Don’t feed the troll…
This world is filled with people like you. You are like “why bother using less resources if you can’t reduce to 0 resources?” That’s a total unhealthy way of thinking.
But for people like you maybe it worth doing some math from money perspective. In my flat, I could probably reduce the “standby” power consumption from 100 W to 50W by cutting off the power of my AC (which is connected to WiFi all the time, waiting for remote commands), oven, microwave, 2xTV etc.
50W reduction means 36 KWh saved every month and at 0.5 USD/KWh it means 18 USD saved every month and 216 USD saved every year.
About your laptop VS RPI (because of HA inefficient implementation) even with 10 W difference in consumption, you would save 3-4 USD/month which means 36-48 USD/year.
Are you serious or you believe that most of the people on this planet are living on cold climate and need heating in their homes all the time?
Being a programmer for 20 years now, I do get frustrated when I see such popular products (like HA) with such a bad implementation/architecture. I also see programmers who don’t care anymore about efficiency of their software because the hardware keeps improving every year. The best example is an iPhone <5 which will not open facebook these days, but few years ago it was able to work flawlessly.
Also, after my struggle with HA installation, I finally managed to start it, and guess what? I had to wait about 10 minutes with my RPI 3 at 100% CPU usage for HA to do some sort of initialization? After 10 minutes, there were plenty of errors that there were no ZWave/Zigbee whatsoever devices found. Why would somebody implement such a procedure when you first start a program???
I tried OpenHab and the installation was so much easier. I had to install Java + Maven, then downloaded the OpenHab files and started with “start.bat” on Windows and “start.sh” on Linux. In about 10 seconds after I ran the start script, I was able to login on OpenHab platform. Why HA can’t be like that, what additional features it has that it needs to be so heavy?
im not sure if it’s a “troll” seems more like someone from another planet , just landed
I don’t want to rule out altruistic motives yet, but the used wording is not helping his/her cause. It’s like the “Just stop oil” movement here in Europe these days. It doesn’t help the cause, if you aren’t able to compromise…
Maybe true, but somehow i find a huge lack of “insight” in HA and it’s users “know-how” and common knowledge, and there is also a slight peculiar perspective upon saving energy.
I believe most HA users(including me ) have many ideas , and have save quite some watt with i.e automations(way more than than the 15W HA consumes on i.e a laptop) (maybe he’s missing that point), but one can not expect much from someone who start out like this, in his first,1 and only topic, who knows he might become an active contributor some day , and find out that people can count and know that a utility don’t consume if it’s switched off.
As for his last 2 questions i hope he can find the Docs-section,they kind of rounded up the topic, we are back where we(he) started, RTFM
You just keep showing your ignorance. I have a soldering station which consumes 4 W even if is switched off (from a physical button). Of course, it doesn’t have any WiFi nor bluetooth whatsoever. You are throwing with numbers (15 W consumption of your laptop) but I bet you haven’t really measured it with a meter. You can buy a power meter for like 20 USD and then you can use real examples with real numbers not just pure assumptions or something that you’ve read in some documentation.
You, as a simple HA user , have little or no power to decide how developers of HA are developing the application, but being a developer myself, I know for sure that a website is not mandatory to be hosted inside a container or VM. In general, the developers are simply not aware that their software (even if is free of charge) can cause unnecessarily costs and energy usage. Also, most of the developers don’t accept critiques and other opinions especially if their product is a successful one (like HA is). Therefore, they will not put any effort in optimizing their applications.
So if I throw my garbage in the dedicated bins for 99% of the time, is totally ok if I throw my garbage on the street from time to time because hey, in 99% of the cases I’ve did it correctly.
Also don’t lie yourself, all the wireless based smart devices are using quite some energy because they need to have their radio receivers listening for commands all the time. A radio transmission is energy expensive regardless if is WiFi,Blueetooth (even BLE), Zigbee, ZWave whatsoever. This unnecessarily radio transmission for smart devices has also become a trend embraced by most of the users. Not to speak about security vulnerabilities. Radio signals are broadcast and can be received by neighbors. Even if the communication protocol involves encryption, there can still be a lot of interference (intentional or not) with other nearby radio transmitters. We can then talk about Faraday cages formed by steel bars used to reinforce concrete and so on.
Oh, and by the way, I do have a UI application written in C# hosted on a RPI, from where I control my lights and my heating system and it consumes 37 MB of RAM right now. The uptime of the application is 67 days.
The other app (which takes the stream from my 4 surveillance cameras) uses 463 MB of memory right now because I have allocated 100 MBytes of buffer for each camera in order to be able to upload in real time the videos in Google Drive (over the internet of course).
