LWN: Comments on "A kernel developer plays with Home Assistant: general impressions"

A different perspective

Rudd-O — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 21:44:42 +0000

> I just really don't see the "value add". Life without random things happening (and having to debug them!) with heating/lighting or whatever seems a lot simpler to me. Is turning a knob really that much effort?

The main value-add for me was in *never* having to do anything that the house should just do for me, and *never* having to remember when the appropriate time for a chore is. Go in a room? Lights on. Leave? Lights off. Leave home? Start vacuum, turn everything else off. Printer done a long print job? Voice announcement where I am. Washer done? Announce it, so I can move stuff to dryer. Baby bedtime? "OK, Nabu, baby sleep" and *everything* is set up just right. I can concentrate on the stuff that I want or need to do, not on silly stuff like "did I forget to turn off the light in the reduit?"

Stuff like Crestron-level controls of all media around the home, dashboards, AI-powered voice controls are just bonuses atop everything else.

Complex and bloated

Rudd-O — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 21:40:33 +0000

Valetudo was the main reason I replaced my Neato BotVac with the Dreame we have now. Despite Neato biting the dust, I would have kept the hardware and even modded it to run 100% local, if Valetudo hadn't been relatively easy to use in order to root the Dreame and turn it fully local. TBH the Neato hardware is simply superior (it vacuums more per pass), but after my experience with cloud-based vacuums, I learned my lesson and I won't accept any such bullshit anymore.

Complex and bloated

Rudd-O — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 21:37:36 +0000

> even bought two robot vacuum cleaners from the same vendor (Dreame).

You can free most Dreame and Roborock vacuums using Valetudo. 100% local and compatible with HA via MQTT.

Complex and bloated

Rudd-O — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 21:36:08 +0000

Lucky you because HA probably already includes support for all those devices.

Also: its own container OS!

Rudd-O — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 21:33:32 +0000

Recommend installing HA using the development scripts into a ./venv and developing that way (venv/bin/hass -c path/to/config.yaml). Restarting HA in HAOS every time is too annoying and it consumes a whole machine (or, worse, your prod setup). Restarting the venv HA is much, much faster.

It's not just Home Assistant towards which some companies are hostile

amcrae — Fri, 23 May 2025 00:48:17 +0000

Running HA in a docker container works very well, and removes all the trickiness around upgrading or running on different platforms.
For ZigBee, I run Zigbee2MQTT in a separate container, and it all integrates seamlessly.

A strong principle I have is to avoid anything going to a cloud instance, so everything connects locally, and I have no dependence on any external services. Even for Google Home, a local integration can be achieved, but it is somewhat fiddly - https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/google_assistant/
I have it set up for 'local fulfillment' so that commands can be sent from Google Home directly to the local Home Assistant instance. However it is not a simple exercise.

For solar inverter monitoring, the tendency is to have an integration that polls the cloud based solar data provided by whatever brand of inverter you have, but I don't like that idea - sometimes it isn't as real-time as you need to do automation based on generation or consumption data, or it provides it at poor granularity (e.g 30 minute intervals).
Some years ago I wrote my own solar monitoring that polls the inverters (and a CT meter) directly, and then provides this data to HA directly. At one point I thought it may be useful to rewrite this as a HA integration, but I don't actually like writing Python, so didn't end up doing it.

It would be great if every supplier of gear that uploads data to the cloud published their protocol so that anyone could monitor their stuff, but how naive and idealistic am I...

It's not just Home Assistant towards which some companies are hostile

PhilippWendler — Wed, 21 May 2025 15:46:40 +0000

I am not sure whether all Solax inverters have Modbus, but if yours has it, you can use a cheap USB-to-RS485 converter (or Ethernet-to-RS485) and https://github.com/wills106/homeassistant-solax-modbus/. Works great for me.

