Just wanted to say that my life as a quadriplegic would be 13.4 million percent more crap without Home Assistant. Being quadriplegic and having something as open as Home Assistant is absolutely amazing, I have automated absolutely everything in the house and home assistant has not choked once.
Couple that with one of the friendliest communities for newbies I have come across in a long time and you have something really awesome.
I've been using it for a couple of years, I have tried all the other open source alternatives but nothing really comes close for me. I'm actually fiddling with my installation right now as it were.
I cannot plug my phone in to charge it up myself obviously, so I am writing a little automation that will check who is in the house and announce through the speakers my phone needs charging up or send them a text message if I have their phone number when my mobile phone charge gets below 20%.
Totally cool beanz and I am totally serious about how much easier this makes my life as a quadriplegic.
Thanks for your comment. I came to this discussion with my blinkers on, so to speak, pre -judging how I need less automation in my world, and you give concrete evidence how someone's "meh" can be balanced by untold advantages (13.4 million, in fact) of such a system.
Thanks for making me eat humble pie and broadening my views. Sometimes more tech is helpful indeed.
Ps: The way you're applying it is creative and awesome too!
No need to eat humble pie at all! it has been my experience thatEngineers And other reprobates like the ones that haunt can use don't know anything about this stuff, but the second it is brought to their attention I pretty uniformly had positive responses along the lines of "hmm, that is an interesting engineering question" and away we go. :-)
It is one of the wonderful things about this place, who gives a crap about the emotion being quadriplegic (I certainly don't) let's just solve the logistical problems! And as far as I'm concerned all of the problems that disability has introduced into my life have solutions that revolve around logistics, which project/process/company/widget do I need to buy/invent/collaborate on to make this thing work. It's great.
I'm automating my house because I nearly ended up being quadriplegic[1] and I want to be prepared next time if I loose my mobility.
I'm largely doing it with 433Mhz hardware, Raspberry Pi and python scripts. I didn't use Home Assistant because I presumed large project might be overhead and inhibit my choice of hardware; your comment has made me to rethink my strategy.
Raspi is definitely a good starting place for Home Assistant (the Hassio distro makes Home assistant particularly easy to pick up). If / when you grow out of it, an older laptop or desktop would probably be more than enough for you. I’m a big fan of Home Assistant!
And how do you interface to it? Do you send what you caught to MQTT?
I am considering having something else as the RF receiver but would need to forward what it received to MQTT (I can write that part myself - it is really the interface to the dongle I would like to understand)
I cannot plug my phone in to charge it up myself obviously
Do you mind if I ask how much precision your conveyance of choice has? I've built docking stations for small mobile robots by mounting qi receiver pads [1] on the robot and compatible phone chargers [2] on walls where the robot can drive up to them to recharge. If you have enough precision you might be able to do the same thing, mount a pair of pads somewhere, run a cable from the pad to your phone, and dock them together to recharge.
Hmm. Not sure what to do if you don't have enough precision to dock a pair of charge pads like that. Maybe... put the one on the wall on a horizontal rail at the correct height and add a motor to run it back and forth until it starts charging? Maybe mount it on a small robot arm?
Can you clarify what you mean by "conveyance of choice has" please?
Apple has a very very awesome accessibility software, it is seriously the best of the world and I have tried all in the decade since I became a full-time wheelchair driver. I use a chin controller to drive my chair, and I also use the chin controller to access Apple's Switch Control[1] using the Tecla Bluetooth bridge. As soon as funds permit I will be updating to the new Tecla as it is an amazing device, it really is the missing link.
This means that anything you can do on an iPhone I can do the same, it is not some subset of commands like most other mobile platforms. Once a new phone or any of the other Apple offerings is taken out of the box, I can get my designated hands to turn on the accessibility software and from then on I can do it all myself. There is literally no the company where this is true. As far as I know.
If I understand you correctly, it might be cool when my iPhone is connected to my wheelchair to be able to drive up to something while I am working and have it charge. It would have to be pretty robust as I will drive into it at some point!
Ah, sorry, I didn't know what kind of wheelchair or control scheme you were using so I didn't know whether you'd be able to align yourself precisely enough to get the thing to charge.
> If I understand you correctly, it might be cool when my iPhone is connected to my wheelchair to be able to drive up to something while I am working and have it charge. It would have to be pretty robust as I will drive into it at some point!
I think that that's doable, yes! Above, I linked the amazon page for a receiver pad that's designed to be mounted to cell phones to let them use wireless charging even if they don't have it built-in. If you mount one to your wheelchair somewhere and connect it to your phone, you should be able to mount a matching phone charger pad on your desk or the wall so you can drive up to it and your phone will charge as if you'd placed it on the pad. It might be a bit slow - it'll probably only charge at 5W, which looks like it'd take about 4 hours to fully charge an iPhone while it's in use - but it should work.
