A different perspective

Posted May 11, 2025 1:57 UTC (Sun) by felixfix (subscriber, #242)
In reply to: A different perspective by warrax
Parent article: A kernel developer plays with Home Assistant: general impressions

I'm with you. Tinkering with computers is fun, but my employer provides enough of that. Automating my house does not interest me. My robo vacuum is pretty much useless; it can only keep floors clean if I rearrange my furniture and lifestyle. Maybe those $2000 ones are better, but I'm not interested in finding out. I can vacuum a room in 5 minutes with my old-fashioned manual vacuum cleaner, shuffling furniture and rugs as I go, rather than take as much time shoving them aside in the morning so the robo vacuum can spend hours during the day, and then shoving everything back where it's useful when I come home. And last thing I want on a day off is to have to tell the vacuum and everything else to simmer down and switch off the automatic work day stuff. And if there were still kids around, there's more disruptions.

So it goes with just about everything. Automated blinds? I open and close them based on where I am sitting and what the weather is like; I'd spend years fine-tuning any program to match my needs. Automated lights? Same problem, and sometimes I want them lower, sometimes higher, and I can reach a light switch faster than I can unlock my phone, open an app, and tap through several menus.

As for tinkering with computers at home for home use, the projects I have provide all that I want.

A different perspective

Posted May 11, 2025 4:19 UTC (Sun) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

All I can suggest is ... wait for part two. I have no "smart plugs", no "smart speakers", no automated blinds, no robot vacuums. But HA has turned out to be quite useful anyway.

A different perspective

Posted May 11, 2025 5:59 UTC (Sun) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm a bit like you but can imagine some use cases. For example in my home, the central heating control was very basic when I arrived, essentially often heating too much for no reason. Since I'm rarely at home I found it a waste of energy. I hacked my heaters in the rooms where I usually go to install ESP8266 modules to apply an offset to the temperature control. They also embark a LDR to detect light and infer my potential presence and share that info with other ones. With all of this I managed to cut my energy consumption by about a third, because the heating is completely stopped when I'm not at home, automatically restarts strong when I arrive, and it restarts at some hours late in the evening before I'm supposed to get back. I can even do a "touch /tmp/returning" remotely when leaving office if I get back earlier so that it restarts heating, planning for my return.

Then I realized that if one day I move to a new house, it will be particularly difficult to explain that stuff to a potential buyer, explaining that I'm running Mosquito on an old WRT54G running a 2.4.37 kernel and controlled by bash scripts running on one of my servers... I've thought several times that HA might be an option to re-integrate all of this in a more standardized way. I have not yet made the jump because I expect it will be a lot of work for little short term gains, but that's definitely one use case I do envision.

A different perspective

Posted May 11, 2025 7:42 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Then I realized that if one day I move to a new house, it will be particularly difficult to explain that stuff to a potential buyer, explaining that I'm running Mosquito on an old WRT54G running a 2.4.37 kernel and controlled by bash scripts running on one of my servers...

Dunno where you live, but in a sense I'm lucky. We have a shortage of housing so a lot of houses get completely revamped by a purchaser as a matter of course. So telling someone they need to modernise the heating isn't a problem - there are enough bidders that it won't affect the price much.

But I'm with most people here - so much of this is "tech for tech's sake" and I don't have the incentive to work out how it works. Plus, of course, so much is online and gets updated every six months - if it take me a year to work it out I'll just give up. Things need to "just work" and that's a description that can't be applied to a lot of today's tech. Especially if you NEED a smartphone - a full half of the people close to me (be it physical, family, emotional) can't cope with a smartphone. It's bad enough trying to get them to use a dumb phone!

Cheers,
Wol

A different perspective

Posted May 11, 2025 10:54 UTC (Sun) by parametricpoly (subscriber, #143903) [Link]

Having a custom system is less of a problem if you expose a "dumb" hub that only exposes access to the devices in a somewhat similar way as Firmata. If your dumb hub provides access via serial, USB/serial, MQTT, HTTP, HTTPS, telnet etc. those are all standard protocols and it doesn't take that long integrating it with a smart hub. I mean most devices only do on/off. Sensors often just do simple triggers. Sometimes you want to provide adjustments 0-100% (e.g. brightness, curtains, sound volume etc.). Heating and PID (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional%E2%80%93integr...) stuff is a bit more complex