It's not just Home Assistant towards which some companies are hostile

Tet — Wed, 21 May 2025 15:04:19 +0000

I want to get information about what my solar panels are doing - how much power is being generated, how much is being exported to the grid, what the level of charge in the batteries is like and so on. There is a Home Assistant automation for my inverter. But only if it's connected wirelessly, sending its data to a cloud server in China. I don't want to do that. My inverter is connected using ethernet and has no access to the general Internet, only to my home network. But the inverter doesn't expose any open ports when configured like that, so the integration doesn't work. It does send some data out via MQTT which I can capture and see using mosquitto. But it relies on the cloud server sending back some magic responses before it will start publishing the data I want to get at. The company that makes the inverter, Solax, are actively hostile to their customers. They could give me the relevant information. But they have refused. They're only interested in you using their cloud servers. I'm not asking for support. I'm technically competent enough that I can do all of the work myself. I just want to know the information needed. But they have no interest in supplying it.

Also: its own container OS!

Cyberax — Mon, 19 May 2025 17:44:42 +0000

I actually found out that HA development is fine with HAOS. You can just install an SSH plugin and develop a new component in the `custom_components` directory. It's a bit clunky with HAOS restarts, but for simple components it's fine.

The same applies to ESPHome-based components, they can be developed in `esphome` folder directly.

Also: its own container OS!

aigarius — Mon, 19 May 2025 12:45:11 +0000

Yes. Always use the HAOS, unless you have at least 5 years of HA usage experience and at least a year of HA *development* experience. And even then, for the peace of mind it is best to run your production instance on HAOS (possibly inside a Proxmox VM) and have a separate development instance for hacking and weird experiments. The integration with addons, HACS, backups and upgrades and tight tracking of compatible system level package (hi Bluetooth stack!) is *critical* for reliable and stable experience.

A different perspective

nirik — Sun, 18 May 2025 15:56:59 +0000

yeah, same here... it's been 'fun' to play with. You _could_ do everything yourself, but it would be a lot of infra work and reverse engineering of tons of devices, this way you can integrate things pretty quickly and easily. There's also a lot of flexability in the framework to show things the way you would like if you want to tinker with the data.

A few things that stand out for me:
* Just having easy historical data is great. You can see how much the temp changed in that room over the last day/month/year and have a nice graph of the data. Being able to graph the temp sensor by your chair against the ductless heatpump sensor way up on the vaulted wall lets you see that heat sure does rise (and allows you to easily adjust it)
* consolidation of remotes/controls. I no longer need to find the remote for the blinds, the heatpump remote, etc. Everything is easily controllable via my phone or laptop.
* Being able to check the moisture level in the garden to know if I should water, and being able to water from anywhere.
* Being able to tell exactly how many gal of water I water the fruit trees (since pressure varies here on a pressure tank/well system).
* I do have a few 'requires internet' things: My car (it pulls from toyotas api) and my cpap machine. It's unfortunate that I don't have direct control over these, but adding them here allows me to at least have/save all my data locally.
* Being able to tell how full/empty propane tanks are should be nice for when we are in a power outage and running on generator. In the past I have had to go out and just lift the tanks from time to time to see how much might be left, this way I can know when to switch without going out into the cold/wet/rain/snow.
* Having the data on my hybrid hot water heater has been interesting. I got to learn about upper and lower tanks, that heatpump mode draws about 300-400W, but when we use a lot of hot water and it kicks on the electric element, it uses ~5500W. Avoiding that by increasing the target temp should save us on the electic bill

Anyhow, will stop there. I think it's a nice fun framework for wrangling iot stuff under local control with a pretty interface.

A different perspective

AdamW — Thu, 15 May 2025 07:10:54 +0000

The main value for me is doors. Being able to allow access for the catsitter, or a friend who shows up unexpectedly with something to drop off, or whatever. Being able to check whether I remembered to lock the doors when I'm in bed, without actually getting up and going to look. Being able to open/close my garage door if I don't have the dedicated remote with me, without using the godawful MyQ cloud thing (thanks, ratgdo).

