https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1017945/93d12d28178b372e/

Someone posted that URL as a separate submission shortly after this was submitted, but rather than splitting the discussion, we've merged the comments here so it can all be discussed as one topic.

Not everyone might know, but last year we started the Open Home Foundation as a non-profit in Switzerland and I donated Home Assistant to it[1]. It's fully funded by users. There are no investors involved.

We are fully committed to building out a smart home that focuses on local control and privacy. Yes there are rough edges, but we're actively working on it in the open, with progress being released every month.

~Paulus, Founder Home Assistant & President Open Home Foundation https://github.com/balloob

[1]: https://www.openhomefoundation.org/blog/announcing-the-open-...

I cannot thank you enough for this. It was a bit risky adopting Home Assistant for everything ~two years ago, but that you guys did this move really makes me feel less scared about eventually having to replace it with something else.

I'm subscribed to Home Assistant Cloud (via Nabu Casa) even though I don't use it just because it seems to be one of the few ways to financially support you, is there any way of doing one time donations to the foundation itself?

So with the limited resources that we have, we currently only consider bigger donations valued $10k or more. We've had monetary donations from DuckDuckGo and Espressif so far.

As a very happy Home Assistant user, hopefully you can manage something similar so you have enough money to stay afloat and keep up the good work.

https://www.openhomefoundation.org/organization/#support-our...

You could (and I understand many people do) run an entire smart home without any WiFi at all, if you’d like.

Home Assistant is free and open-source, and I understand from his comment above that their founder generously donated the project to a non-profit foundation to sustain it that way for the future.

Which is awfully reassuring with respect to the rent-seeking incentives you’re worried about.

So if the controller falls out or you don't have one you can still have your buttons toggle lights etc. Controller or no controller, in either case it works just fine without wifi.

Like my parents wifi SSID was set when I was in high school and 20 years later it's the same.

But if it did change, all the devices just setup a temporary AP and wait to be told the new one and the password (the temporary AP is also password protected).

Not everyone might know, but last year we started the Open Home Foundation[1] as a non-profit in Switzerland and I donated Home Assistant to it[2]. It's fully funded by users. There are no investors involved.

We are fully committed to building out a smart home that focuses on local control and privacy. Yes there are rough edges, but we're actively working on it in the open, with progress being released every month.

~Paulus Founder Home Assistant & President Open Home Foundation https://github.com/balloob

[1]: https://www.openhomefoundation.org [2]: https://www.openhomefoundation.org/blog/announcing-the-open-...

I have a Nabu Casa subscription, but I don't really need it.

Shame there’s no way to donate it.

OP explains their motivation for not accepting small donations in another comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44014822

>It would be interesting to see what would happen to a pull request adding support for, say, OpenThings Cloud as an alternative. The fate of that request would say a lot about how open the project really is.

I kinda hope nobody tries. Their attempts at monetization have been pretty friendly and tame thus far & if something spooks them that could change.

To be fair to them they've been making a big push on adding backup support recently. Their Nabu Casa subscription has built in support for this and was a major selling point for me getting the subscription (I have Wireguard for remote access already).

At the same time they implemented first class support for their own subscription, they added the hooks for other integrations to provide the same level of backup support. Now you can easily choose to use Google Drive, S3, BackBlaze and others just as easily as Nabu Casa. In some ways it's "better" as Nabu Casa only supports a single latest backup.

From this they seem pretty friendly and not too interested in lock-in.

I don't have anything I care about in the Home Assistant install to need encryption; if you have access to that you are already in the network, same as the actual running device.

It's the HA system I've always wanted and the only way I would ever do it: everything just speaks regular IP, has a web interface, and lives on an isolated Wi-Fi network.

Generally it feels like they're making deploying it as hard as possible, doing stuff like checking if supervisor is running in a docker container and just not working if it is.

This is presumably born out of frustrations with users deploying it incorrectly, but there really is no reason a supervisor based HA install can't run in a docker container. I've got a some private hacks doing just that, that I'm hesitant to post publicly in case they find some way to break it.

No idea what the obsession is with keeping a full home assistant install from running in a container, but it's very strange. Trying to add more friction so they can sell more of their dedicated hardware? Their hardware is nice and stands on it's own, the only reason I don't use it is because I want to run on an old touch screen chromebook for very low power usage.

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

It has integrations with allmost all devices or apps I use and the support for DSMR (Smart Electrical Meters) is first class

I plugged a cable into my meter, the usb end into the server and it just works.

It does have a steep learning curve, though. It really seems “by IT people for IT people”

The other think I'm not a huge fan of is it's template language, it's clunky to say the least, but overall it's a great amd flexible system

Updating from that far is probably risky but you don’t need to backup everything, just the config directory. Automated backups to Google drive are worth the upgrade alone.

