try to be. Provide visualisation tools to manage what listens and what broadcasts. Have black boxes of logic, just mandate they must respond in a particular way.

Leave the rest to programming. And if non devs are frustrated: help turn them into devs

I've setup HA so that I can turn on/off a couple of WLED smart lights and I found the UX of the dashboard to be a bit confusing.

After setting up a HomeKit Bridge integration, you are given a QR code to connect from the Home app. The code appears in the Notifications tab. I missed the code at first so the Notifications tab was empty and I thought that there should be a button to issue another one? After looking it up online, apparently the way to go is: delete the integration, create it again and be more careful with the Notifications tab.

Then if I want another person in the house to be able to control the lights from their device, I can't show them the code. This makes me wonder whether the HomeKit Bridge supports only one connection or if I just have to screenshot the QR code? It can't be that bad, right?

Other than that, a great piece of software. When I got the smart lights it bummed me out that I couldn't control them with Home and had to use some third-party app to do it so eventually discovering HA significantly improved my experience.

HomeKit can pair only once, to pair it another time it needs to be unpaired first; a design choice unrelated to HA. But you can “share” your home in the Home app. That will add additional “controllers” to those devices (HA being the device here).

Thank you, I thought so. It'd still be nice if they could print it somewhere because that was my first impression so I assume other people not familiar with HA will run into it as well.

Regarding sharing, I tried it, but it says "A home hub is required to add or remove accessories, scenes or people". I looked it up and apparently you were able to use an iPad as the home hub which you'd share access to, but since a certain version of iPadOS/iOS it can only be either an Apple TV or a Home Pod. I think Apple is focusing on being able to access your home setup anywhere so it requires a device that is supposed to stay at home all the time. Still a shame because it hinders offline-first setups like mine.

Mind you, HomeKit really is offline-first. The home hub does operate as the internet bridge, but on your local network you don’t need internet to operate your home.

+1 for same boat.

I've mostly settled into using HA for basic home automation and backing away from lots of or complex automation. There's a certain amount of time I can spend and anything beyond that feels like a job that isn't adding much marginal value at home.

One small tweak that helped with dead/unavailable devices. I set up a simple daily automation that pings all of the Z-Wave switches throughout my house. Was having lots of problems with one or two occasionally looking dead but the once-per-day ping helps.

Maybe it's the zigbee integration? Several people mentioned it being unreliable here. I'm over here with my 5 year old z-wave set up wondering what the fuss is, because it's been super reliable for me.

The only thing I can to do was a little clicking around when the z-wave implementation switched over to js but the upgrade path ended up being straight forward.

So what's this beautiful, tested and reliable alternative to Home Assistant? did you ever find it? Guess baking your own like OP did is out of the way as per your last sentence.

If Apple Home, Google Home and Alexa aren't enough for you (or you want a fully self-hosted option) you don't really have many options.

Home Assistant is the big one, biggest community, most integrations, you can pay for their cloud stuff to get easy integrations to the big corps above. They also have a dedicated device they sell you can use to run HA.

Domoticz is a bit of an odd bird, I never figured out what was their value propositon

OpenHAB is the one I'd pick if I had to install a system for someone else than myself. It's not exactly easy to configure (the object/entity structure is a bit weird IMO), but it has a pretty decent amount of integrations and it's rock solid German engineering made with boring old Java.

If you want control, my suggestion is to use HA only for the integrations and do all of the brains somewhere else. Either a self-made program that pokes HA using its API or directly via MQTT or Node RED.

> Domoticz is a bit of an odd bird, I never figured out what was their value propositon

Simple, rock solid functionality. If you want more, write scripts.

I really like the approach.

> Simple, rock solid functionality.

Don't ever open that C++ code base unless you have a barf bag.

I started making contributions and gave up because I have better things to do with my time then ruin my soul.

I will also note that they stole the MQTT protocol from Home Assistant - so at least they need ideas from elsewhere. (ie openzwave died so domoticz needs to rely on the same NodeJS subsystem infrastructure of HA)

I love the concept of domoticz - lua, but my god the architecture and implementation is a tire fire.

>I love the concept of domoticz - lua, but my god the architecture and implementation is a tire fire.

Is that better or worse than a dumpster fire?

Tire-fire is spectacular compared to dumpster fire. Highly energetic thick black smoke probably visible from space shuttle with naked eye.