The hardware itself is pretty durable. The receivers are designed to be mounted underneath phone cases, so you can do the same thing to the one you mount on your wheelchair. The pads are designed to have phones tossed at them every afternoon for several years; I've never had one get even close to breaking. If it does have trouble, the wireless charging tech is designed to be able to run through cell phones' shells and cases and you can build version two with a polycarbonate cover that'd survive a charging battlebot.
You probably could. I personally wouldn't attempt it because I mostly do software and wouldn't want to risk draining it dry overnight or voiding the warranty or something, but if it's a just a car battery it shouldn't be hard for someone with more EE knowledge.
Another option might just be to mount an entirely sperate power system just for the phone and any other devices. Buy a huge USB power bank off Amazon and mount it to the carriage or something, might not even need duct tape.
That was my first thought too. If there's a 12v battery on the chair, a car USB adapter could power the qi pad. Then the issue is how to move phone to pad and move it off the pad for use. There would be virtually no chance of running down the wheelchair battery with this setup; the motors use much more energy than a USB charger.
I thought somebody might ask, so I am just sanitising my config files and then they will be available on my Github[1] hopefully in about an hour. Was there any particular automation you were interested in?
No problem, in about an hour things will start appearing And I will include usefulness et cetera.
The most commonly used automation by a very long way are the lights, because I use voice operated computer people were continually coming into my asking if I was okay because they could hear me talking. This obviously was crazy makin.
So now they ignore all talking unless they see:
All of the lights pulse on and off in a blue colour, which means can you please give me a hand when you have a minute I would like a drink or something similar and it is not urgent.
Or
All of the lights pulse on and off in a red colour, which means drop and come running as I am having and episode of autononmic dysreflexia, my hair is on fire or something equally problematic. It is a very much urgent.
after that I would say that these three are the most used, I'm sure there is a way of pulling that information out of the database but I'm not sure how. If someone from home Assistant Team would like to tell me, that would be great!
* Battery Level on iPhone is below 20%, get someone to plug it in
* Notification asking that the basement be closed when it starts raining, or if someone opens the window when rain is predicted to please close it
* Logging whenever the medication draw is opened and closed and keeping a running tally (this one is super important)
It (or something in my stack) has choked for me a few times. The power went out at my house for an hour last week. and my kitchen lights somehow dropped off my network? I had to reconnect my lights to my network, and then i had to completely remove TPLink from my server, reboot the server, and then connect TPLink back to be able to control my lights.
Barring an extended power outage though, I would agree, it is pretty amazing.
Was looking at going with OpenHAB for a bit, but something about home assistant ease of use really got me.
Aeotec and Fibaro Tend to be my go to companies when I want to buy some sort of sensor, anything from door and window sensors to motion sensors. Overall they have been the most solid and well performing in my experience.
The purpose of Home Assistant is to first observe all data flowing through your house, by connecting all existing sensors, switches, gateways and anything else that has a digital pulse.
The second step is control, having centralized access through a web or mobile app to all moving parts of a home.
However, the power of HA comes from the third step: automation. The best interface is the one you can forget exists.
I've been running HA for over two years. Aside from being lazy about upgrading to newer versions and adjusting to breaking changes, it's been working great and has spoiled me and my wife. We now expect every house we visit to automatically unlock before we reach the door, for the lights to turn on (and gradually off) automatically as we move through rooms, and for our phones to notify us when the best time to open a window would be, to naturally cool during the summer. It's great to have cold light during the day and warm, lower level light as the evening progresses.
Together with the Python environment provided by appdaemon, there's almost no limits to what you can do, provided you instrument your house with sensors and switches as best as you can.
I just wanted to saythat I totally agree with part:
> However, the power of HA comes from the third step: automation. The best interface is the one you can forget exists.
I have the interface just for my carers and PAs et cetera, almost all of my interactions with the house are done via voice or other scripts triggered by various things. I would post a picture of my dashboard but it is horrendously messy contain hundreds things!
Motion sensor on patio. When it detects motion, check if your phone joined the network in the last minute and that a few minutes ago you were not in the gps area of your house. Send command to unlock the lock. Send a push notification that it unlocked so you know if it triggered on accident (incredibly unlikely when using motion + gps + wifi).
The motion sensor isn't strictly necessary, you can use the phone joining the network as a trigger. It's just an extra filter to ensure there are no accidental unlocks. It will also prevent unlocks if you come home, park, and then leave without attempting to enter.
That's how I would do it, all easily doable in home assistant.
Id want another authentication level like fingerprint in the action so if I drop my phone its not still a key. I like the general plan, but two levels of identification if possible.
More secure than keys—you can't remote-wipe keys. (And, presuming the network requires a password, remote-wiping the phone would make it not join the network any more.)
kevinsundar below is entirely correct, that's how I have mine set up as well. However, instead of network detection, there are multiple GPS-based device tracker methods for proximity.