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/backup/

If I should ever need to rollback I can change the Docker image tag from ‘latest’ to a specific one I guess.

I’ve never had to do it but I do know people sometimes complain about updates breaking things.

`docker commit` should help you there, in making a copy of the container

with BTRFS you can even mount/work with multiple snapshots of same directory at once. it is great for debugging.

deduplication will save you space.

My question is: is it really convenient to use only SaaS now if there is always the possibility of losing your data? I am referring to the case described in the article.

[1]: https://vrutkovs.eu/posts/home-infra/ [2]: https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics-Community/homeassistant-a...

PS: I'm working at VictoriaMetrics company

So, answering your question: > My question is: is it really convenient to use only SaaS now

no, it's not

At least, that’s what I like to tell myself.

This business model doesn’t work.

Many have had this idea. They all run into the same problem: The target audience for hackable home automation devices doesn’t like paying a premium for anything they think they could DIY.

If you have a $70 nicely designed, documented IoT sensor but the DIY home automation people think they can put ESPHome on a $10 Amazon device and accomplish nearly the same thing, which one do are they going to buy?

If you go through the forums you can already find some semi-premium devices that are a little better constructed and might have better feature sets. They’re always followed by comments from people recommending a cheaper option.

I agree with you that targeting devs/people with an under-developed sense of buy/build doesn't work!

I'm hoping that the devs with money/slightly more accomplished who don't have time to mess with stuff would pick it up.

A bit of a jump but I think this was one of the big strategic mistakes of products like FirefoxOS -- aiming for the dev with money who can afford a $600 I-support-foss-and-mozilla signaling device that also happens to be a phone they can hack on may have worked better than targeting $60 feature phones.

> If you go through the forums you can already find some semi-premium devices that are a little better constructed and might have better feature sets. They’re always followed by comments from people recommending a cheaper option.

I think that's OK! It's similar to HN dropbox effect. IMO you actually want those people to find the cheaper option, those are bad customers for a premium brand.

The product has to actually be noticably better/more consistent/etc than the cheaper option though. And IMO there is a large subset of nerds that don't actually want to write 5 files and flash an OS to do smart home stuff -- they want to play at the application layer.

A good counter example might be the NAS industry.

This is all theoretical of course, so... We're just armchairing at this point.

Shelly was early, the cheep chineese stuff was easy to hack but they eventually moved to cheaper and more esoteric chips where custom firmware is non existent or not as mature. This is changing back, though! The number of ESP-32 powered LED light controllers that I've seen on Ali that feature a USB port for reprogramming / have all the GPIO labeled ... even have a HA/ESP-Home/WLED logo on them is infinitely more than I saw in years past (a few is infinitely more than zero, right?)

My heuristic for anything operating at mains voltages is "If I can find a product that looks just like this on Temu/Aliexpress, I'm not buying it". They're probably white label products sourced from the same factories and suffer from the same quality issues.

Relays found in smart plugs are often sketchy in my experience. About half of the ones I bought or set up for others make unsettling noises that made me worried about poor electrical connections and risk of fire. I only have two Shelly plugs but those don't suffer from these issues.

And even more unfortunately, price itself is not a very reliable indicator. Low price is usually a sign of poor quality, but high price is not a sign of high quality, but rather more often just an attempt to take advantage of people who don't know better.

Absolutely. Cheap hardware means corners cut... regardless of how open the software is.

Shelly devices are quite open and well made but easily 2x the cost of other wifi relay devices. Belkin WeMo devices are similar price to shelly and about as well made but their software leaves literally everything to be desired.

Knowing what risk is acceptable and how to identify if a particular component is built to a spec that obviates that risk or not is probably going to _always_ be part of the DIY scene.

If you want to go a step further, look for devices made for ESPHome or devices made by Shelly. Both have local APIs and are very hackable.

(disclosure: I am the president of the Open Home Foundation and ESPHome is one of our projects and I am also a board member of the Z-Wave alliance)

I am not a practitioner, but instead someone that looks at the ecosystem from time to time and has been waiting for a while, because I dont see the stack + DX/UX that I want yet.

Zigbee never reached critical mass and requires a hub. Z-wave seems to be the same. Thread over wifi (IIRC different protocols/transports are just fine) is what I think will be the future.

IMO Thread wins out, support gets put into routers, and I can just have a thread enabled router which MAY have other

I don’t want to buy an IoT hub. Many IoT devices I want to control are powerful enough to run Wifi, and I want to control them with a standard networking stack with high adoption and familiar tooling. Thread seems to fit this use case the best.

Please feel free to rip apart the above opinions, they’re loosely held. I’d love to learn how wrong I am today!

> If you want to go a step further, look for devices made for ESPHome or devices made by Shelly. Both have local APIs and are very hackable.

