Any members here that didn't think they'd be able to figure all this out?

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Hi there, everyone, my name is Schwim.

I have always been interested in self-hosting in general and HA with all it’s addons particularly and while I’ve watched a lot of videos and read content regarding other people do it, I’m afraid that it’s too far out of my wheelhouse to be able to make it work for me.

Without boring everyone, I’d like to explain my limitations so you have some idea regarding what I’m going to struggle with so that you’ll be able to say whether you managed to work through the same.

I’m in my low 50’s and have enjoyed tinkering with PC-related stuff my entire life but seem to have capped my understanding an knowledge of popular genres of tinkering somewhere around the early 2000’s. I’ve used linux as my main machine since the mid-90s, I’ve run sites and managed LAMP stacks for a couple decades, I’ve worked with home and auto wiring, modifying and adding features, I have created a lot of stuff with welding, woodworking, fiberglass, etc.

But I’ve never soldered anything. I’ve never written any code other than PHP/JS/HTML. I’ve never used a raspberry pi for anything more than a server. I’ve never 3D printed anything. Any tinkering that has originated in the last 15 years or so is like magic to me.

The above shouldn’t be considered braggadocio, as none of it was exceptional, just usually sufficient.

Although I’ve always had an interest in self hosting and smart home-related stuff, my country’s(US) push into a surveillance state, cloud providers’ inability to protect data when they’re not selling it to affiliates and cheap IOT opening your home to anyone that cares to do it has really worried me enough about using these services and devices enough to really want to try to push through my ignorance and trepidation on setting these features and managing them myself.

Physically, I struggle a bit with delicate work due to not-so-great eyesight and some hand tremors. If it’s not too small in scale, I can usually get through it but some of the tiny target soldering I see on Youtube is well beyond my capability.

Some of my smart home interests are power-related(monitoring, storing and maybe generating), security(cameras, entrance monitoring, alarm) and convenience items(lights, hvac setting). There’s more but those are the broad strokes.

I’m curious if there’s some others here that have overcome similar hurdles and lacked the capabilities required to tinker to become proficient in creating solutions for their home using HA and creating stuff themselves. I worry that I’m just too limited in the talents and skill required to play in this sandbox.

I’m sorry for such a long-winded first post but I appreciate any thoughts anyone might have on the matter.

Thanks for your time!

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For me it was coding. I’ve done other coding in Second Life and stuff like that but never something like Home Assistant. YAML confuses me to no end for the most part. Home Assistant visual editor is great and only getting better. I was use Smartthings for a while but it was limited on the kinds of automation that could be done, so I switched to Home Assistant. Getting Home Assistant onto a raspberry pi was the first biggest issue for me. I had never use a raspberry pi before but I followed the instructions and it all worked out and has for years now. I want to switch to a mini pc, but I’m auDHD and I’m having a hard time figuring it out. I know if I just sat down and did it I could probably get it working. One of these days I’ll get motivated enough to try again. This community is great tho, very helpful and friendly. I kind of want to get into the ESPhome stuff but thats like YAML to me but I think they’ve just added a visual editor for that stuff too.

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I am mid-sixties. No coding experience but I am a problem solver and I read instructions! It is a rabbit hole, which keeps on giving! Just pick something small and see whether you get sucked in! Get a large workshop light/ magnifier and some steady hand grips if you decide to do some ESPHome devices. Otherwise there are loads of pre-made modules available. Potter gently. And if you can’t work something out, sleep on it! Amazing what you work out on a good nights sleep. Good luck

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I think your a great fit for HA. keep it simple at first and as your confidence grows you can pick which projects your comfortable with. Many users have extensive installations using only retail hardware(no soldering required). I’m sure you can do this!

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I was in your shoes ~10 years ago when I started HA. I just spent time learning yaml and the data structures it understands. And I spent time equating that data structure to the documentation. If you learn that, the documents are easy to read and you’ll only have issues with HA’s idiosyncrasies.

Now I’d consider myself a power user. I’ve soldered things, I have a number of PI’s (None that run HA), I’ve contributed quite a bit to the codebase, etc. Just takes time. Took me probably ~3 years to become really proficient with HA.