On rock solid functionality:

https://github.com/domoticz/domoticz/issues?q=crash

segfault, leak and hang are also fun ones. Apparently the massive memory leaks in the python integration has never been fixed. Not surprising, one look at hardware/plugins/Python*.cpp is bad for your health.

Does nobody use Hubitat any more?

I'm still using it. Upgraded from the C5 to the C7 a few months ago. I use almost entirely Z-wave devices, and the HomeKit integration built into Hubitat makes it easy to manage them all like native HomeKit devices.

Managing probably any Z-wave mesh isn't something I'd recommend for a non-techie, but it doesn't generally requires consistent maintenance. And with Hubitat, it's a small standalone box that does OTA updates.

For me it fills a pretty big gray area between mass market consumer ecosystems and Home Assistant.

Never found one. It's on my list of things to do someday but that list only grows. I keep telling myself retirement will be a great chance to develop sw like that and give back.

OpenHab,

I'v gone from home assistant to smart things to openhab and its been stable and simple to set & forget.

It's great to setup via the UI, easy to backup and restore as once you actually start to build it into the foundations of your house you start to value the stability of it

I still never used OpenHab (at the moment running HA but not happy about it).

I’ve tried developing custom components for HA and it was so bad, there’s no docs at all and Python being untyped language doesn’t help either. Just out of curiousity I’ve googled OpenHab docs to understand if I could achieve similar there and their docs are awesome, full and well written. (and it’s Java so half of the code IntelliJ will write for you)

Not beautiful, but I use HomeSeer on Ubuntu. It is commercial, but after spending a couple thousand dollars on all the home hardware and server, spending a bit on software makes as much sense. It is reliable with my automations. I have added custom devices and automations through scripts that publish MQTT messages. For simple remote control, I tend to eschew their UI and have HomeBridge publish device access to HomeKit.

I'm looking at Mozilla's WebThings.

I work for a company (Inductive Automation), and we build a platform for industrial automation called Ignition. A few years back we created a special free license tier (and some light weight branding) for personal and educational use. It's called "Maker Edition", and there is a growing group of users using it for home automation. Mostly people already in the operational/industrial automation space, but it seems like it's growing more broadly.

We package Ignition as a docker image, an installer, or just a simple zip archive you can decompress and launch, so it's easy to self-host or deploy to a cheap cloud tier. The biggest downsides are that there will be a bit of a learning curve to using it (as with any new tool), the documentation being focused on commercial use cases, and similarly, we don't offer first party drivers for common home protocols (zigbee, zwave, etc). But we have pretty good docs, a free online learning platform, and pretty active forums. 3rd parties have written various drivers for home use.

I'd love for more in the home automation/maker space to know about and use it. We don't monetize maker edition in any way, and so don't really promote it, but I'd love to see the home userbase grow (and hopefully by extension, the hacker/maker community who might be able to help contribute to drivers and other resources).

It's an open platform built on the JRE, with a public sdk and example modules (plugins) and related tools available on github.com/inductiveautomation. The software is in use to automate virtually every industry, so it's fairly well tested (at least to the extent that a toolkit can be).

Maker Edition info is available at: https://inductiveautomation.com/ignition/maker-edition

Disclosure : work for inductive automation, but otherwise don't have a financial interest in people using Ignition Maker Edition or anything of that (aside from any side effects that come from broader adoption in general). My selfish interest is in a larger home use community so there are more cool projects to check out, resources to share, open source modules published, etc.

All statements here are my personal views.

How about just using e.g. your Apple TV as a hub, to connect to Homekit devices. I'm probably going to do that. You can also build your own devices(*) that connect directly to the Homekit hub without having a bridge or any kind of other software running.

(*) Example; ESP32 with HomeSpan

Homebridge works fine in such a setup as well for devices that aren't Homekit-compatible out of the box. I ran a setup like this for a while, but Homekit just wasn't flexible enough to do the automations I want. Also, everyone on Android is locked out, which can be annoying if you have guests and can't give them access.

I could just let people use the iPad. We have a couple lying around. What I'm interested in is how Homekit wasn't flexible enough to do the automations. What kind of automations were you planning to do?

I guess a good trajectory would be to start with Homekit like you did and then have the option of hosting that bridge yourself via Homebridge when you want to expand or go more advanced.

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