Thanks for the recommendation! Appreciate the disclosure and apologize for the blast of relatively uninformed opinions.

One more side question — why is it so hard to get a simple IoT button that runs local Wifi (really hoping for no base station) only and is battery chargable?

Buildable with an ESP32 clearly but I just want to buy this.

So the bit I'm missing: how do you control them purely over WiFi? Do you run software on your phone that can control the target? Eg: app talks directly to the device over your network, instead of via a browser + Home Assistant running on a Pi. I can't think of any examples of a product that works this way without being cloud enabled (IE: there is a hub but you don't own it)

Maybe not, but I don't really want to actually run Home Assistant, I want the basics to hack on, really. Trying to pick the most open thing that will be easy to program without relying on using something like Home Assistant (not that its bad or anything).

> So the bit I'm missing: how do you control them purely over WiFi? Do you run software on your phone that can control the target? Eg: app talks directly to the device over your network, instead of via a browser + Home Assistant running on a Pi. I can't think of any examples of a product that works this way without being cloud enabled (IE: there is a hub but you don't own it)

Yeah that's my goal -- basically I want to be able to control the devices from anything web connected (and ideally, the same program running in multiple places).

My thinking is that I can build this without being cloud enabled if I "just" (famous last words) had Thread/Wifi.

With all the excellent feedback in this thread (thanks HN!), it's looking like a small SBC + a Thread/Zigbee/BLE dongle[0] is the way forward, and hooking that up to my router via USB so it's always powered and follows the router around (maybe velcro it on).

SBC (or something smaller maybe, but probably the SBC) so I can program it myself.

[0]: https://sonoff.tech/product/gateway-and-sensors/sonoff-zigbe...

For my automations I do just that and I bypass home assistant and control my devices directly over mqtt. It works very well.

It sends out BLE packets when pressed, which can be picked up by Home Assistant via a Bluetooth adapter or using a Bluetooth Proxy. You can make the latter with any ESP32 and https://esphome.io/projects/?type=bluetooth

Thanks again for the rec.

Sounds like a far off weekend project

Different expectations. I don't want my things to know that wifi exists. It stops vendor lock-in, it ensures local communication, it means things work even if network goes down. It also makes sure they will never autoupdate or join Mirai botnet.

I've got a mix of zwave (fibaro), ZigBee (Ikea) and ble at home and I'm ok with that.

And with Zigbee bindings most of my inputs are set up in a way that they still work even if HomeAssistant goes down.

Not that HomeAssistant has ever down, but I can imagine its SSD or something failing and not bothering moving it to a different computer for a few days while I get a replacement in.

Also, unfortunately up until now I've been saying the wrong thing -- I mean Matter over Thread versus Matter over Wifi. Matter over Wifi seemed like a winner to me because I could just use it.

It looks like going forward I'll be plugging a small SBC into my Router's USB (+ ethernet) and connecting a Zigbee + Thread dongle. That should cover me for most communication options, then from there it's "just" a software problem :)

So it's not like you need a big stand alone device that has to have it's own Wifi or ethernet or anything like that, it's just a USB stick.

Just want to have the one device and I think that's maybe the simplest way to get it without trying to run stuff on the router.

Basically, it is a hub, but it's more of an attachment to the router than anything else.

Think HomeKit but a tiny bit more open, the open bit is, that a vendor can allow it to communicate with devices of other vendors. But they don’t have to.

Thread also needs more expensive SOCs, with Zigbee you only need a tiny micro controller with a few MHz of clock speed and a few KB of RAM. Thread and matter on the other hand can require megabytes of RAM.

Vendors which nowadays sell HomeKit devices can reuse their SOCs for thread matter, keeping their 3-4 times higher prices compared to devices with the same functionality from Zigbee vendors.

I'd counter with the fact that walled gardens are incredibly popular, and in particular to consumers. Consumers don't care if the gate is locked or not, they care if the flowers are pretty and the tea at the garden party is nice.

> Thread also needs more expensive SOCs, with Zigbee you only need a tiny micro controller with a few MHz of clock speed and a few KB of RAM. Thread and matter on the other hand can require megabytes of RAM.

IMO prices of SOCs are going to zero. ESP32s are a great example of this. Once RISCV is more widely used and capable things will accelerate even faster.

> Vendors which nowadays sell HomeKit devices can reuse their SOCs for thread matter, keeping their 3-4 times higher prices compared to devices with the same functionality from Zigbee vendors.

I think we agree here...? I think that HomeKit device that is just a bit more open is going to win. But I think that HomeKit device gets adopted faster if it's just a router -- I can understand updating a router to get a smart home. What I don't want is confusion around whether I need a hub or not, or whether devices work together or not.