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Gotta start somewhere.

The knowledge is there and people in forum are helpful.

When I first setup HA I spent 2 weeks setting up a docker container on RasPi. It felt amazing to finally get it running. Last week I created a service ticket and inventory management application that works with HA. It only hard the first time and infinitely easier after.

You’ll do fine.

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My brother in law is in his mid 50’s and just started with HA. Yes, he’s asked a few questions of me, but all in all he’s been fairly self-sufficient at doing what he wants with it. Age and experience aren’t the limiting factors, it’s how much you’re willing to learn to do the things you’re interested in.

As others have stated, these forums are an amazing wealth of knowledge and experience waiting to be tapped into.

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If you have linux experience I would:

  • buy a cheap intel NUC
  • install HAOS via USB stick
  • and take a look which integrations work for you
    – a lot of stuff can be done via HA UI
  • if you need YAML/Jinja coding ask an AI engine for help
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I think you have mixed up some of the things provided by Open Home Foundation (OHF).
OHF provides different parts to the smart home. One of them is Home Assistant and another is ESPHome.

Home Assistant is where the Smart Home is really controlled and if you can run a LAMP server and code in PHP/JS/HTML, then this part will not be an issue for you. It will probably be somewhat easier than what many beginners otherwise experience.

ESPHome is the part that might require soldering, 3D printing and so on, but it is approachable when you decide you want to step into that subject.
ESPHome is for homemade devices, but you can often manage just fine with the many vendor-made ones. Zigbee, Z-wave and Matter provide a wide range of solutions and will get you 98% there. The last 2% is the weird automation of automatic dispensing bird seeds in the outdoor birdhouse or other weird setup you come up with when you tumble down the rabbit hole while waving at the mad hatter in the passing.

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Hi Schwim, my background and timeline is not dissimilar from yours. Anything tech has always been hobby, interest, helping less technical friends, and just plain brain excercise. Similarly came from PHP, mySQL, and lamp stacks and hadn’t looked a piece of code in over 20 years when I decided to invest in Home Assistant (mid-late 50s at the moment). My only real leg up with HA was that I ain’t dumb, thank God.

Once I had HA up and running I was surprised by how many things that I wouldn’t have thought about were auto discovered and ready to integrate, even my printer was not so dumb. HA is an incredible engine and makes getting out of the gate pretty painless.

I remember YAML when it was in its infancy, I didn’t have much use for it at the time but it wasn’t difficult to get my head around… you shouldn’t find it too difficult if/when you need to deal with it. And if you ever used Smarty templates you shouldn’t find learning Jinja all that difficult either. It’s the same thing, just different (Python based rather than PHP). My soldering experience is mostly based on electric guitar wiring, I have yet to need to build a device from dev boards up. I’m interested, just haven’t.

That all said the whole initial experience with HA has come a holy freaking long way just in the short time I’ve been making use of it (a hair over 2 years). From the initial dashboard organisation to the way automations are created… it’s all much more pleasant and intuitive. And in that time I’ve used to make my quality of life at home much more pleasant. It wasn’t unpleasant before, but it’s more pleasant now.

Jump in, the waters fine :). If you don’t like it you won’t have lost much more than a bit of time and you’ll still likely learn something. And if you get stuck we’re here to help from our own experience. Someone above suggested that if your stuck you can use AI to get past it. I’d rather recommend that you post what you’ve tried here and get some real insight into where you may have gone wrong instead, the resulting understanding is better.

Hoping to see you around.

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I’ll be 50 later this year and while I am physically able to solder, I can’t wrap my head around the mechanics of it and every single thing I’ve ever touched a soldering iron to has consistently wound up worse off for it.

Good news is there are plenty of pre-assembled projects and off-the-shelf components to do almost anything you may want to do, and lots of other projects to do cool stuff that don’t require soldering at all.

I was a CS major in college 30 years ago, so while I have a basic grasp on code structures, loops, classes, functions, etc, a lot of it has been lost over time. I can stumble through it, but my education wasn’t on anything modern - C, assembly, LISP, etc. Python, perl, html, Java, yaml, had to figure that all out as I went.

