
Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform running on Python 3 - federicoponzi
https://home-assistant.io/
======
balloob
Founder of Home Assistant here. If anyone has any questions, let me know!

Besides being able to install it as a Python package on Python 3, you can also
install it using our Hass.io OS. Based on ResinOS and powered by Docker, it
offers over the air updates and management of your device via the user
interface: [https://home-assistant.io/hassio/](https://home-
assistant.io/hassio/)

~~~
AnonymousPlanet
Hass.io? In case you don't know, hass means hatred in German.

~~~
SeanDav
David Hasselhoff will not be pleased to hear that - his surname loosely
translates as "Court of Hatred"

~~~
foepys
"Hassel" is German slang and translates to "hassle".

~~~
hutzlibu
.. but that is new slang, and originates in "hassle" afaik. And I would rather
say, it is just used (and written) as the original english word.

~~~
foepys
It could very well be exactly the other way around. Even my grandparents knew
this word and taught it to my parents. It's absolutely not new.

~~~
hutzlibu
Interesting, I never heard of it and will ask mine. Which area are you from?
(maybe it is dialect?)

Anyway, I suppose most teens who use today, got the word from gangsta rap and
their "street hassle" ..

------
oulipo
I'm a co-founder of Snips [https://snips.ai](https://snips.ai), we are
building a 100% on-device Voice AI platform which protects your privacy as it
does not rely on sending voice on servers like Google and Apple do

You can use the platform for free (we will also open-source over time), it can
run on Raspberry 3 and we added an integration with the amazing Home
Assistant: [https://home-assistant.io/components/snips](https://home-
assistant.io/components/snips)

~~~
halflings
> which protects your privacy as it does not rely on sending voice on servers
> like Google and Apple do

And on your website:

> The First On-Device Voice Platform

Android already has on-device voice recognition. Just try getting in airplane
mode and saying "OK Google, play music" or something that does not require
being online.

~~~
oulipo
Yes, but their business model is still to get and sell your data to advertiser

We do a 100% on-device platform, where your data never leaves the platform,
and we want to power the next generation of private-by-design smart IoT
devices

~~~
danellis
_Sigh_

How many times do we have to do this? Google isn't selling your data to
advertisers.

~~~
nopzor
How many times do we have to do what?

Google is absolutely selling your data to advertisers.

If you mean they won't sell it to them in raw form I guess you're technically
correct, and I'd of course agree with you, but I don't think this is the
parent posters point.

They aren't being altruistic by not doing this; if they did they wouldn't be
able to monetize it anymore.

Am I misunderstanding something here or are you just being pedantic?

It's the same reason I'm an iPhone user. I'd rather deal with a company whose
business model is to sell me overpriced hardware rather than to "sell my data
to advertisers"

~~~
libertyEQ
I _just_ watched an interview with Trump where the interviewer asked about the
possibility of regulating tech and specifically mentioned all the info these
large tech companies are gathering and "selling" our data. While it may be
considered pedantic, I think the nuance is important. Fake news often has a
kernel of truth in it and being sloppy about the facts has implications.

Here on HN, we know the specifics, but FOX viewers don't (for the most part).

------
cardmagic
Is anyone else here completely confused at how much hype there is around
automated light management systems? I don’t get it. Is it really that hard to
turn on and off lights manually that people really need all this stuff? What
am I not getting?

~~~
dbm5
While I understand your skepticism, there are a few use cases for which I use
HA which would be either painful manually, or would require alternate devices
such as timers/etc:

1 - outside lights - various lights which light our home's pathway or areas we
prefer to have lit at night come on automatically at sundown and turn off at
sun-up.

2 - scenes; with HA, we can click one button - a switch with scene control in
our case - and have the lights in the room go to a specific set point,
receiver come on, select sonos, and tune in to a particular station - an
activity which would conventionally require several manual steps with various
input devices.

3 - notifications; with HA, I get notifications when the front door or garage
doors are opened/closed.

There are several things I plan to implement:

1 - using presence detection and adjusting temps/lights/etc based upon that

2 - fan control; we are heavy users of ceiling fans, and integrating them into
home automation would be a significant upgrade. Haven't found a replacement
for our Minka controllers which supports zwave (or anything else).

All of this has been possible for years - usually with single vendor solutions
which are very costly; HA integrates nearly all automation platforms into a
single system allowing each platform's features to work together relatively
seamlessly. It's a moving target, but has become very stable/reliable with
recent releases.

~~~
alkonaut
Tried to get a single outside light automated through a z-wave gaget hidden
behind the switch. Endless hours later the thing is still either working
intermittently or not at all. Even with the nodes in the network right next to
each other the network is fragile as hell. I just can't believe how expensive
z-wave things can be so much worse than the old 433mhz things that have been
around for ages.

I finally gave up and now it's just on (or off) 24/7...

I'm considering giving it another try but I'm not to keen on investing in
another tech only to see it fail as miserably as first gen z-wave

Is there no good standard that works over electric lines? Seems it could be so
much more reliable and cheap. And every single device already has the wires.

Powerline Ethernet is sketchy with some wiring configurations but you'd think
that these minimal bandwidths could be handled in nearly all wiring setups.