Buying a single router that acts as a hub + Wifi "repeaters" (IIRC that's what they're called) that can "extend" the signal (and along the way give other devices a point to connect to) makes perfect sense to me as a consumer. I already know what WiFi is, and I want better coverage, not worse. The smart home stuff just falls out of tech I am already familiar with, efficiency by damned.

And it has an encrypted pairing process to your vendor controlled hub. Said vendor can allow or disallow it which other vendors may speak with said hub.

Here is the landscape we have: HomeKit: fully closed, requires certification from Apple. Very expensive and limited functionality.

Zigbee: fully open, anyone can make Zigbee devices and sell them without any restriction. Operates on the same frequency all over the world. Devices are super cheap. You can expand the protocol however you like as a vendor.

Z-wave: fully closed, several incompatible frequencies, requires certification to sell devices.

Thread and matter: semi closed, same ieee standard as Zigbee for data transfer. Vendors can allow it to talk to devices of other vendors. Requires certification. Same price tag as HomeKit, aka 3-4 more expensive than Zigbee.

All of them require hubs. And only with Zigbee you are guaranteed to have interop between all vendors and all devices sold across the globe. Thanks to Home Assistant. With thread the vendor can simply disallow you to use your devices with HomeAssistant, which is unacceptable by me.

> All of them require hubs. And only with Zigbee you are guaranteed to have interop between all vendors and all devices sold across the globe. Thanks to Home Assistant. With thread the vendor can simply disallow you to use your devices with HomeAssistant, which is unacceptable by me.

This is the one I want to push back on -- Thread over Wifi doesn't require a special Hub right? Taken with other info from this thread clearly in the real world it's not so simple to find the right hardware... but it's possible to just buy a thread device and use it over regular old wifi.

Sounds like Zigbee is closer to ideal than Thread or Thread/Wifi.

Maybe this is the startup someone needs to do -- some reasonably powered device to attack to a router/connect close to a router which supports Thread and Zigbee, has completely local management and call it a day. Is this just over-complicating a smart hub? Don't know.

Thread just adds an IP layer above Zigbee. Zigbee is on the same protocol layer as Ethernet or WiFi.

AH, I've just realized that I've been using the wrong terminology.

I've been meaning to say Matter over Thread vs Matter over Wifi!

Matter seems like a decent way forward, and it can work only over wifi which is what drew me in to focusing on Matter. IIRC Matter/Zigbee isn't a thing (though it technically should be possible, Zigbee is just a transport as far as Matter is concerned right?).

[EDIT] works -> can work, Thread/Zigbee -> Matter/Zigbee

In the Zigbee ecosystem vendors out right refuse to communicate with devices from other vendors even though Zigbee is an interoperable standard.

That lead to the birth of zigbee2mqtt, literally hundreds of years of development time went into it to have full feature support for every Zigbee device that exists.

For thread and matter devices each vendor would have to do the same. And that won’t happen, leading to a fragmented ecosystem.

Thanks again for laying this out -- I've been seeing zigbee2mqtt everywhere and this explains why someone would add mqtt to the mix. Sounds like this is another thing that needs to be run/managed on the software side to be robust.

This is an insane goal (and who knows when I'll actually get to work on this project), but what I want to build is an all in one something that "just works". So roughly:

1. Pick a good enough physical comms stack to hit most things

2. Write software to fill in the rest

It's going to be difficult but it feels like the setup for all these tools is just hard, when it doesn't have to be if you could pin down the hardware/install instructions, then write a really decent software layer to pull it all together without making people go homelab.

That said, that's probably what home assistant devs thought before they reached the current level of complexity, I'm probably preparing to attack a windmill here.

I think my secret sauce here will be WebAssembly -- if I can nail down the hardware below, build/convert a ton of adapters via WebAssembly, and then build a compelling/easy to add/install/manage/configure UI on top of that, I might have myself something worth posting to HN someday.

Aka buy lightbulbs and switches from ikea and you can right out start using them, I believe you only need a hub to create groups of devices which then can get controled with one switch. You then could unplug the hub and still use them, only needing a hub for ethernet bridging and automations.

Yeah thanks for pointing this out -- just need a single Zigbee coordinator (if my light research has been correct so far) and I'm ready to go.

I think IKEA bulbs will also be in my future.

Matter would be correctly the application layer protocol of thread and could be spoken over any transport. Like HTTP

To clarify this: Thread is not building on top of Zigbee, they are both independently built on 802.15.4

Having a lot of career experience in this area, I greatly prefer to keep my IoT devices off of my WiFi.

You don’t need a separate hub device for Zigbee or Z-Wave, just a simple USB adapter that you plug directly into your device controlling everything.

Keeping the low bandwidth IoT devices off of the main WiFi had a lot of advantages. It’s also much easier to rotate your WiFi password when you can do it all without reconnecting every light switch in your house, for example.

