balloob

With Home Assistant[1] we use Ghost for our newsletter[2]. Besides ease of use and great design as article points out, it also was the only newsletter host that allowed us to disable all the tracking.

+1 for Ghost. Awesome software

[1]: https://www.home-assistant.io [2]: https://building.open-home.io

ESP Web Tools uses WebSerial to allow users to install, update and manage firmware running on ESP microcontrollers: https://esphome.github.io/esp-web-tools/

Founder Home Assistant here.

Home Assistant is turning 8 years this week. To celebrate we have launched crowdfunding campaign for Home Assistant Amber, a device for both beginners and home automation enthusiasts and the easiest way to get started with Home Assistant.

For more info see https://www.crowdsupply.com/nabu-casa/home-assistant-amber

It’s all clearly defined in ADR-007 https://github.com/home-assistant/architecture/blob/master/a...

The TL;DR: Authentication for devices and services are via the UI only (to deal with OAuth2, refresh tokens, auto-updating IPs via mDNS). Automations/scripts/scenes are both YAML or UI.

It’s implemented but it still requires an official Google Assistant smart home skill and a cloud connection to set-up. It works out of the box with Home Assistant Cloud.

It’s kinda cool how it works, as your Google Home Mini will run our JS app and let it interact with Home Assistant. In the case of Home Assistant Cloud, all commands are just forwarded as-is as all processing is always local. You can see the source here https://github.com/NabuCasa/home-assistant-google-assistant-...

Note, syncing local access, exposed devices and any command requiring 2FA still goes via the cloud.

You can see the most popular board types in Home Assistant Analytics @ https://analytics.home-assistant.io/

Founder of Home Assistant here. Let me know if anyone has any questions.

Glad to see Troy likes it as much as we like creating it!

If you haven't heard about it, next month is the Home Assistant Conference[1] where we will have three tracks: everyone, advanced users and developers. Each filled with great talks and of course some exciting announcements!

[1]: https://www.home-assistant.io/conference/

> Let’s be honest. Hacktoberfest has never generated anything of value for open source.

This statement by the author is not true. I lead Home Assistant[1], last year the 10th most active project on GitHub[2]. We love Hacktoberfest at Home Assistant and gladly participate. We have gotten a lot of high quality contributions and some of these contributors also stayed and joined our core team.

We've been many years in the top contributed projects during Hacktoberfest. In earlier years spam was higher but now it's not too bad. The biggest thing that they did to reduce the spam to us was making sure our repository didn't get linked on their website.

I see a bunch of calls of people are trying to stop Hacktoberfest because it attracts people to open source and we're all so busy. But… if we get more people and we get them along as a maintainer, the long term work load can be reduced because more people are working on open source.

So instead of calls for trying to stop Hacktoberfest, let's ask for a better way to control spam. I think that the announced guide by DO to tell people to open a PR on their own repo is a good start.

And if anyone reading this is interested in participating in Hacktoberfest by improving their smart home, check out the Home Assistant Hacktoberfest blogpost[3]!

[1]: https://www.home-assistant.io [2]: https://octoverse.github.com/#top-and-trending-projects [3]: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/10/01/hacktoberfest-...

Author of pychromecast here, the underlying library that this project uses to control the Chromecast.

I wrote this lib initially for use in Home Assistant, https://www.home-assistant.io

For Home Assistant I made a rule that all device drivers are stand-alone Home Assistant agnostic Python packages. That way more projects can use it.

Glad to see that strategy is working out and it powering projects like this

I work in home automation (Home Assistant) and we can improve our customer lives with privacy and local control without hurting society. And I bet a lot of other industries too.

Don't get scared by this article and not use Alpine. It's perfectly fine to run Python and it's what we do with Home Assistant too.

Home Assistant maintains Alpine wheels for a ton of packages for their 5 supported platforms: https://wheels.home-assistant.io/

Repository of our wheels builder can be found at https://github.com/home-assistant/hassio-wheels

ESPHome is amazing. it makes building your own IoT sensors and devices so easy.