~~~
iakh
Z-wave is a mesh network, so the more devices you have the better the
connectivity. If you only need a single device, try locating your hub as close
to the switch as possible. Otherwise, ironically, the solution may be to
invest in more light switches.

~~~
alkonaut
Yes. I considered the distance but before spending more money on switches I
don't really need, I figured I'd try with the base next to the switch. Didn't
work reliably there either. So I'm not going to dare buying more nodes.

Is there any standard that _isnt_ mesh based? Hub and spoke with lots of power
like wifi seems much smarter.

Seems like complete idiocy to use a fragile low power mesh network for
something that a) has to have 99.9999 reliability (like lights) and also has
unlimited power (2kW+ available at each node!!) like lights.

The reason I went with zwave was because of the need to work behind an
existing switch. For sockets it would have been much easier with 433-plugs.

------
lima
How does it compare to OpenHAB 2, other than the language (OpenHAB is written
in Java)?

I'm currently running OpenHAB and it's rock solid (I have one with >2 years
uptime on a BananaPI). If I want to extend it, I usually write Python scripts
that either use OpenHAB HTTP API or send MQTT messages, so I've not yet felt
the need to write Java code. While I'm proficient with Java, I'd have to set
up a development environment.

But the OpenHAB scripting language - while very powerful - has a very steep
learning curve. It's hard to work with if you don't use it all the time and
you end up having to google everything single thing you want to do.

The Home Assistant community appears to be more active (about 2x) and the
barrier for entry is much lower.

~~~
JshWright
> The Home Assistant community appears to be more active (about 2x) and the
> barrier for entry is much lower.

I would go so far as to say Home Assistant is literally the best open source
community out there today. Very active, lots of folks happy to help users with
issues, and lots of devs happy to help newer devs through the PR process.

~~~
ghroos
Having contributed to a number of projects via github, this is not true at
all. I have had prs closed within minutes with curt replies. That is not how
you “help newer devs through a PR process.” In another case this happened for
a very clear bug. I’m cool with making amendments but maintainers do not seem
open to that often, feeling more content to close things because they see the
fix as a “hack”. Compared to other projects HASS is one of the worst I have
dealt with, sorry to say.

~~~
JshWright
Obviously this is an entirely subjective thing, and neither of us is "right"
or "wrong".

Home Assistant has certainly gotten a lot more particular about new code as
the project has grown, but I still feel they do a great job of helping new
users along.

Bummer you had such a negative experience...

~~~
ghroos
Which is sad considering an issue I was attempting to contribute was a bug fix
rather than new feature work. Clearly a lot of the earlier code suffers from
lack of design.

As I mentioned later I have had PRs accepted but overall I find maintainership
to be a real mixed bag. Better run open source projects do not have this
inconsistency.

------
balloob
For people interested in the tech stack:

Backend is Python 3 with asyncio. Source: [https://github.com/home-
assistant/home-assistant](https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant) \-
License: Apache 2

Frontend is a PWA powered by Polymer 2 Source: [https://github.com/home-
assistant/home-assistant-polymer](https://github.com/home-assistant/home-
assistant-polymer) \- License: Apache 2 - Demo: [https://home-
assistant.io/demo/](https://home-assistant.io/demo/)

------
johnjuuljensen
I've experimented with both Home Assistant, Domoticz and OpenHab. They're all
pretty good in different ways, but in the end in decided to roll my own.

They all have built-in scripting, but it's pretty common to send events to
mqtt and use some external tools for scripting. In ended up using node-red,
because it looked interesting and was really easy to get going.

After a while it seemed like the only reason for using any of those 3 systems
was the device support, and since I was just using z-wave, for which there is
a nice node-red library, I decided to do it all on my own. It only took a
couple of week nights before I had most of the things I needed.

It did feel kinda silly to do drag and drop programming, and I did en up using
the function node a whole lot, but in the end I stuck with it because it
allowed me to show the family what it does and how it works.

------
eltoozero
I was able to get Home Assistant spun up via Hass.io on an RPi2 very rapidly,
switched to RPi3 for improved UI performance though.

OTA updates have been seamless, but the out-of-box still requires some conf
file editing, which may be a turn off for some. It did automatically discover
AppleTV, Roku, and Hue (easy pairing).

For integrating "homebrew" sensors I was able to roll MySensors[0] platform
with parts lying around in drawers to get house-wide temperature monitoring
with a few lines of yaml.

Looking forward to further refinements to the platform!!

[0]: [https://www.mysensors.org](https://www.mysensors.org)

------
Animats
This thing seems to be mostly an interface for other home automation devices.
In the demo, it doesn't directly control anything important. It's not like
there are motor control relays connected to the Raspberry Pi's GPIO ports.

A big question is how this fails. It needs to fail into some safe condition.
Raspberry Pi machines have a full Linux and no stall timer, so they can end up
crashed or hung. If this thing turns devices on and is relied on to turn them
off, that's a problem.