Battery life is atrocious and latency from deep sleep will be very bad. I’ve got Zigbee buttons from ikea that run on nimh batteries for a couple years now and only used like half of the charge. The hub is an usb dongle attached to the home assistant server, no issues.

So what do you consider to be "bad" battery life? I've got quite the tolerance, but the problem is that they don't even exist. Everyone seems to stop out on this at "it would never be worth it".

> Zigbee buttons from ikea that run on nimh batteries for a couple years now and only used like half of the charge.

This is intense for me, I'm happy with replacing batteries every 6 months if I could simplify deployment by 10x.

> The hub is an usb dongle attached to the home assistant server, no issues.

Maybe deployment isn't as hard as I'm making it out to be! That said, nothing easier than sending some packets to an IP address. I assume Zigbee APKs are easy... But for example if I search on crates.io (https://crates.io/search?q=zigbee) I don't see any obvious choices.

To restate what I want (and hopefully is sounds a bit more reasonable) I want to be able to buy one smart light bulb, configure it over BLE to connect to Wifi and for the rest of it's live configure it/change it via Wifi. I want that for basically every device, and I'm fine with swapping batteries every 1 to 6months if I could have that!

I think this might be the case. Get a USB zigbee dongle and spend ~1 hour setting up Home Assistant and you're more or less done. Adding a new device consists of clicking a button in HA to enable permission for devices to join and then powering on the device. It will discover the network and report the features it exposes.

You can control devices via HA over wifi. Plus HA gives you an API that you don't have to maintain and update as you add new classes of devices to the network.

You'll spend far more time repeatedly replacing batteries with wifi devices than you will with configuring HA once.

Edited to add: one nice thing I forgot to mention is that using HA for your own homebrew devices lets you keep a single consistent API for those and commercial devices. You can build a little ESP32 device with custom sensors, displays, etc. and control those exactly as you would with off-the-shelf products.

I really need to figure out how deep I want to go -- HomeAssistant is clearly the best off the shelf option. Maybe I'll set up HA first and then see if it really is worth trying to build something better.

You should look into zigbee2mqtt IMHO.

Not excited about having to essentially now also bring along a MQTT broker but... It's probably pretty painless to run most brokers and it's likely a single-machine-is-fine affair.

Why I’m excited about thread over wifi is that I don’t need any extra specialized gear and possibility one device could run by itself

Now I'm really wondering why over wifi didn't take off.

Pure ZigBee is... spotty because there are no certification requirements. Matter is stuck in development hell, but is slowly getting better.

And the problem with WiFi is energy efficiency (or a lack thereof) compared to ZWave/ZigBee/Thread.

So far, I've tried probably most of the home radio standards. Lutron was the most reliable, but it's also super-proprietary. My next house will just have conduits with low-voltage cables running to all the light switches, so I can use something like KNX instead of the radio-based stuff.

Here is a esp32-h2 with thread and zigbee support for $5-$12

https://a.aliexpress.com/_mMfZEsX

I figure support for something like this is likely to increase faster than a $70+ board.

This is a problem I'd really like to solve the old fashioned way/I think it prevents too much building. Energy density, rechargability, etc are like CPU speed to me -- it will eventually be solved, and I can deal with replacing a device every month or swapping a rechargable battery (especially if the device can tell me it's low).

I really do think it will be Thread+Wifi routers that eventually get a built-in Thread antenna that win (at least wining me over).

If either ZWave or ZigBee had managed to get into the home router space, they would have won already IMO. There are probably annoying reasons they couldn't until now.

> So far, I've tried probably most of the home radio standards. Lutron was the most reliable, but it's also super-proprietary. My next house will just have conduits with low-voltage cables running to all the light switches, so I can use something like KNX instead of the radio-based stuff.

Thanks for sharing this and your other experience!

Also TIL KNX.

That actually had been the case for a while. A lot of WiFi routers had a built-in Thread (ZigBee) radio, but then nobody actually used them and the manufacturers stopped bothering with them. So now pretty much only Eero access points still have it.

> Also TIL KNX.

My dream is to have _actuated_ switches, that have full tactile feedback. So that the paddle will physically flip when switched remotely.

I commissioned an engineering company to look into that, but apparently this is not feasible at all with the NEC and UL requirements in the US. The only way is to use low voltage wiring to the switches and then use them to control line-voltage relays. This kind of system is popular in Europe, so you might as well just go with something like KNX.

Thanks for this context -- when I searched I only found "thread border routers" -- I couldn't find a router made by a well known brand that included thread functionality -- it always seemed to be "buy a router AND buy a thread border router".

Really surprised that I missed the wave on this and wonder if it was a "we want people to buy two things" rather than no one actually using it. Maybe I just have to wait for it to come back around?