But the other stuff is, honestly, just fun. Have I actually used the ability to control my heat pumps from HA much, since I set it up? Well, nah. Was it fun? Well, yeah. Is it world-changing that I can use it to auto-shutoff my ebike battery charger once it gets close to full capacity, and not have to do it manually or worry about the battery burning the house down if it overcharges? Nah. Is it kinda neat? Sure.

YMMV, but I've found HA extremely well built and designed in just such a way that fiddling around with it feels like *fun*, not a chore.

Complex and bloated

mjg59 — Thu, 15 May 2025 00:39:18 +0000

esphome is great for more complex setups (I use it for an air sensor monitor that has different sensors on SPI and I2C and needs to be able to report multiple results in different units), but when all you want to do is toggle a GPIO then Tasmota is almost certainly preferable.

Complex and bloated

dskoll — Wed, 14 May 2025 22:34:38 +0000

Thanks for recommending Tasmota. I took a look and converted one of my plugs over. It's much simpler and more straightforward than ESPHome, and better documented too. And the silly little HTTP GET invocation to control the plug works fine for my purposes. So again, thanks! I'll be converting the other one over soon.

Complex and bloated

Wol — Wed, 14 May 2025 06:48:34 +0000

> I'd posit that has more to do with folks simply not *purchasing* this crap, because the value-add for "smart home" to non-gear-fetishists is approximately zero.

Companies forget that the "value add" can easily be NEGATIVE to the consumer. We want a BASIC phone service with OUR choice of add-ons. If our phone company isn't careful they might find I try to bring the weight of disability charities down on them because we can't turn off unwanted extras.

Last time this happened we got refunded three months of phone charges because the service was - to put it bluntly - life threateningly bad! Then we recently upgraded and the mess has come back ...

Cheers,
Wol

Complex and bloated

pizza — Tue, 13 May 2025 20:46:42 +0000

> Companies like Lowe's tried to jump on the "smart home" bandwagon (IRIS) and get access to all those tasty, tasty data. And it failed entirely, they got nothing but losses.

I'd posit that has more to do with folks simply not *purchasing* this crap, because the value-add for "smart home" to non-gear-fetishists is approximately zero.

Complex and bloated

Cyberax — Tue, 13 May 2025 20:23:59 +0000

> ...So I take it you have no problem with everyone+dog having access to always-on microphones

I don't really care, yes. What are you going to do with this data? For ad-tech, you need to tie it to a browser user somehow, and that's not trivial. You can also (try to) sell the aggregate data for market research, but there's a very limited amount of valuable information in day-to-day life of regular people.

That's also why TVs are the only major area where privacy violations make commercial sense, they have a closed loop for ads. The data from a TV can be used to calibrate the ads that are shown on the same TV. Basically, if you have a device with a screen that shows you ads, then be afraid. Otherwise, you're likely fine.

Companies like Lowe's tried to jump on the "smart home" bandwagon (IRIS) and get access to all those tasty, tasty data. And it failed entirely, they got nothing but losses.

Complex and bloated

pizza — Tue, 13 May 2025 19:44:37 +0000

> Data collected from smart devices is largely worthless, except for TVs. There are scores of dead companies attesting to that.

That conveniently ignores the companies that didn't die, many of whom bought up the assets (including the data!) of those failed companies.

...So I take it you have no problem with everyone+dog having access to always-on microphones (and sometimes cameras -- Roomba taking photos of people on toilets, anyone?) in your home, along with detailed data on room occupancy (including schedules) and location data? And that's just the devices; factor in the truly awful state of individual apps (and every device has to have their own app, because $reason) which all seem to require access to fine location data, phone state, and usually far more?

So "worthless" or not, I have a major problem with the fact they're all doing it anyway,... and making their products shittier in the process.

Complex and bloated

Cyberax — Tue, 13 May 2025 18:35:37 +0000

Data collected from smart devices is largely worthless, except for TVs. There are scores of dead companies attesting to that.