I have a YouTube channel with nearly 100 videos where I try to leverage some of my professional experience as an enterprise IT consultant to help break things down for people to understand them easier. There’s a thread here in the social section where I post links to the videos. Check them out, they are more technical in nature than they are product reviews or “look at my cool stuff”, so they may be of some assistance to you in getting started.

As for whether or not you can do it? I’m sure of it.

If you care to share what part of the US you’re in, you may even be able to find some local enthusiasts willing to help.

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Home assistant has a reputation for being very complex. This is true in the sense that it is almost unlimited in possibilities and with that comes complexities. In it’s younger days, I would suggest that those possibilities were the focus of the focus of those who lead and those who contributed to HA. It was for technologist by technologist. As it has matured great would has been done easing the both the onboarding and the longer term interactions with the system. I think it is fare to say that 90% of all configuration and device management how has a UI element and most basic to low-mid deployments can happen without ever having to go into YAML files. I am sure this will continue further. But in that time HA UI has built on, not replaced the underlying messaging and routing functions still enabling high complexity whether that is custom UI or complex device management. With the arrival of AI, the underlying capability has never been more accessible. I have used and been involved with many open source projects over the last 35 years. Some are now staples and others part of the worlds leading OS. In a time where the heights of open source community seemed to be fading, HA is one of the most complex and successful.

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I think there are four major challenge areas (some of which may not apply to all):

  1. Getting Started.
  2. DIY / Integrating hardware into your home.
  3. Configuration.
  4. Code.

#1 - Getting Started

Frankly this is one I lay at the feet of the HA documentation team - I think there needs to be a “Before Getting Started” guide where the first question is:

Is home assistant right for you?

For most people the answer is probably going to be yes, but there are significantly different paths to onboarding based on your experience and willingness to tinker with stuff.

On one end the the spectrum is going to be people that just want it to work with minimal setup / configuration (they may find a commercial solution is a better fit for them).

On the other end of the spectrum are those that want maximum flexibility to configure thing how they want - they may be better off jumping in at the deep end.

I would also suggest some kinda of “persona” type examples Bob - just wants to turn lights when he gets home - here is a suitable setup.

Jenny - Wants to automate 20 different systems - pool, heading blinds, wants voice control, already has smart home devices from 7 manufactures …

When I started I found it really confusing with the different installation modes, protocols, plugins and going down the wrong path can be both frustrating and expensive.

#2 - DIY / Hardware Installation

This is an optional point - I personally don’t feel comfortable messing with mains voltage so I didn’t want to buy anything that required me to do that.

I was able to avoid it, by simply buying smart bulbs and plugs along with some IR transceivers.

The most DIY I did was using some double sided sticky tape…

#3 - Configuration.

I think this is a problem for everyone - the only advice I can give is.
Don’t venture too far from the heavily walked path - buy hardware that many others use and that have recent guides / setup videos.

#4 - Coding

I am not sure what to advise on this one - some people find it easier than others to pickup coding.

That said HA provides multiple ways to achieve goals:

  • Building automations through the UI
  • Using YAML in the UI
  • Using YAML in the config files
  • Templating language
  • Blueprints.
  • Plugins/Integrations

Sometimes things can be achieved in different ways.
Sometimes specific options are only available using a particular technique.

This abundance of choice can be overwhelming for a beginner since they don’t know which way to try first.

Unfortunately as your experience with HA grows you finding yourself needing to learn all of them, and each comes with its own set of quirks and surprises that your need to get burned by - sure the documentation may mention some of them but many times the surprise is so unusual you don’t think to check the doc for it.

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As been said, someone with half your experience will be fine working with HA. It won’t always be easy, but that’s kind of the point.

On a bit of a side note, I find it interesting that people often will bring up YAML as the difficult part to getting started. Sure, it’s a new “language” to learn, but of everything to learn about using HA it’s probably one of the least complex parts (it’s just scalars, lists, and dictionaries and some initially frustrating indentation), but you will need to learn it as it’s what gets posted here when asking for help.