Maybe the answer here is a USB powered device with an extra 2.4Ghz radio (running like.. OpenThread or whatever I need to do thread over an available antenna?) attached to the router?

What I don't understand is why I just use the existing router's 2.4Ghz antenna for this? The amount of confusion in the space and inability of devices to do multiple things is really annoying, to be frank. I can only surmise the reason this stuff is not easy/obvious is profit-incentive (outside of the difficulty of designing good standards of course!).

[EDIT] OK, so the antennas aren't the same, despite being the same frequency -- clearly this is to ensure speedy operation at the hardware level.

So the add-on antenna would probably work if I bought some parts from mouser:

https://eu.mouser.com/c/passive-components/antennas/?protoco...

[EDIT2] Nope, more confused. Multi-protocol antennas exist. Why is this not a set-and-forget option for all the routers??? Someone clue me in to the politics/power struggle or whatever the real reason is here. And then connected + taped something to my router.

It's worse. There are _no_ new stand-alone Thread Border Routers on the market. You might find old stock of GL.iNet routers, and I believe there were a couple of other experimental devices.

If you want a robust Matter network, your best bet is to use Apple or Google devices as border routers. Or you can use a USB ZigBee stick with HomeAssistant.

> [EDIT2] Nope, more confused. Multi-protocol antennas exist. Why is this not a set-and-forget option for all the routers???

No market demand, so router manufacturers just don't bother. The initial versions of Matter were a burning trash fire.

Sounds like we're almost there and Zigbee/Thread are at least supportable with the same hardware. I can work with that I guess!

> No market demand, so router manufacturers just don't bother. The initial versions of Matter were a burning trash fire.

I remember hearing about this -- they fixed/improved it eventually but I guess the damage was done.

    There is a crucial difference here, though: the Home-Assistant integration for Refoss devices, which interfaces directly with the monitor and needs no cloud connectivity, is written and provided by Refoss itself. Home-Assistant compatibility is the first bullet item on the above-linked product page.

Oh, and hobbyists mostly aren’t going to pay premium for those either, unless those come preflashed with esphome and sponsor hass project, and even then 90% people are still going to buy the cheapest option on the market:)

For example, I wanted to replace a light bulb by another one that has a different Mac address to replace another one exactly. Before it was as simple as changing the Mac in the config file. No it is more complicated.

Also it was very easy to review and backup the config files. Now it is less obvious.

It's literally just a reverse proxy. Set up any you like. Wireguard, cloudflare tunnel, caddy with a security plugin, the options are limitless.

The OS is the path of least resistance and gives you the best experience for low maintenance.

https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=hao...

It's still running a second kernel and entire userspace stack. In my world that's not "very little overhead".

I'm aware of the tradeoffs here. For home assistant specifically, there's two options if you want to stay on the path of first-class support. Run it bare metal or in a VM.

Going a different path isn't a bad choice, or even a big downgrade.

I had fun with all the different ways of running home assistant 6+ years ago, and then decided to embrace a solution that required the least fuss and would hold up long term. I'm happy with my choice, and it gave me exactly what I was expecting.

Having said that, I think if you prefer traditional distro packaging, you should absolutely stick to that.

It's not hard to run HA in unsupported mode. The only real difference is an annoying reminder that you're unsupported. Everything else works, including plugins/add-ons.

I've run HA a bunch of ways. It doesn't really matter all that much. Use HACS to fill any gaps.

Of course you don't have to go the proxmox route, but it is an easy route.

I have a proxmox cluster, so moving things between machines, high availability, and backups are a breeze. Had an SSD go bad a few months ago, and I just moved everything on that machine to another node until the new drive showed up. It was a pleasant experience.

There's plenty of other ways to achieve this, but this is what I chose and I'm happy with it. It's simple, and I can manage everything from my phone if needed.

This. If I have to trust some huge container or custom OS where is the benefit of open source?

That is a very subjective opinion.

As was already mentioned, people rarely want to run a dedicated physical server for just a single purpose. The concept of Home Assistant Operating System requires exactly that.

Also, it is Debian-based. It uses the `apt` package manager which is slow. Some people may prefer something faster and more modern, like `pacman` or `dnf`.

> run perfectly virtualized

Fair enough.

But that obviously requires virtualization being set up on the server. If people do not use virtualization for anything else on their server, they may as well set up Home Assistant directly.

Finally, I think there is one more issue.

Many of the integrations which are possible with Home Assistant Operating System require physical hardware being connected to that server. A reader, a receiver, something like that.

But these home servers are often placed in some inaccessible locations, like an attic, where the data from sensors is unavailable. It may be impractical to run cables there. And the wireless devices may be too far away for a receiver located there to be able to read them.