Complex and bloated

pizza — Tue, 13 May 2025 10:55:14 +0000

> Once lots of people have home automation servers with a standardized device interface, smart devices will become commodities, and low cost rather than high margins will be the name of the game.

Look no further than the rapid enshittification of televisions to see how well that theory has worked out -- In practice, those "smart devices" are already being reduced to selling at zero or negative margins, with any profits being made by monetizing collected user data (including injected advertising), subscription fees, or both.

If you don't control the server backend and/or the user client, none of that is possible.

Complex and bloated

rgmoore — Tue, 13 May 2025 05:33:59 +0000

The problem is that we live in a world where making gear that best serves its purpose and has good price is not sustainable. You need something else to survive. Something high-margin.

I don't think that's quite true. High margins are necessary for relatively new businesses that are selling to a small market of early adopters, which is where most smart devices are today. Over time, though, manufacturers will figure out how to make those same general kinds of goods into low margin, high volume items that will sell to everyone. I think a really good home automation server will be a key part of that happening. Once lots of people have home automation servers with a standardized device interface, smart devices will become commodities, and low cost rather than high margins will be the name of the game.

Complex and bloated

leromarinvit — Mon, 12 May 2025 14:57:20 +0000

If all you want to do is expose a REST endpoint for toggling a switch, then ESPHome might be overkill - e.g. for your Sonoffs, you could use Tasmota. That's configurable via a built-in web ui, so it's harder to lose the config there (but not impossible, so keeping a backup is still wise). It doesn't have an API that could reasonably be described as RESTful, but you can execute arbitrary commands via HTTP GET - so switching with curl will work.

Where ESPHome really shines is for running complex custom automation code close to the target. E.g. I have a smart plug for my coffee machine which (among other things) detects the pump running (via reactive power) and resets a turn-off timer accordingly. Best of all, you can write all this custom logic in a real programming language (C++) - anyone who's tried to implement similarly complex things with Tasmota will probably attest to its limitations in this regard.

In general, I always aim for having as few involved parts as possible for automation (so as to not introduce unnecessary failure points), so being able to run custom code right inside the actual actuator device is nice. I also run HA, but for this reason, I only use its automations when there is no other option (Zigbee, I'm looking at you). I mostly use it as a dashboard and for occasional manual control. It also servers as a home for my ESPHome configs (via the ESPHome Builder addon), mostly out of laziness.

Complex and bloated

leromarinvit — Mon, 12 May 2025 08:36:16 +0000

> I even bought two robot vacuum cleaners from the same vendor (Dreame). Both have different software (Dreame & Xiaomi home).

If you haven't already, you might want to look into Valetudo (https://valetudo.cloud/). Its main feature is that it lets you control your vacuum without being connected to the manufacturer's cloud service, so you can stop worrying about the privacy and security implications. It has a nice, local web GUI, and can optionally integrate with HA (or other systems) via MQTT.

I've been running it for years on a Roborock and a Dreame vacuum cleaner, without any issues.

Python compatibility checks

geofft — Sun, 11 May 2025 23:12:43 +0000

> For C we have LibAbiGail. For Rust we have Cargo Semver Checks, Crater and many other things… what do we have for Python? Wishful thinking and prayers?

Now that Python has grown type support, something like https://mypy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/stubtest.html would be a good way to do the sort of thing libabigail does to check that a new version of a package exposes the same interface as previous versions. (Of course, in both cases, whether it has the same semantics is a different question, but there are a wide variety of tools for writing tests, and no real substitutes to doing so.)

A different perspective

dskoll — Sun, 11 May 2025 21:56:57 +0000

I have a far easier hack. My bedroom window has a semicircular bit at the top that the curtain won't cover, so enough streetlight leaks in for me to see my way to the toilet. 🙂

It does mean I need a sleep mask to sleep at night.