I use a Z-Wave 6-in-1 multisensor from Aeotec in each room, strategically placed in the corners so as to cover only motion in a single room. That takes care of motion sensing, temperature, humidity and luminosity (not used for automation, purely informative). The other two are UV and vibration sensors that are not as useful.
Setting a short motion detector rearm time lets me start a decay timer for the light that just turned on. If no motion is detected again, it starts lowering the intensity gradually over 10 minutes and finally turning the light off. I added a button in HA to override this and keep the light on when needed.
I ditched HA automation as it is very limited if you want something more fancy (or less lines to type). I moved teh AppDaemon (https://appdaemon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) and use HA mostly for managing teh decvices and keepipng state (and MQTT for messaging).
If someone can program basic Pythin it is really, really worthwile to try it out.
I use Aeotec Z-Wave Multisensors permanently connected to USB power (they can also run on battery). However, any PIR motion sensor would work, such as the cheap models from Xiaomi (but there's the extra cost of battery changes).
A Hall sensor on each window (aka open/close sensor), plus temperature sensors in each room and one placed outside.
When the window is closed, but the outside temperature is lower that inside, it sends a notification to open the window. The opposite happens when the outside temperature exceeds the one inside, unless the window is already closed.
This is all written in Python via appdaemon since it's easier than defining the same automation via the UI (although that's also doable nowadays).
Back in June an animal chewed through the fiber line to my house. It took AT&T three trips and five days to fix it.
In those five days I became acutely aware of how internet dependent my home automation is. I vowed to no longer invest in home automation that requires non-local access.
I found Home Assistant after being burned when Google bought Revolv. I spent $299 on a device that google literally bricked when they acquired the firm and had no recourse. It started out just controlling my Sonos speakers but now controls a whole Zwave mesh I've been slowly building throughout the house.
The only real downside of Home Assistant is just how active the community really is. Each upgrade is a huge avalanche of changes and they're occasionally (but documented) breaking. Do yourself a favor and use Hass.IO (https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/ ) to manage Home Assistant upgrades and backups. It is really nice.
Edit: changed "dearth" to "avalanche" thanks to braindeath for the cluebat.
There is a setting in Plex that will allow it to work without authentication for any devices connecting from a defined subnet. So I just set this to my home network's setup and can use it without issue whether I have an Internet connection or not.
I confirmed this when I tested my Plex server on a Raspberry Pi out in a cabin in the middle of nowhere and it streamed fine without an Internet connection.
I just checked, and Plex happily played my local media with my internet connection powered down. I'm using Plex 1.16.5.1554 running in a jail via the FreeNAS plugin and playing from a Roku Stick+.
Only hiccup was the Roku client took unusually long to bring up my list of local content; I could imagine it timing out on DNS connections.
I've never connected it to the Plex servers ("associated it with my Plex account"), perhaps thats the difference?
Oh that's cool. This happened to me a few years ago, we'd moved house in December and had no internet all Christmas/new year due to all the contractors being on holiday. I was emotionally scarred enough to still remember it today!
Maybe that behaviour's fixed now, or maybe I just hadn't found the setting mentioned in the comments below.
To answer your question, yes it appeared to be attempting to authenticate with their servers, even though my Plex server was local
As others have said this is incorrect. I live in a bus and sometimes stay in places with a bad phone signal / slow internet connection. I download Youtube videos to my local file server and watch them via Roku and Plex in these cases. It works fine offline. Roku warns you before launching the Plex app but it works fine.
Jellyfin is an open source fork of Emby. I've been trying it out after the Plex mobile app "forgot" I paid for it, and will be migrating over soon. I haven't used Emby so I can't speak to the differences, but it seems to work very well. In some ways it's even better than Plex- turning on subtitles doesn't seem to hit performance as hard
I need to do more research on that. The people behind Emby seem to understand and are trying to minimize the blow-out by making 'as many features in stand alone open source modules as possible'.
I thought it did work with local media, no? Did it used to?
AirPlay seems like a good local alternative, but I’m hesitant to fully invest in it because it would lock me into Apple products and I fully hate to be locked in, despite having an iPhone at the moment.
I have been at pains to tell managing agent that a "upgrading" our security gates to use GSM as trigger to open is not an upgrade from the standard remote. We are just introducing a whole lot more failure points.
I mean use it as a gateway. Then the rest of your house is covered by the same WiFi, but you have a metric set so that if the normal internet works all your devices use that, but when it goes down they all use the phone.
When I built the house I decided that I was looking for a Home Automation system that was going to be:
a) Open source, or open standards
b) Everything can be done entirely locally
I settled with using the KNX system for the primary actuators for the house, with Home Assistant for automation and control.
One nice property of KNX is that it's distributed, you don't need any central manager for the system to work, so if you press a light switch, then that sends a packet on the KNX network directly to the light actuator. Then there is an IP/KNX bridge to allow you to interact with the KNX network to hack on it.