~~~
JshWright
Home Assistant supports sensors and switches using GPIO pins (if you're
running on a Pi, obviously)

[https://home-assistant.io/components/rpi_gpio/](https://home-
assistant.io/components/rpi_gpio/)

Home Assistant is indeed an "aggregator" for a lot of different home
automation devices. Personally, I find it very useful to have my Nest, my
ZWave devices, various ESP8266 "things" (garage door controller, temp/humidity
sensors, my doorbell, etc), along with my Chromecasts, and the home/away
status of my wife and I all rolled into one state machine (plus a lot of
"general" information... the time, sunrise/sunset timing, current weather in
my area, traffic conditions, etc).

Having all that information in one place means those various components can be
controlled intelligently, based on all the available information, rather than
just the small island each of them would be on their own.

A Pi is totally optional, BTW. You can run HA on pretty much anything that
runs Python3.

~~~
LrnByTeach
Wonderful , this summarized the capabilities of this HAss

> A Pi is totally optional, BTW. You can run HA on pretty much anything that
> runs Python3.

> Home Assistant supports sensors and switches using GPIO pins (if you're
> running on a Pi, obviously)

> Home Assistant is indeed an "aggregator" for a lot of different home
> automation devices.

> Having all that information in one place means those various components can
> be controlled intelligently, based on all the available information, rather
> than just the small island each of them would be on their own.

------
kuschku
Assuming I have a few lights controllable via GPIO on the Raspberry pi (with
custom circuitry to power the lights), what’d be the easiest way to integrate
them with Hass?

(btw, hass means 'hate' in German)

~~~
SEJeff
Feel free to call it Home Assistant instead of hass :)

One of the primary deployment platforms is the Raspberry Pi, so it is very
well supported. I believe this would do exactly what you want:

[https://home-assistant.io/components/switch.rpi_gpio/](https://home-
assistant.io/components/switch.rpi_gpio/)

~~~
kuschku
Hm, I can’t do multiple pins with PWM with that, can I? Because I currently
have for each LED strip 3 pins with R G B using PWM.

~~~
JshWright
You would likely be better off using some other solution for your light
control, and then talking to that over HTTP/MQTT.

I use a version of this: [https://www.stavros.io/posts/wifi-enabled-rgb-led-
strip-cont...](https://www.stavros.io/posts/wifi-enabled-rgb-led-strip-
controller/)

It integrates nicely with HA via MQTT.

~~~
kuschku
Yeah, I’m trying to switch to an arduino-based solution, but I just really
want to avoid WiFi. And building custom protocols isn’t that optimal either.

~~~
icebraining
There are MQTT libraries for Arduino that work with the Ethernet shield.

~~~
kuschku
Good idea, for some reason I forgot that the Ethernet shield exists!

Thank you a lot, this really helps.

~~~
JshWright
Also, the ESP8266 (which supports the Android SDK) has WiFi onboard, and is
available in some very small form factors. I'm particularly fond of the WeMos
D1 Mini (which you can get for a couple bucks each).

[https://wiki.wemos.cc/products:d1:d1_mini](https://wiki.wemos.cc/products:d1:d1_mini)

~~~
kuschku
Yeah, that’s what I had seen before, but I really want to avoid WiFi. (Where I
live the spectrum is quite congested, and reliability of WiFi is low)

------
SEJeff
Here is a really nice post from one of the home assistant contributors on
visualizing the home using home assistant and some other goodies:

[http://www.vmwareinfo.com/2017/07/visualizing-smart-home-
usi...](http://www.vmwareinfo.com/2017/07/visualizing-smart-home-using-
home.html)

------
jo909
Reasonable satisfied user here. I love python and even contributed support for
one particular device to a component library.

But my plan for the next free weekend is to look into Node-RED and a fully
MQTT based system. I feel like that's the way to mix and match different
frontends, automations, components etc.

------
thearn4
Looks interesting, can this function as a ZWave controller hub when used on
system with a ZWave USB stick?