I’m pretty new to HA, and pretty old, too, and I work in YAML probably 95% of the time. The frontend team has done an amazing job on the automations UI, but I rarely use it. I find once an automation becomes a tiny bit complex that the UI is just way too cumbersome. (I wish there was a setting to always start in YAML…)

I’m curious if that happens to most HA users over time.

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I believe YAML is a file format - it isn’t really a language.
HA exposes what I will call its AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) in both YAML and UI formats.

I suspect the combination of YAML + AST gets criticized from both sides:

  • For a beginner it has (what seems like) an unnecessarily complex set of specific formatting rules.
  • For a software engineer, it has verbose / totally unnecessary syntax - over what a traditional programming language would offer.

As I noted above the AST is quirky, to give two examples:

  • Variables are limited in scope to the current level of nesting - you can’t set variables defined in an outer scope.
  • Conditions inside of loops act like continue statements instead of break statements.

For me its about branching, as long as you don’t use many (at most one of each of):

  • If
  • Choose
  • Loop

Automations remain readable in both UI and YAML formats.
However keeping branching to a minimum is a real challenge.

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Thank you all so much for both the help and the warm welcomes. I greatly appreciate it and feel much more confident about diving in.

Before a couple responses, I did a bunch of reading and selected my starting point, hardware wise. I ordered a nuc, router and wireless access point, all of them chosen due to both my reading on this forum and discussing the topic with my ever-present AI peep.

[Intel NUC 10 i7 mini desktop PC | 16GB RAM | 250GB NVMe | No OS | NUC10i7FNK]
tp-link Omada Gigabit VPN Gateway [ER605]
tp-link Omada AX3000 Ceiling Mount Access Point [EAP650]

I’m going to focus initially on just setting up HAOS on the machine, then I’ll start reading up on setting up the router and access point, then I’ll probably try solving my front door camera doorbell for my first project.

Thank you, this is what got me started down my initial path.

You’re absolutely right. I had conflated the two to all be one thing. I did some searching on readymade stuff that works with HA and there seems to be a lot that works OOTB or with little fiddling.

Would you mind sharing your channel link? I’m missing it if it’s in your profile. DM is fine if rules or preference don’t allow it in the public space.

Thank you all very much again for your help. I’m excited to get to play with the system, solve some problems and learn some things.

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I suggest you do that the other way round. First set up the router, then set up HA. Access point can wait till the end.

You don’t want to be locked out of your HA install if your new router ends up on a different subnet or hands out a different IP to your server.

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What is the point of having ha and local controlled devices if your network equipment is cloud based or cloud dependent.
If you want local control then it is local control all the way.
Openwrt/opnsense and then you can build things up from there.

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Is there any documentation regarding setting up the gateway itself? I am finding a lot of documentation on how to setup the network settings in the developer docs and online via howto’s but I’m not finding any real tutorial or walkthrough on setting up the router that the machine running HA will be connected to.

In case it matters, HA will be running on the NUC with a wired connection to the tp-link ER605 gateway. That 605 will have to be connected to the Cox Panoramic cable router for anything on the HA system or connected devices that needs the internet for some reason. From reading, I can use the gateway’s firewall to restrict what’s allowed in and out for each VPN setup. If I understand what I’ve read correctly, this would keep my stored data on this network from being accessible both on the WAN as well as the network provided by the Cox router.

If you think of any resource that may help me with the gateway’s setup, I’d love to see it.

Thanks!

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HA is not meant to run spread out over multiple networks and you need to be a damn good network designer and administrator to accomplish that.

I suggest you either skip using the ER605 as a router and just run it as a access point if such one is needed or you configure your Cox router to either work as a bridge or to forward all traffic to your ER605 and then run the entire network behind the ER605.

Besides that the HA server, and really any server, is running best with a cabled connection.
After installation you would rarely need access to the server. It is all done over the network after the setup.
It is only with special rare error cases that you maybe needs to connect a monitor and keyboard, but then the HA server can be moved temporary in those cases.