All the "light" automation in the house is all done using KNX programming. For example, walk into hall, light turns on. You don't need a central authority for that. The motion sensor just talks to the light directly.
For anything more complex, Home Assistant get's involved for all the more "global" automation via the IP/KNX bridge.
And of course you can control everything through it's app. I love how fast and responsive it is since it's local. It's maybe 100ms at most from clicking the button in the app to the light being on.
The main thing I can't do without the cloud is voice control. I'm using Google Homes for it which Home Assistant exposes all my devices to. Local voice control systems really suck compared to Google unfortunately.
Another thing I'm happy I did is just put sensors for everything everywhere through the house. Here is a screenshot of most of them.
I actually have more data then this that I haven't bothered to hook up yet since it hasn't been important. Like the motion sensors also provide light levels and so on.
Overall, I would definately recommend Home Assistant.
> The main thing I can't do without the cloud is voice control. I'm using Google Homes for it which Home Assistant exposes all my devices to. Local voice control systems really suck compared to Google unfortunately.
have you looked at picovoice? been pretty impressed by their wake word (Porcupine) and STT (Cheetah) on phones/pi's etc. seems like this could be integrated as a local STT provider with ada.
I'm curious, what kind of motion sensors are you using? I looked into hooking more of them in my home, but I could not figure out an affordable way of doing that.
> Local voice control systems really suck compared to Google unfortunately.
I'm in the process of building a house and am thinking of going the KNX route. I'd prefer critical things to be hardwired rather than rely on wireless, just because it's more reliable.
I'm interested to know if you installed everything yourself or had a contractor do it? My understanding is it is expensive to get someone to do the work (as usually it's hotels or offices having this done), but the actual hardware doesn't cost much more than the z-wave equivalent.
Oh and your Room of Requirement definately needs more explanation :-)
I had a contractor and he did all the electrics as well. This meant that the cost for labour wasn’t really much more than getting all the “dumb” electrics done.
Ultimately wiring for KNX doesn’t take a lot more than just running a single extra wire through large sections of rooms since it’s a bus based system.
We worked on an hourly rate + cost of materials, rather than a fixed contract.
All the other home automation people I talked to didn’t really “get it”. This guy opened up to me about the importance of open standards from the first time I talked him and was happy at the concept of me programming the KNX devices myself, so I knew as soon as I met him that he was the right guy for the job.
I worked really closely with him (a daily catchup every day) in order to make sure everything was perfect.
I was really happy with the process, but it relied on getting a guy I could work really well with.
In Germany, there are lots of people who plan and program the KNX system themselves. The actual wiring is carried out by a professional but the commissioning etc can be done by anybody. KNX requires a specific software (ETS).
As KNX is a global standard this procedure becomes more and more implemented. We have published an ebook about how to get started with KNX, ETS 5 and ETS Inside (cheaper version of it) and share best practices.
Hi there,
are you based in US? KNX is not fully certified in US, right?
I spent fair amount of time trying to find good switch actuator that is US gang compatible. But did n't find anything good.
Also this says nkx is not certified in us: https://www.cepro.com/news/will_european_knx_home_automation...
I have over 500 sensors integrated into my home and when all done will have over 1k. I find the biggest problem when you get big is that home assistant has no way to deal with back pressure of updating networked sensors. Once you have issues with say 5-6 sensors it starts cascading.. you hit 10 which could be just ecobee sensors or homekit it can bring down homeassistant.
Every room has a minimum of 7+ sensors (motion, occupancy, light sensor, nightlight, sound, mic, temp, humidity, smoke & carbon (and all related nest sensors like battery, last check, status..., path lighting (not included)). Then light switches are all smart + have occupancy + dimmer level etc... It adds up quick...
I have some crazy node red sub flows where I use state machines to turn on based on conditions and I can do whole home announcements as well as level audio and use it for custom security solution. I have smart bulbs too in some rooms and everything is 100% local with no external dependencies (if voice assistant stops working it doesn't affect anything and I'm going to probably move everything to almond). I built everything around sub flows and I made it easier to debug by adding friendly toggles that actually let me do some crazy accessibility stuff like announce motion or lights turning on etc.. If you were blind you'd know exactly where you were at.
I'm also doing local facial recognition (lots more todo) and I'm starting to integrate those into custom automations based on whose in the room (wife or me). It also greets us when we get home. It's been my dream since I was a little kid to have a smart home, and by smart I mean work for me and be quality of life improvement while being dumb for everyone (progressive enhancement). Home should alert you to dangerous weather or do the proper thing if a fire happens (open windows/ doors, turn on path lighting, announce what direction to go to the exit, etc).
If you’d be willing to open github issues for home assistant with your problems I guarantee you the dev team would want to know about and fix them. I’ve met Paulus in real life and he deeply cares about the community.
