How Home Assistant became the most important project in your house
github.blog32 points by chmaynard 9 hours ago
32 points by chmaynard 9 hours ago
I do love my HA setup. I use it for everything from home security system (door/motion sensors) to turning on/off the Christmas tree lights.
One thing I think is a little more unique is my home electrical uptime monitoring. I have my router, HA, and a few other devices running on a APC UPS. The UPS has a data port that I plugged into the computer running HA. I installed Network UPS Tools (NUT) on that computer and used a HA plugin to integrate with it. Then, I setup a notification to message my phone if the UPS switches to ‘discharging’ status. As long as the Internet stays active when the power is cut, I should get a notification about it. I did some power cord pulls as a test and it works great, just waiting for a real outage now. I also have a notification for when it’s restored (assuming it happens before my UPS runs out of juice).
I should also add that having a water leak sensor (with proper alerts setup) under the kitchen sink and next to a condensate pump has saved me from some real headaches if things had gone unnoticed.
If you like to tinker, Home Assistant can be a lot of fun!
Friendly reminder that you should never test a UPS by unplugging it from the wall as this also cuts the ground connection.
Home Assistant is the poster child for an incredible open-source project. There are community plugins for a mind-boggling number of devices, and crazy functionality that seems like magic. (Flash a $5 ESP32 with some pre-built image and you can connect HA to any BLE devices it can see.)
However, it is very much a product by nerds, for nerds. My wife loves it but she's not going to bother writing YAML to create her own dashboards. She used to write simple web forms so I have no doubt she could, but it's not something that appeals to the average person. Imaging a machine is beyond the realm of what the average consumer is willing to do.
HAOS runs really well as a VM image and doesn't use much in the way of system resources, if you have a home server with 4GB of extra memory you can throw it in KVM and it'll be happy as a clam. I've never had it brick itself.
Home Assistant is awesome and I highly recommend checking it out. Even if you have an existing smart house hub/platform you can often integrate HA in cleanly.
I used SmartThings for years and was hesitant to switch but I was able to control all my devices in ST from HA without moving/repairing/etc devices over. Once I had seen the power of HA I started a _slow_ migration over (took over a year cause I was lazy). The entire time the house worked just fine (except when the internet was down and then only the HA “native” stuff worked).
My biggest recommendations and I wish I could make this text bigger:
Do NOT use a raspberry pi for your HA host. They are unreliable and you will incorrectly blame HA for RPi’s failings (like I did). After moving to a dedicated cheap BeeLink mini PC my HA became rock solid.
You can play around with HA in docker or a VM as well and even host it there indefinitely but avoid RPi’s as your host, you’ll thank me later. If you want dedicated hardware (I do recommend that since smart house stuff often needs to be “always up” and the family doesn’t care/understand why your homelab is down, just that the lights don’t work) then go for a BeeLink or HA’s hardware offerings.
Raspberry Pi is a bad choice for any application that frequently writes data to disk. Most Home Assistant setups will often have historical tracking of at least one data point, which means that it would be constantly writing to disk.
If you get a high quality SD card with more storage than you'll ever need (64GB, 128GB), you can have a stable system for a while until the SD card becomes corrupt. The larger SD cards help with longevity because it means the SD card can spread writes out over a larger area, which means it'll take longer for the SD card to go bad.
Make sure to always have RAM logging enabled on your Pi! DietPi defaults to RAM logging.
Can you elaborate on why the raspberry pis are unreliable? Is it the SD cards, or something else?
I can't really. I used a Raspberry Pi 4 and later a 5, I used Canakits which provided approved power supplies for both, I used the highest-end SD cards I could get and then later used a special case/hat to instead use an NVME stick for storage. None of these were reliable.
I bet you could make a small book of all the times I've said this online and then had multiple people tell me "I'm running my whole life on a RPi v1, you're crazy, they are rock solid" (also people agreeing with me), I'm here to tell you I've spent literally hundreds of dollars following all the recommended guides and I've come to the conclusion that RPis are crap. I've owned every one of them from the original B-style one (I still have it) up to the 5th gen with the highest ram, I do not like them and I won't be buying them going forward.
> Is it the SD cards, or something else?
I have no clue, I'm sure it was the SD card at least one of the many times but it wasn't always something obvious. Sometimes the RPi would just lock up, no ssh, no ping, no web interface, and I'd have to power-cycle it to get it back up. I got tired of doing that and finally bought a BeeLink and it's been smooth sailing since then.
Raspberry Pis themselves are perfectly reliable given a stable power supply and good storage — steer clear of slow and flakey SD cards.
The HAOS virtual appliance is awesome though.
> Raspberry Pis themselves are perfectly reliable given a stable power supply and good storage — steer clear of slow and flakey SD cards.
At some point the problem stops being my fault and must be the ecosystem. I bought official power supplies, I bought top tier SD cards, I bought special hats to use NVME with RPi, they all sucked IMHO. Maybe I am "holding it wrong" but after buying every RPi from the original B to the 5th gen with the max ram I'm done. Also the foundation seems to have lost its way (especially through COVID) so I'm not really interested in support them anymore even if I found their hardware to be reliable.
Aren't the "official" Home Assistant Yellow and Green boxes they sell basically Raspberry Pis with stable power supply and good storage?
I got into ST about a year or so before samsung acquired them. Amazing ecosystem at the time and the ST community was great. I even taught my self groovy, so I could write my own device handlers. Then it went down hill couple of years after the acquisition. I still have my gen 2 ST hub and have been slowly trying to pivot towards HA. How easy is it to integrate ST into HA? I have a bunch older zwave wall switches and few other sensors that are tied into ST. But I really hate the ST app.
I was in the same boat at you and I found it super easy to use ST as the hub and HA as the brains until I decided to get Z-Wave/Zigbee dongles for my HA.
That said, I went to find the instructions to do it and it appears that Samsung broke the integration about a year ago and there still isn’t a solution. I’m sorry, it seems like I migrated fully just a few months before it stopped working and that explains the 1 device I still had on ST stopping working about a year ago (it wasn’t important and I never tracked it down).
I am glad home assistant (HA) gets some exposure. I run it in a VM on a proxmox server (because I use it for other stuff), it works like a charm. If you only need HA buy the dedicated hardware they sell or buy a mini PC. For my lights and switches (via the wall module), I am 100% Philips hue which is expensive but make the best smart lights money can buy and works as expected locally even if the internet or my HA server were to go down. Beware the rabbit hole of home automation though
It’s actually a nice article if it wouldn’t be so obviously AI written.
In my opinion this really devalues the reputation I am having for a publication and is a pity especially in this particular case as home assistant is such a great community.
If you run an Apple HomeKit stack and don’t need all the other stuff HA offers, I recommend checking out https://homebridge.io
There is a lot of complexity lurking there. At a second home I have HA running on an RPi and also an Apple Homepod Mini (with Matter). I wish someone could explain to me how these two devices do (or do not) interact, and how I can get Apple Home on my iPhone to play nicely with HA both locally and (when I'm away) over Tailscale (so I can do remote operation of thermostats and a heat pump on wi-fi).
Is this the kind of scenario that I should be asking an LLM to sort out for me ?