A different perspective

felixfix — Sun, 11 May 2025 21:49:33 +0000

I have no problem getting up at oh-dark-thirty, walking ten feet to the bathroom, and flicking on the 4 watt night light. Muscle memory only takes a few nights to train.

Complex and bloated

VersedBook0 — Sun, 11 May 2025 11:47:06 +0000

In fact even if you setup a Virtual Machine running Home Assistant OS like I have it's still a basic Linux install that.. wait for it.. runs docker containers for all the major bits

A different perspective

VersedBook0 — Sun, 11 May 2025 11:40:58 +0000

While I agree, at least in part, there is also the matter of the plumbing to achieve the required results. Continuous monitoring of said sensors, checking time of day then doing something, etc. All that does require an amount of scripting or programming of some sort.

The Home Assistant system and its ilk provide all that at an easy high level. While maybe a bit much for this one example, In terms of my time spent getting this going I think smart home for the win.

Complex and bloated

parametricpoly — Sun, 11 May 2025 11:01:30 +0000

> The cat's schedule isn't tied to yours. Just ignore DST (I do this for the clocks in my house which aren't easy to change and don't control anything I care about).

I've set it up to serve 3 proportions during the night so that the cat won't wake me at 4 or 5 am. This is really for my comfort.

A different perspective

parametricpoly — Sun, 11 May 2025 10:56:01 +0000

Agreed, but for this you don't necessarily need a full blown smart home. A single adjustable light with motion/presence detection and/or RTC for adjusting the brightness level is sufficient.

A different perspective

parametricpoly — Sun, 11 May 2025 10:54:41 +0000

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

Complex and bloated

MortenSickel — Sun, 11 May 2025 08:57:25 +0000

"Modern day solution is to set up containers. "

Which is actually the way of running HA if you do not want to run it on a stand alone box. My HA runs in a docker system on one of my debian servers at home. All of the large components are running their own.container, everything working.nicely as soon as I had the general docker setup.right.

Complex and bloated

mjg59 — Sun, 11 May 2025 08:25:28 +0000

I've a bunch of code in HA, I run three instances of it, I have a whole bunch of complexity tied into it from turning the yard lights on when it's dark, to running the fan in my bathroom when the humidity is significantly above the ambient humidity, to noticing that the cabin water supply pump is running but drawing too little current so there's probably a water leak and turning it off to stop it burning out. I've never paid anything. There are use cases where the subscription makes life easier (and yes the hoops to jump through for Google Assistant integration without using a maintained cloud service are annoying), but "damned near useless" is just not even slightly true. If you've ended up under the misapprehension that HACS (the community maintained integration distribution system) requires a subscription then, well, that's a misapprehension?

A different perspective

Wol — Sun, 11 May 2025 07:42:27 +0000

> 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

Debian

pabs — Sun, 11 May 2025 07:35:43 +0000

I note that the Debian folks are working on HA packaging:

https://wiki.debian.org/Python/HomeAssistant

A different perspective

wtarreau — Sun, 11 May 2025 05:59:28 +0000

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

corbet — Sun, 11 May 2025 04:19:34 +0000

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

VersedBook0 — Sun, 11 May 2025 03:07:13 +0000

Actually I find that getting up in the middle of the night for a toilet break and having lights under the bed just come on and the toilet light on very dimmed and it all just turns off when getting back into bed to be really really nice, and no fiddling trying to find switches and stuff :)

Complex and bloated

Cyberax — Sun, 11 May 2025 02:18:00 +0000

> HA is damned near useless without that $65 subscription as far too many integrations require the Nabu Casa Cloud Service

That's completely incorrect. You can use HA without any subscription. Mobile applications for HA also support custom URLs, and mine is directly exposed with a public IPv4/IPv6 addresses.

The only integration that is bothersome to set up without HA subscription is Alexa. You can _still_ do that, but you'll need to follow a somewhat convoluted process of creating your own private skill.

A different perspective

felixfix — Sun, 11 May 2025 01:57:33 +0000

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.