Founder Home Assistant here. Thanks for all the wonderful comments.

This app is great. It's widely adopted within the Home Assistant community to create interactive floorplans to control your home. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebMQwVjVewU

At Home Assistant we have used Lit Element to power our new user interface and it has been great. Small and fast components, easy to learn for new developers, intuitive API.

One of the coolest thing is directives, https://lit-html.polymer-project.org/guide/template-referenc... (you can also write your own). Directives are attached to a DOM element and can interact with the DOM as they see fit. Examples are awaiting an async iterator and writing results to the DOM as they come in, or have a directive that attaches an animation or ripple effect to an element on click.

For people interested in a UI built with it, the Home Assistant demo is at https://demo.home-assistant.io and source is at https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant-polymer/tre...

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 :-)

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

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...

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

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/

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.

It depends on how much DIY you want to do. Snips.ai is the easiest to set up and can be installed from the Hass.io dashboard.

There is also Rhasspy[1], a voice assistant toolkit for Home Assitsant. It has instructions and custom components on how to integrate a full voice assistant (wake up, speech to text, intent recognition, text to speech) into Home Assistant using solely open source tools with different choices per category. It's very cool.

[1]: https://github.com/synesthesiam/rhasspy-assistant

We're working with Amazon support in trying to pin down why this is happening but the support response time is slow. Our end looks all fine and the majority of people are able to link their account.

You can try some of these troubleshooting steps[1]. If you are on Twitter or Discord, PM me (@balloob) your username and an exact timestamp that linking failed so I can forward it as another example to Amazon.

[1]: https://twitter.com/clstokes/status/1019039457339535360

Thank you, really appreciate this kind of feedback :)

I store these kind comments in my notes and whenever people are asses online, I always go through the stored notes to know why we do what we do.

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

(Founder Home Assistant here)

Everything that you can do in YAML + more, you can do in Home Assistant using Python. Have a look at my PyCon talk [1] from 2 years ago or check the available functions in the docs [2].

About the dashes. In Home Assistant when an option takes a list, you can omit the list if you are just passing in a single entry.

[1]: https://youtu.be/Cfasc9EgbMU?t=1038 [2]: https://dev-docs.home-assistant.io/en/master/api/event.html

Sorry to hear that you had a bad experience. As an open source project we get bombarded with pull requests where people have spent time and research to create something without reaching out to us in advance. This means that sometimes the way you are architecting your new feature doesn't fit with the current design or our vision. It means that we will sometimes say the feature needs changing.

We are all volunteers and the last thing we want is to start argueing with every person on the internet. The maintainers would burn out pretty quickly. And that means that if we are looking at 20 PRs a night, we will make mistakes and judge too quickly. Can we look at less PRs and spent more time on each PR? Sure, then people get pissed that it takes too long to get feedback on their PRs. There is no winning for us here and so each maintainer will have to find their balance.

For 9272, Pascal has offered the correct solution: a service switch. Every platform could be sharing code with other platforms given enough configuration parameters. We have made the decision that that is not in our best interest as it means that growing one platform now has to be made compatible with all the other configuration options and it becomes a mess. So create a new platform if your change is changing the core of a platform (like removing the template from a template switch). Your comments after the PR got closed got probably missed.

For 9270, you rebased after the discussion took place and I don't remember if the code was different before. The current change looks fine for me. You've removed your clone so I can't re-open the PR for you, but feel free to open a new PR with those changes and tag me in the PR message.

I have not used tornado but I love aiohttp. it's super fast (part in cython) and does HTTP + websocket client and server. Their team is are part of the asyncio contributors, they know their stuff.

We reload right after you make a change in the UI. Seems pretty hot ;-)

If you want automatic reloading when a file changes, feel free to contribute a watchdog component to Home Assistant so people can hook it up themselves.

Contributions to improve Open Z-Wave integration are always welcome :)

We already allow reloading the most important pieces of configuration: groups, scripts and automation.