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Comment by richardlblair | Hacker News Reader

I also have limited interest, but alas, I have home assistant and I'm not sure I could fulfill my needs without it.

1 - My child is a runner. Zigbee door position sensors talk to home assistant and play sounds when a door is unlocked or opened.

2 - I'm super private. Giving people a key to my house is not something I'm comfortable with. I use Unifi Access + ESPHome + Zwave deadbolt to get the level of control I'm comfortable with. The doorbell also plays a sound in the house (in addition to the app on my phone)

3 - I have an under counter water cooler that runs way too hot. Zigbee temp sensor + Zigbee powerbar + simple exhaust fan keeps it cool.

4 - I dislike having 15 tv remotes and I have a more traditional AV setup (not sonos). I use events on the TV to control the audio (power on, volume, infer input selection)

AI has made all this a lot easier. I don't reall put a ton of effort in anymore, whereas before I'd have to fumble with configs.

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Hah second the AI part. Started a home assistant setup years ago to setup water leak sensors with alerts to my phone, but didn't feel comfortable enough having home assistant accessible from the web, so besides writing brittle yaml files now also had to deal with open VPN etc etc and after major update my config files were incompatible and with kids just didn't get back to it.

However this week spent an hour with claude to migrate to tailscale, latest home assistant update, sensor setup and filtering for my rtl433 antenna, connected hue lights while we're at it, migrated to latest pihole version and put everything in git in one nice compose file with a step by step instruction on how everything was setup and which account sign ups were needed. I still checked every step and manually approved stuff, but the remote session feature made this easy to finish.

> I use Unifi Access + ESPHome + Zwave deadbolt to get the level of control I'm comfortable with.

That makes me uncomfortable, electronics controlling physical access sounds like a nightmare to me. I'm glad we have the options though, so different people can customize to the level that makes them feel safe.

What would really make you feel uncomfortable is there is near 100% probability that there are electronics controlling your physical access to buildings you use on a daily basis. Maybe not your home, but other acess.

And the most important thing(s) that any experienced HA automation geek knows is:

1) Always have a manual way to control a device if HA goes down.

2) Local only, no cloud.

> Always have a manual way to control a device if HA goes down.

It is for this reason that my lights (Hue) and switches (Inovelli) are bound in ZigBee groups. HA adds some niceties, but the lights still work if it’s down. Accent lights I have bound to the Hue Bridge, because their app adds features HA doesn’t have, and they aren’t required for emergency egress.

The only gap I have, I think, is that because I’ve set all bulbs to respond to power restoration after a cut in last known state, if everything somehow lost its Zigbee binding, putting switches into dumb mode locally still wouldn’t help. However, since that’s an improbable scenario, I accept the remote possibility in exchange for not being awakened from lights coming on in the middle of the night. Plus I keep flashlights / headlamps throughout the house.

I just feel incredibly uncomfortable with something as complex as modern software controlling something as basic as physical security. Now modern locks aren't exactly create, but adding on a layer of software just provides you with an additional layer that can fail.

For a home, I'd argue that you should fail open, for safety. So now I'm sleeping or out of the country and the software fails and the doors unlock.

Then there's the quality of the software. Home Assistance is probably fairly good, but the software in the devices probably isn't. All the demonstrations I've seen of home automation, regardless of supposed quality and interoperability has been, in my mind, yanking as all hell. If an IoT sensor reports nothing, is that because there's nothing to report, or has it lost connection, or is the configuration broken? I'd be constantly nervous about the later two. A practical example is tire pressure sensors, I despise them. They are more often than not misreporting, so you learn to ignore them.

And as you say: "any experienced HA automation geek knows", yeah, but I don't want to be a home automation geek, I just want the stuff to work. I don't want to be bothered by setup and configuration, I don't want to think about it, ever.

re #1 - I know families in similar positions, and a secondary lock placed high up on the door has been a lifesaver (literally), and gives much-needed peace of mind.

Example: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DR9CMGZ

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