I've been eyeballing this problem space for a while now and came to the exact same conclusions as you did, KNX for everything "important" + Home Assistant for nice to haves.
Just waiting for the build a house/completely renovate an apartment to put it to practice.
Can you give some more information about the sensors you use, especially for CO2/VOC measurements?
Kind of off-topic but has any work been done on possibly extracting and re-using the voice ML model Pixel phones download (for things like live caption[0] and audio recorder[1])? I imagine there would be some legal issues but personal use probably would be fine.
which local voice assistants have you tried? is Snips one of them? I'm thinking of setting that up for my next raspberry pi project but I havnt really done a whole lot of research on it either so maybe it's a waste of time
The text in that image on Imgur is barely readable due high compression. Please consider hosting the image on your site next time or someplace where they don't compress that much.
Yes, on mobile. Now it's ok, it seems to be a direct link now. Previously it was terrible, really barely readable, in a thumbnail mode like this https://imgur.com/a/oKm3fP1 which presented this https://i.imgur.com/BOB10kkg.png . Never mind...
As a disabled person, I couldn’t even begin to describe how much of a tangible improvement HA has had in my life. Being able to turn all the lights off from my bed before I go to sleep, or have the heater in the kids room turn on automatically if temps drop, etc etc, has quite literally saved me immeasurable amounts of physical pain.
I love home assistant, but find the automation subsystem to be lacking in both ease of configuration and features.
I found a happy middle ground by installing Node-RED [0] on the same machine and linking it to home assistant via the home assistant websocket plugin [1].
It allows me to create visual workflows for automations, which I find much better to use than raw yaml files.
I hadn't seen that before, but I don't think it addresses my biggest problem with HA automations: it's not a GUI.
When I'm developing my automations I often need to do a lot of testing and debugging when things don't work as expected.
I find that Node-RED allows me to do this extremely easily as I can click on nodes and see what values are being passed around, and what state things are in.
AppDaemon would be great for that, as the callback methods it requires for listening to state changes or scheduled timer can be independently unit tested and debugged.
Automation is an area of pretty active development. While visual workflows aren't a thing in HA, you definitely don't need to write yaml in order to create automations. The UI has supported it for quite some time (and is quite usable, in my opinion).
There's some NLP involved since the latest version got released (0.102), so you can just type some simple automation like "turn off lights when I leave home".
Powered by Stanford's Almond, which you can install yourself, as an Hassio addon, or use the cloud version: https://almond.stanford.edu/
I have been using home assistant for about 6 months now.
Currently I am mainly using it to show what is happening around the home (device detection, adsl data usage, weather from my simple weather station, house power usage etc, local train level crossing state (barrier down/up))
Very impressed with how easy it is to add new items to the overview.
I have one smart plug, the intention is to control the Christmas lights this year. I did do this about 15 years ago with my old x10 system and it would be nice to try something a bit more advanced.
This is not the interesting feature of this system by the way. That is microgeofencing, knowing per room where people are. Yes, you know where you are in the house. However, your "smart" home does not.
Integration with home assistant is on the roadmap. We need a few more people to want it.
Yes, it's a shameless plug. However, there aren't many open source hardware products on the market, so I think it contributes to the discussion.
> Yes, you know where you are in the house. However, your "smart" home does not.
I solved this in home assistant by adding sensors to my doors inside the apartment.
For example if the living room doors are closed, and after that there's movement inside, the room is marked as "occupied". It works really well.
Same could be achieved with straight line movement sensors on the door frames, if you're someone who keeps the doors open all the time.
And speaking of open source, my whole smart home setup (from sensors, lights, heating, etc) works offline and using open source software and protocols even if hardware isn't open source itself. Which I found to be a good tradeoff.
Yeah, then you've more data. It will work better because even if it doesn't see movements you know the door hasn't opened so the person has to be in there still.
I think you will run into trouble if there are more people in your household though. But it's a smart idea!
Most of them check to see if you're connected to the wifi, while some of them rely on your smartphone to report your GPS coordinates. I personally use nmap to look for my phone on my wifi network.
Definitely! It's the only open source smart speaker I know. Here in Holland there's also the Homey, but they locked most of it. It's benefit is that you can run local connections. Even the Google Local SDK does not support BLE connections to local devices.
According to wiki they filed for bankrupcy in 2013. Their www.x10.com website is still going - flogging the same stuff as 20 years ago.
I still have a few boxes of x10 hardware that I spent a small fortune on back in the 90's. I like that signals went through mains (vs. radio signals) but the reliability is poor.
The nice thing about x10 is that most of the commands were idempotent. As such, I would send every signal once a second for 10 seconds. Usually the light came in within 3-5 seconds but sometimes it would be 10 seconds.