No i rather not, im sure you live in such, and haven’t been outside for decades
You have found a fundamental difference between the two projects. Openhab takes a minimal approach and you need to opt in. Install each binding you need and want.
HA takes the approach of have loads running so it can do background discovery and make a new user happy when things get magically found. You need to opt-out.
Two different projects that prioritize different things.
Hi, I’m new here but came to this topic with the same error. The reason why I’m trying this core installation is because the docker version is missing the add-ons in HA, at least if I read the HA site correctly. First installation I made is on my synology but because of this restriction (no add-ons in docker) trying to set it up on my Raspberry. Is my assumption correct or could I still try the docker version on my Pi? Or is there even a way to get the add-ons working on my Nas (VM is no option).
Regards Gijs
As per HA-Docs, you can only run "Add-Ons in … “HomeAssistant OS” or “Homeassistent-Supervised”
And if you click on the “Installation” link in same page, you find the options you have for either your Pi or your synology , i suggest you go for Homeassistant OS
You only get add-ons with Home Assistant OS. Core doesn’t give you those, neither does container.
The docs even have a table that show this.
(Supervised was cut from that table because it’s a trap, and you shouldn’t run it unless you enjoy frustration)
But that means I need to fully flash my Pi then? Any disadvantage if I want to use gpio later on to automate more stuff in the house etc?
Is there big differences to the standard raspberry os?
If you want to use Add-ons, you need to fully flash your Pi, yes that’s correct.
Trust me (and likely most others in this topic), when they say you won’t need your GPIOs on the Pi later on. If you want to run your home automation stress free and reliable, you will want to install HA-OS. All other things will run via HA in the future, and there are loads of possibilties to use other things like ESP based devices to get your DIY style home automation.
Most people here, that started with other installation methods are now running HA-OS, because it is the most reliable way to run HA.
The differences are not that much (depending on perspective) to Pi-OS, but with HA-OS there is somebody behind it, that takes care of all the nasty little pitholes you can fall in. Let me give you an example from a few weeks ago:
Pybluez
is a package for Linux (incl. Pi-OS), that is no longer maintained. This wasn’t much of a problem, as long as it worked. But times move on, and requirements are getting higher, so with a new python version, pybluez
isn’t compatible anymore… For HA-OS there seem to be a solution, but who is taking care of all others? There is no way, that HA takes up the unmaintained repo for pybluez
, other maintainers don’t seem to be on the horizon, so pybluez
is dead. And now? That’s just one example why HA-OS is better than Pi-OS and core or container (or supervised).
That being said, let me ask you a question. What do you have in mind, that you’d need the GPIOs for? What is it, that you think about doing? I can practically guarantee you, there are at least two other ways doing it with HA without the need for GPIOs on your Pi.
TL;DR I know, it’s much to ask, but trust us - do the install with HA-OS and ask if you have any questions. I can guarantee you, in about six months, you can come back to this topic and will tell us all, that it was the right decision!
And there is also a HACS integration that allows the use of GPIO on PI’s
Pssst, don’t tell, that was my joker, if @gaaijus
would surprisingly have a good argument against HA-OS.
Haha, good to read guys!
I’m actually planning on integrating my Somfy remote connected to a Arduino and Pi.
Hate the fact that Somfy does not support local API for the connection kit and forces us to spend triple that money
Plus I like puzzling with this kind of stuff, not done many of these projects but looking how to integrate this best and have an additional remote to use
All advise is welcome
Then you will likely have a lot of fun trying out ESPHome! This will be fun for you!
Don’t get overwhelmed!
And for your Somfy, I would take a close look to this project:
ESPHome is perfectly integrated via an official Add-on (to run the ESPHome software) and a nice integration into HA (the ESPHome integration, so the Add-on can talk with HA and vice versa). You will find a lot of information on the ESPHome page, but in short, don’t bother with writing “complicated” Arduino code, you can just do it easy in ESPHome.
That’s what I was meaning in my post above. If not covered by HA with its over 1000 integrations, there is mostly a custom component available, like the one above.
And as you can see, it has a lot of advantages, to not run these things on a Pi, for most cases an ESP device has a much smaller foot print. Lower energy consumption, smaller size, easier placement and so on.
My advice still stands , install HA-OS on that Pi and take your first swim in the big home automation pool. You might get addicted, if os, see you soon in this very forum!
Wow nice, I’ll dive into that! Looks a lot more stable then the remote wiring indeed, the challange there was to keep track of the remote position. This seems to be covered in this solution.
Installed HA OS right away yesterday.
So yes you will see me around on this forum