So people need to come up with work-arounds to get their data to their server. They set up various signal proxies and thin clients which receive the data from the sensors on the spot where they are available and then send them over network to the Home Assistant server.

Unfortunately, from my experience, many integrations completely ignore this usecase. They are likely focusing on a happy path where everything is connected locally to "the one" server. And only then they behave nicely and work out of the box. But as soon as you need any special step or behavior, it is necessary to dig deeper and create custom layers to transport the data from your devices to the server.

Home Assistant Operating System does not make any of that simpler. Perhaps on the contrary, it forces you to use a specific Debian-based distribution with possibly outdated packages that you cannot easily upgrade without breaking Home Assistant.

Which is why it makes little sense to bother with it, in my opinion, for these kind of installations.

Do people really care if it takes 5 seconds to parse a package index vs 1? I don't get this argument at all.

And that's even before you realise it's based on fiction:

> Home Assistant Operating System is not based on a regular Linux distribution like Ubuntu.

https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system

There is no apt or any other package manager on HAOS.

Home Assistant Operating System uses Buildroot which uses Docker to run container with Home Assistant Supervisor. And only that container is Debian-based [0].

[0] https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/blob/0c75...

I suppose it depends. I do care because I typically need to do it regularly. And it is nice to have it done quickly.

Not so with the homeassistant installer. No wifi setup, no ssh access at all. You really need to cable it, nmap the new IP, and then I got stuck because the web server doesn't show up. Attaching the keyboard brought me into a restricted ha> prompt, where I cannot fix anything.

So far it's horrible

If you use ethernet, no editing required. Web interface goes into setup mode automatically.

Worth noting that ha cli[0] (ha>) does have a `network` command to configure this as well.

[0] https://github.com/home-assistant/cli

There are two ways to get through Home Assistant:

1. Identify the easy path instructions, get equipment that matches perfectly, and follow the instructions to the letter. Use only equipment known to have great integration. Upgrade only when necessary. Change nothing as soon as it’s all working.

2. Be willing to spend a lot of time tinkering and debugging. There’s a big Home Assistant channel in one of the big Slacks I’m in where everyone eventually hits something that takes days or weeks to figure out.

Many companies have tried to package or use Home Assistant as the foundation for plug and play IoT hubs, but they all seem to end up with the same realization that it really needs a capable and willing human in the loop as soon as you deviate even slightly from the list of devices with excellent support. This isn’t even entirely Home Assistant’s fault: Most of these devices were never designed for third party control.

At our house I run HAOS in a VM (on a beefy server). My wife uses the app on her phone (as do I), and we have a cheap tablet with the app for guests. On the laptops/desktops we also have access to the web UI.

As the article points out, remote access for the phones can be done via the commercial offering or a VPN (as in our case: wireguard on the OpnSense).

Also what SD card you have, the durability between different models differ a lot. The SD card I use for my dashcam been working for years (A "SanDisk MAX ENDURANCE" card), some other cheaper SD cards can stop working properly after just months if you're using them for write-heavy stuff.

This is something I also had to accept about HA. It runs in a VM in my case so it worked out-of-the-box, but you don't just ssh to it after installing it, and the ha> prompt is just a bit different. So far, it hasn't been in the way, although it occasionally takes time to find out how to do things.

It's very flexible though, and apart from devices in your house there are many outside sources of data to use, like weather data, sun elevation or trash pickup dates. The HA app on your phone gives you many sensors usable in a flow. The time spent on it usually results in something worthy of that time, in my experience.

Not having HAAS has made little difference to me being able to do all sorts of stuff - and HACS gives you access to a whole bunch of additional stuff, and works in docker.

Then again, I also don't understand why people buy every "smart"/cloud based device and try to glue everything together - when the hardware fails most likely the vendor does not exist or no longer supports it anymore and then you start all over again.

I have been using HA for years and I love it, it does what I need it to do while operating quietly in the background. I don't have any devices that are "cloud based" so I don't care if the vendor goes out of business or not.

My stuff is a mix of wifi, z-wave, and my cameras are ethernet cabled but can be integrated with onvif.

My house was also built in 1958, there's no chance I'm running KNX cabling anywhere, much less all the places I have devices.

The openHAB Cloud Connector allows connecting the local openHAB runtime to a remote openHAB Cloud instance, such as myopenHAB.org, which is an instance of the openHAB Cloud service hosted by the openHAB Foundation (https://www.openhab.org/addons/integrations/openhabcloud/)

> There is also a container-based method that can run on another distribution, but this installation does not support the add-ons feature.

You can use the add-ons with the containerized version. This has been discussed elsewhere.

I had to automate restarting the modem when the Internet is down by power cycling a smart plug[1], Home Assistant turned out to be extremely useful for that. Official HW integrations and Node-RED was very straightforward to solve my problem. Since then I'm managing and monitoring various hardware devices in my home through HA.