I have my old flat in 2000(ish) fully linked. This. Included PIR sensors, door sensors, and lamps, lights. I also had. The heating fitted with an x10 switch. This meant that I could turn the heating on and my kettle on remotely on the way home from work.
X10 was nice that it could communicate through main, but when I started to use Ethernet over power, it stopped working. It also was one-way. There was no confirm or status from the switch devices.
I looked into it a few years ago when the radio-based stuff was still fairly immature/expensive, and it seemed like it was super low bandwidth. Like, fine for on/off operations, but not really fast enough to do things like have a light track a dimmer.
Some crossings in the uk are directly available as a state within the data, mine is not so I have to track the trains into and out of a region. When the train enters the region, I assume the crossing must be down and when it leaves, I assume it must be up.
Its about 30 seconds to a minute off, but for my purpose that's OK.
Out of curiosity, what is your purpose? Do the crossings stay down long enough to cause backups sufficiently large that you alter your schedule to avoid them?
There's a level crossing a few miles from me that has automated barriers. The tricky bit is the crossing is right next to a station and there will be various rules in force:-
* barriers must be down at least X seconds before a train is due to go through
* barriers must be down even if the train is coming in to the station to stop (before it gets to the crossing) - the barriers must be down in case it overshoots
* etc
Whilst the barriers can go up as soon as a train has passed there may be another one along shortly enough that it's not worth opening the barriers only to close them a few seconds later.
Combine those with a timetable that puts 10+ trains an hour each direction and the barriers will probably be down for longer than they are up in peak times. I've seen them down for 10+ minutes at a time.
Here's the google streetview that just happens to have a train that has already passed and stopped at the station: https://goo.gl/maps/jhzApjZHUAJ4FcSt6
As a pedestrian (or a cyclist without lots of luggage) it's often faster to use the footbridge to cross rather than waiting for the train(s) to pass and the barriers to rise.
Wow. There's a similar intersection near me in the bay area, and it always struck me as an incredibly poor design. I'm sort of surprised to see that there's another such intersection in the world. Fortunately (?), I don't think CalTrain runs any more than every 15 minutes, so the gates are rarely down for more than a couple minutes at a time.
I've switched a lot of my existing light automation over to esphome [0]. I flashed it on various cheap LED Wifi bulbs that have been 'liberated' via tuya convert [1]
After going through zigbee and zwave, I feel like I finally arrived at a solution that allows me plenty of reasonably priced selection and extreme customization (e.g. just using the warm/cold white LEDs on a RGB+white bulb).
Great experience so far and completely automated integration within homeassistant.
I hope that the esphome-configs project [2] will grow over the next little while and provide more and more copy+paste configurations for various hardware.
I greatly prefer Mozilla’s solution. Home Assistant seemed to have some critical issues when I used it for my two switches and one light bulb. Even turning them on and off on a schedule was dubious. It would forget a device or two and leave it as-is indefinitely. I found it odd that Home Assistant would not alert me to a lost device. Not only does WebThings work for me but it also has a UI that has some thought put into it instead of just spitting its API into a Material interface. It is much easier to use on a small mobile device because of its intentional responsiveness. Maybe it just did not play well with my devices but Home Assistant felt like an MVP that was not up to the task of dependability.
When did you last try home assistant? It improves very rapidly and the new “Lovelace” interface is insanely customizable along with being excellent on mobile.
I absolutely love HA. Using Z-Wave mesh network to control most things, especially lighting and fans. From automating your smart TV, alarm and CCTV, HVAC, garden watering, etc.. It's pretty limitless and there seems to be an integration for everything.
You can get really smart about things by tying actions to complex combinations of states. I now often 'forget' to hit the light switch when entering rooms in other homes.
Depending on what you want to do, maybe you don't need to overcome it. I'm a fan of these, which are "automated", but require no electricity: https://www.blumat.com/classic/uber-classic
I think there's a way to hook the latter up to mains water if you have a big install.
Basically, the soil moisture determines the watering rate via diffusion through a clay cone.
I was getting all ready to rig up some custom raspi sensor based watering thing when I found this and realized that my way would have been waayyyy more maintenance headache, more expensive, and probably not work as well.
Yes so it's a Z-Wave valve which has been connected to a split off of the cold water line to my kitchen sink. Typically this valve could be used to control your mains but I'm just using it to feed some drip lines. Basically one small garden and then a few runs to individual planters with an adjustable dripper on the end.
I have automations to limit watering if it has rained recently, and also to increase watering if the day has been extremely hot. Still looking to make it even smarter but this has already been a great improvement.
If it is done with solenoids they can only let water through when there is power applied and the spring should return the stopper whenever there isn't any power.
I used OpenHab2 in the past. But its quite heavy, and bulky. However it works well... What i did notice is z-wave commands where slow on the raspberry pi..
I moved to Home Assistent and i'm not moving back. I did like the more plugin-like architecture & technical design of openhab better... But that makes it bulky. Openhab feels more mature, but also has a lot more legacy... HA is just movign faster...