~~~
SEJeff
It sure can! Many of our users (I say our somewhat sarcastically as I'm only
an occasional contributor) use this USB zwave stick successfully:

[https://aeotec.com/z-wave-usb-stick](https://aeotec.com/z-wave-usb-stick)

See this documentation for more info please:

[https://home-assistant.io/docs/z-wave/](https://home-
assistant.io/docs/z-wave/)

And this for the specific controllers officially supported:

[https://home-assistant.io/docs/z-wave/controllers/](https://home-
assistant.io/docs/z-wave/controllers/)

If you're a new user, hass.io is going to be the most approachable way to get
hass up and running while making it easy to install all of the add-ons and
configure things securely + upgrade easily. The docs for zwave on hass.io are
pretty straightforward as well

[https://home-assistant.io/hassio/zwave/](https://home-
assistant.io/hassio/zwave/)

And if you want to learn more about what hass.io does ontop of normal home
assistant, please visit this page:

[https://home-assistant.io/hassio/](https://home-assistant.io/hassio/)

I hope this helps answer your question.

------
exar0815
One of the best things of HA is the Emulated Hue Bridge. It allows you the
mapping of any kind of Hardware on the corresponding Hue Device. It basically
translates e.g. MQTT to Hue. This nicely allowed it to me to integrate my
custom built devices in my Home Automation and control them with Amazons Echo
Dot.

------
dberg
I had a lot of challenges running home-assistant. Wouldnt find devices
properly, issues with devices falling out of the zwave network. Would
constantly have to "re-sync".

I went and spent the money on HomeSeer and it has been so much better. Tons of
great plugins that just work like MQ for the garage, IFTTT, etc. Has
schedules, adhoc scripting integeration so you can run your own shell scripts
on events, multi-event groups, a decent UI, logging and strong device support.

Its strangely written in VB but from a device support standpoint has been
extremely solid and finding any device i throw at it quite easily.

------
IgorPartola
I originally tried to use OpenHab and was turned off it because it required me
to define all my stuff manually instead of discovering it automatically. Does
HA do the same thing?

~~~
gbrayut
HA has a bunch of things it will discover... See [https://home-
assistant.io/components/discovery/](https://home-
assistant.io/components/discovery/) and the list of manually configured
components in the top tab.

------
strin
The home IoT world is broken - I got lots of devices (Sonos, Hue, Alexa, Roku,
...) and they don't play well with each other.

Shoutout for data and API integration layer for Home IoT.

~~~
zild3d
Haven't used it but I've heard openHAB is an option to speak to the various
devices (alexa and hue directly supported, sonos and roku supported through
IFTTT)

[http://docs.openhab.org/addons/io.html](http://docs.openhab.org/addons/io.html)

------
rb666
I love Home Assistant, by far my favorite automation platform. I couldn't
recommend it more. At home we use it to automatically dim the lights based on
the luminance outside, send us messages when laundry is done, activate and
deactivate our alarm system based on who is home, turn the radio on in the
morning when we enter the living room, turn off all lights in the house when
we go to bed, etc. etc. !

------
a254613e
I really really wanted to set this up and have it working, but configuring
devices and actions with it is so unnecessarily complicated that I ended up
writing my own scripts to do whatever I wanted rather than writing templating
code inside YAML config files (literally) to do certain things.

------
z3t4
If you want to build everything yourself you can get stuff for very cheap eg a
pir sensor for 1$ and it will be a good learning experience. If you think it's
fun you can even start selling stuff, there's a huge market with huge margins.

------
cordite
Is there anything out there for setting up a DMX controlled light strip to
something smart?

~~~
snw
[https://github.com/bluemaex/homebridge-
dmxuniverse](https://github.com/bluemaex/homebridge-dmxuniverse)

------
an_account
Has the automation scripting improved recently?

Last time I looked into this there was an uninvuative (for a newbie) config
file that required a server restart to see changes. Not exactly the easiest
way to learn as it was a very slow feedback loop.

~~~
balloob
Automations can now be created via the user interface:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3isVVpmiq4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3isVVpmiq4)

(Automations have been able to be reloaded without restarting for a while now
by calling the automation/reload service)

[edit: added word "service" at the end]

~~~
an_account
Thanks for the reply! I'll check it out again.

------
vippat
I have used this for a while now and say it's the best choice I've made, Still
a WIP but really really good

------
Animats
The Android client is on F-Droid. Nice. People who don't use Google services
can download it easily.

~~~
fest
I have been using the web interface on Android without installing anything.
Home Assistant leverages web app manifest (essentially, creates an icon in
apps list/homescreen which opens the web interface in a full-screen web
browser).

------
dankohn1
You might be interested in this analysis (that I co-authored) showing Home
Assistant as one of the 20 highest velocity open source projects:
[https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/06/05/30-highest-velocity-
open...](https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/06/05/30-highest-velocity-open-source-
projects/)

------
wakkaflokka
I love Home Assistant. I do wish that the auto-discovery feature was working
in Windows 10.

------
korijn
Is it right that home automation is really just light automation? Or did I
miss something?

------
autorun
How would you maintain all those APIs ?