What's interesting is that there are manufacturers who are not only fine with HA but work with developers of HA integrations which enable offline usage of their IoT products even though their official apps are completely enshittified.

Nowadays I checkout HA compatibility before I buy a IoT device.

[1] https://abishekmuthian.com/restart-modem-automatically-when-...

I've just integrated an office UPS with the Node-RED stock dashboard to log status, mains voltage and battery charge state - it took all of 5 mins, including the time to install the UPS NUT plugin for Node-RED via the GUI.

I love the ease of the visual, block-based configuration, and the ability to add codable function blocks to process and modify data.

The only things that are not so great in Node-RED are the dashboard look and feel, and the dashboard setup tools.

A lot of volunteer work has gone into it but it lacks overall coordination of efforts and a usage model that is simple and consistent. That’s one of the downsides of open source: too many cooks and you get mediocrity, but accidentally when everyone is good hearted about it.

I had to do so much research on appliances I was adding that it was easier to just roll my own gateway and cloud. Now it is a vastly smaller code base that I control and can easily debug issues.

Maybe HA could refactor into a smaller set of modules that doesn’t require a huge set of assets from the get go?

I believe a lot of people who are upset with the product have radically incorrect expectations.

https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/12/classifying-th...

For example Tado: cloud polling

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/tado/

https://lwn.net/Articles/828428/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1019619/

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/fridays-party-creating...

1. Sell the gullible public long-term memberships to a gym, with long-term subscriptions.

2. Sell the subscriptions to a 3rd party.

3. Close gym. Subscription contract still valid.

https://www.celebitchy.com/8971/dr_phil_ran_a_health_club_sc...

I will admit that low (or zero) maintenance is easier to accomplish if you know your way around a little bit.

What makes you think it’s a toy?

Home Assistant is described as a home automation solution which runs locally on your hardware inside your home. Its current development process has many issues.

https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549 is a serious privacy concern. Nabu Casa and the owners of the CDN can collect the following information about the users of a Home Assistant installation: the integrations they use, the IP address of all devices which use the particular Home Assistant installation, the user agent of the device opening the dashboard, the precise location based on IP address, the user's ISP and possibly very specifically the people through a combination of IP address associated with a specific set of integrations configured for an installation. Nabu Casa employees can claim that the data isn't sold or used. The people who run the CDN can do as they please without Nabu Casa's knowledge. It's not possible to load these icons without an Internet connection.

The recent changes made to the backups in Home Assistant OS aren't user friendly. It's no longer possible to make an unencrypted backup without resorting to manual work by invoking an action. This arbitrary change wasn't necessary. It shows that the development process is chaotic and without a clear focus on making Home Assistant a more polished solution with the user in mind. It's just what they want to do.

Security is yet another weak point for this project. Home Assistant is a Python monolith with 1000 direct Python dependencies and countless other indirect dependencies https://github.com/home-assistant/core/blob/dev/requirements.... All these Python packages and their dependencies are bundled in everyone's Home Assistant installation. This is likely the biggest Python monolith in existence. You can compromise this project by compromising any dependency. Some of these packages are provided by Chinese companies for cloud based integrations.

Some addons can only be run with net: host on Home Assistant OS. This is one more potential vulnerability if one of these addons is compromised.

Bugs and regressions frequently get ignored on their tracker. There's a bot which closes tickets for which the developers have no interest. They choose to implement new features and to refactor without concern for people who can no longer do what was once possible. Features can change from month to month without any regard for the user's experience or for the overall stability. The graphs are one such example. New or changed functionality appears to lack thorough design before implementation. Unstable changes make it into stable releases every month.

Paulus has recently stated that Home Assistant is the best home automation solution out there. It's not really the best because it's very good. It just happens to be the most popular among people with some technical skills. It's the best because the others are very bad, support less hardware, require a cloud connection, have poor security, are privacy invasive, require a subscription, are extremely expensive, are updated once per year or for several of the mentioned reasons.

Home Assistant's advantage over commercial solutions is its large number of integrations, that it's open source and that there's a large community behind it. I wouldn't call it better at all. It's very similar to commercial solutions when privacy, security and usability concerns are ignored. The advantage of some cloud free commercial solutions is that they're likely to be more stable without breaking something once per month or every other month.

Those who still want to run Home Assistant may want to run it as a Docker container without Home Assistant OS, to use a separate network for the smart home devices, to avoid cloud connected cameras, to avoid cloud based integrations and to isolate Home Assistant from the other non-IoT devices found on the network. It can be a high value target for hackers and for companies who want to sell your data. I wouldn't recommend running it if one's not tech savvy. It's not something one sets up for someone else who's not tech savvy either. Things will break. It's just a matter of time.