I've really enjoyed using node-red together with Home Assistant. Home Assistant manages the connections to devices and allows me to set up a nice UI, while node-red allows me to do more complex automation logic.
node-red is available as a hass.io add-on [1], with the Home Assistant node-red plugin pre-installed
If I want something simple that either passes power through or triggers a switch in response to a configurable/trainable voice command that isn’t net connected, what’s my best bet?
I thought it provides simple alternative (as asked) with voice commands. But when reading the details the voice processing is not offline (as asked).
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Note that in the 0.8 gateway release, browser-based voice commands are processed using Google’s voice assistant API, so the audio strings are processed in the cloud. The speech-to-text result is passed back to your gateway. If you instead type a command into the text field of the smart assistant screen, those commands are processed locally and do not require a connection to the Internet.
I run it on a pi, but it is definitely not ready for primetime yet unless you want to write your own add-ons. But if you just need it to do one or two things it's pretty great at voice/intent recognition.
I found that home assistant does not appear to have native integration with Google home the last time I looked? I ended up using openhab which has native Google and Alexa integration, although I am not a fan of openhab as it feels ludicrously over-complicated for even the simplest of things.
My lesson learnt after several years going through smartthings, home-brew stuff with raspberry pis, home assistant, demoticz, and openhab using ZigBee or zwave is to make sure your core infrastructure (i.e. things you want to control) is MQTT-based running over wi-fi/ethernet and all your plugs/lights/etc are independently controllable via sending raw MQTT commands on your home network.
If you need to rely on a working internet connection, or too many third party things (e.g. IFTTT) you are going to have a bad time when things inevitably break/change/have an outage/become inexplicably slow/get shutdown etc. Once you standardise on MQTT you can switch out HA/OpenHab/others with minimal fuss, and you have great controll and backup options. WiFi just seems rock-solid Vs ZigBee or z-wave that just seemed so troublesome and unreliable.
Tasmota (1) + mosquito running on a RPi has finally given me a reliable set up after years of struggling. It is some rock-solid MQTT compatible firmware for ESP8266 devices.
We are a manufacturer too with a new product that brings home and industrial equipment online (smart hub and stuff). Only heard of openHAB but this looks awesome. We shall implement. Thanks HN.
Pull requests for integrations are always happily accepted. Just fork the project, follow the contribution guidelines, and send a GitHub pull request. Thanks!
I got started as a contributor to home assistant by sending patches to the Sonos integration.
You can then go to each integration and on the right if it says "IoT Class: Local Push" you can be fairly certain it can be locally controlled without the cloud and that it reports state without the cloud. In this scenario, it'd be DoorBird. You can be fairly certain you can block internet access at your router for this device and it'll work just fine. Don't quote me on that for Doorbird though.
This can be a good first place to look, but don't rely on it.
Many integrations have their local access via reverse engineered APIs, and they often go away when they get popular enough.
I wrote the Samsung Family Hub smart fridge integration for home assistant and one day Samsung removed the local access in a fridge update and now there is no way to access it without their android or iOS app.
Ah yes I agree, I've had the most luck with the above method if I block network connectivity to prevent automatic updates. But thats not always possible / you have to give up many other features potentially.
I'd be interested to know how they handle remote controlling the HA instances. I spent a little bit of time trying to come up with a prototype hub running Home Assistant but kept coming back to the deployment and remote control problem - for instance the REST HTTP API would allow me to send commands in but then I'd need to do something like MQTT to get an event stream from the device. It ended up being too complicated for me to implement.
Functions so far: circuit breakers for mains, water valves, district heating PID control, intercom metering, door lock/sensor, curtain bobbin servomotor, thermometer, aircon control, smoke/co detector, lighting and rgb mood light. AV control is being worked on
Big problem is wiring, I think the biggest problem.
Retrofit cost n times the cost of electronics.
And in new building, wiring labour still makes the most expense because electrical and smart home wiring topologies don't match exactly. You either have to do a lot of wiring, or a lot of wall cutting.
If you're interested in a similar solution (albeit closed sourced and managed) that works in a non-cloud, fully off-line (re: internet) environment. Take a look at http://www.hubitat.com. It supports zigbee, zwave and wifi devices and has strong compatibility with the smartthings ecosystem.
Need a bit intro as even state of union seem to need to watch a video. The problem is it said open source then there is here and there Alexa. Do not want to go into Apple and amazon and google ecology sphere as long as I can. It is my home. Not want someone listen to mine. Not to mention we do not know what authorury can get hold of given in a police state here
Assuming you’re a manufacturer, it would be really amazing if you were to adopt a system like this. Instead everyone currently tries to get you locked in the their own proprietary crappy system that’s going to be shut down in two years because everyone is smart enough to see through the scheme and doesn’t buy into it.
I looked at using hassOS as a base for my rpi project but I struggled with how exactly to do that. Looking at the readmes in that repo it doesn't look like anything has changed on the documentation front.
I spun this OS up as a VM and it does not detect my Wemo smart plugs. However, I'm also not able to detect them from my current phone (running v1.24, I believe, of the app). However, my former phone, which is still running v1.23.1 of the app, _is_ able to see them and connect to them.
Can anyone comment on pros and cons of running it virtualized on a Linux host? I have capable hardware and would like to run it on that rather than on a separate Pi device.
I use the official HA docker version (not Hassio). It exactly replicates a manual installation of HA.
Works great, I use it in network host mode because I did it by mistake initially and suddenly discovered a few devices which joined via broadcast (my Logitech Hub especially).
I recently installed hassio in docker on a VM on a fitlet2 (also running asterisk and pi-hole on the same machine each in a separate VM).
So far no problems controlling a TV and some z-wave light switches.
A Pi is fine, but don't rely on the SD card for storage. Home Assistant is very write-heavy (since it logs state changes, etc), and will kill an SD card pretty quickly. You're better off using the SD card as a read-only boot device and then use an external drive for the actual system.
I connected a 1TB SATA SSD to one of my RPI machines with the Element 14 "PI DESKTOP - HAT AND ENCL". ($50) It's a nice RPI case with some extras.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh7AFRIdGi8
Thanks, that's important information. What kind of Pi should I use? Got a Pi 1 laying around which could be nicely powered by my router, but I doubt that will be enough...
I’m using Home Assistant to join all my IoT devices together, and Node RED to provide a graphical programming layer for automation. It works really well.
EditedTo Add: well, that was meant to be a minor comment and request for pointers but turned into somewhat of a rant. My apologies HMN, my apologies. This kind of dashboard really does have the possibility of reducing the overdoses I am subjecting amongst any number of other mistakes brought about by lack of clear and understandable documentation. And once we have fixed it for me, well from THEREON IS WHERE WE TAKE OVER THE WORLD!
On a slightly related note, does anybody remember that about a year or so ago somebody posted his "Personal Analytics Dashboard" I think he called it. Basically it detailed every aspect of his life. it was things like heart rate, steps walked, miles run, cycles cycled along with all manner of other nutritional input.
The thing that marked it out for me was that it took all those desperate threads of information and display them in one easy to understand and beautiful layout. But I cannot for the life of me find it!
At the moment I want to get to the state that when one of the nurses comes on duty, she can get the iPad out of the server cupboard (after first pressing her flic button to login) and see on one or two pages things like but not limited to:
* Is the catheter turn on or off
* What is the bosses current heart rate (BPM)
* What is today's resting heart rate and how does it fit in over the week, the month and the year
* Which of the doors and windows are open and are they locked or not
* Did the boss get into his wheelchair today, and if so for how long and how far did he travel
* How many doses of his medication has he had today, and how many does that leave him with for the rest of the day
* Have there been any incidences of Autononmic Dysreflexia[1] or any other life-threatening shenanigans other parts of the team will need to know about
And on and on and on, so it would need to be expandable. It may be possible to skin home assistance with something simple enough but I am not a designer.
I've lots of this data coming in already from lots of different sensors, I am however just struggling with a way of turning those data into information that non-technical users will not be put off by. Because if they are put off by it then they will not use the system, and as this is going to be one of the systems monitoring medication and my health et cetera I would really like them to use. Non-technical users make up the huge majority of people who will be using this system.
And to pre-empt what I know one of you will mention because you care about me, I do not ever put my life in the hands of anyone person, process, widget or anything else! It's nice to know you care. <3
I also hate spreadsheets. I mean, I will continue to use them obviously because there is no choice. Just thought world should know that I hate them.
So yes I am pretty much totally comfortable purchasing sensors and and getting my work PA to install them, I'm also having enormous fun creating new sensors but what I am not enjoying is being quadriplegic and trying to draw out nice designs.
Have a feeling it is not necessary and that there will be a simple way for me to plug in all of my data streams and be given a very shiny dashboard that I could maybe put on the wall of my office on some 17 inch screen something similar.
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I've included a couple of links describing autonomic dysreflexia, but be warned it's not a nice condition and it is not fun having one of these episodes. Not happy reading, just put them here for completeness
Couple that with one of the friendliest communities for newbies I have come across in a long time and you have something really awesome.
I've been using it for a couple of years, I have tried all the other open source alternatives but nothing really comes close for me. I'm actually fiddling with my installation right now as it were.
I cannot plug my phone in to charge it up myself obviously, so I am writing a little automation that will check who is in the house and announce through the speakers my phone needs charging up or send them a text message if I have their phone number when my mobile phone charge gets below 20%.
Totally cool beanz and I am totally serious about how much easier this makes my life as a quadriplegic.