Disappointed rant - any suggestions?

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I can’t help but prompting TLDR comments and getting canceled but I’ll try and be brief.

I’m often perplexed by the inherent catch 22 with “Home Automation”. Most of the time people who are looking for automation are usually trying to get some of their time back. However to setup up home automation ecosystems you have to spend a good deal of time configuring and customizing. Your “good bit of time” is dependent on so many variable that its not worth getting into here.

Summary, in searching to automate to simplify your life you need to spend more time then it actually takes to just do the task yourself going down an endless pit of time suck, during the setup and the inevitable updates, EOL, and general hardware failures.

My case and my little rant. I have, by nature, been sucked into, over the years, not paying much attention to compatibility of various devices in my house. Be it, they were on sale, they were staring at me at home depot and I had money to burn, they were a gift, whatever. I have on my Android phone a bunch of different control apps for the various cameras, doorbells, thermostats, vacuum robots, floodlights, alarm systems, speakers… its a mess.

So I had literally 15 minutes between meetings last week and said, I’m tired of this!! There has to be some platform I can buy that will act as a middleware layer providing me an single pane of glass interface to see all the cameras, doorbells, speakers, etc, etc. I had 15 minutes. I did a google search, came back with Home Assistant Green or Yellow would suit my needs of just getting a single view into everything. I quickly bought and went on with my work day.

What do you think happened? Days later it arrived, I was home for an hour so I plugged the thing in, found one last spot on my wired switch (who uses switches anymore) and waited for it magically to find everything.

What did it find?? A shitty HP printer, a Google speaker, a Roomba, and a 10 year old ReadyNas that I forgot I even had (used to be a plex server). It found nothing else.

The phone app I installed had some very non-intuitive dashboard with hardly anything on it. I figured ok, not gonna be a boomer, let me start with an easy one and setup my first integration… my Blink Camera should be a joke to integrate.

Yeah… go ahead and laugh at my expense … I can take it. I found out I can’t just see my camera views like I thought I can on my phone using the Blink app. I basically, after setting up an area, a room, a view, and ignoring other oddities like a scene and labels (guess those are tags) just couldn’t get the damn camera to show a live stream. Back to Google looking for why I couldn’t and I found “Blink doesn’t support any integrations” Along with crap like if you try and call too many tasks via their API you’ll get a locked account (API?? I didn’t even want to be bothered with API crap anyway).

I just want a tile that says CAMERAS and when I click it I see my 4 blink cameras in the house like old school CCTV. Next day was the Roomba which seemed to have an equally frustrating method of integrating with me having to perform tasks in front of the robot. I was at work, again between meetings, so can’t do that either.

Alas… that’s where I am at.

Can someone point me to a place I can get started in sorting some of this simple stuff out . Or should I basically come to grips that every integration I need to do I’ll be looking at documents scattered about and possible GitLab downloads and coding. I’m going to have to spend a good deal of time and even then will be stuck with devices that don’t work and endless product suggestions from people on Reddit and this forum.

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We all have the same vision as you, but humanity has not come that far yet. There are endless manufacturers who insist they have the best solution to your IoT needs, often not compatible and often very closed, prorietary and tying you closely to their servers.
HomeAssistant is the most comprehensive integration platform there is. Some systems are a joy to integrate (with standards like Z-wave or Zigbee) and others are a pain, like my “ONVIF compatible” Nedis doorbell or Robomow, where the manufacturer explicitly denies all access.
Yes, you need to go through integrations one by one, add your devices and see how far you can get. Yes, it takes a lot of time and will be very frustrating if you are unable to devote contiguous time to crack any particular nut.
Most users, however, get very enthusiastic when they get devices to work and throw themselves over the next issue. Pretty soon, all these devices can start doing things together. It gets addictive that way.

I hope your efforts will be successful!
/Fumble

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Welcome to the forum, albeit to express your frustration about devices that do not integrate (well) with HA.

Suggestions:

  • live with it
  • drop HA
  • buy devices that work with HA
  • wait until those manufacturers allow you to take control of your devices

If you spend some time with HA/in the forum, you will find out that HA can do a lot if the devices play nice.

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These are the available integrations - start with them:
Integrations - Home Assistant (HA supported integrations - tested with each release)
https://hacs.xyz/ (non-supported integrations - not tested)

/Fumble

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This paragraph is exactly what makes it take sooo much time. However, your story seems to blame the one system that tries to prevent this mess that you describe. Buying devices that are open and play nice is what saves you time. Home Assistant is what makes it possible… provided the devices allow it to.

But also as stated above, if you like to spend time automating it can be fun. But if you don’t, then this is automation hobby not for you. Because the state of Home Automation is not so advanced that everything is effortless. Automations well done are never easy, because it is a complicated problem to get righ to begin with. And the complexity of technology makes it that much harder.

PS. No amount of programming has ever saved time for the programmers themselves. It saves time for other users. Programmers struggle so others don’t. That is rarely understood or appreciated by the users :slight_smile:

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I’m not sure I agree with this, and it’s certainly not true for me. I got into home automation because I’m a nerd. Having a light come on because a motion sensor sees me walk in saves half a second flicking the switch as I enter. But it’s cool. When I tell Google I’m going to bed and various automations happen, it perhaps saves me 30 seconds.

The one automation that I really appreciate is the Logitech Harmony remote - nothing to do with HA, and Logitech have killed it! But switching between TV, AppleTV, STB, Wii, XBox, Chromecast, and Computer with multiple remotes is a nightmare without it. So given AV interoperation hasn’t been solved yet, I wouldn’t be holding my breath on complex smart devices working well together. The only “solution” is not to buy them.

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API’s is what allow devices to talk to one another. While you do not want to know about them as a user, you DO want them. And you want them to be open, and local. And preferably standard ones. Truth is, few manufacturers are willing to provide that for commercial reasons.

You want the API to be Open, because if it is not, then people need to guess what it does. If they even succeed. And if it suddenly changes and no one knows what changed, your royally *€(#)@&.

You want the API to be Local, because servers cost money. They don’t want them overloaded by calls 24/7, every second. That is why the limits are there. And most of all, if the manufacturer decides the cost does not outweigh the benefit, they turn it off. And then you are doubly royally *€(#)@&.

And standard API’s help to prevent systems needing to invent the wheel thousands of times.

Nabu Casa, with Home Assistant and the Open Home Foundation, fight for open, local, and standard API’s. So I applaude them and support them trough a cloud subscription. Even though I’m capable of providing my own external access and other things.

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As I was a humble programmer myself I thank you for your kind words.

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Blink should be supported, but I guess you need to manually set it up (just stumbled on it, not using it myself)

Go to devices, click add integration in the lower right bottom, and search for blink:
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Or click here:
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However:

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And also:

Since the cameras are battery operated, polling must be done with care so as to not drain the battery too quickly, or hammer Blink’s servers with too many API requests. If an alternate polling rate is desired, disable the “enable poll for updates” option in the Blink integration system options and poll with homeassistant.update_entity action. The cameras can be also manually updated via the trigger_camera action. As a note, all of the camera-specific sensors are only polled when a new image is requested from the camera. This means that relying on any of these sensors to provide timely and accurate data is not recommended

.

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As @Fumble said:

This alone is the primary source of your frustration. Few manufacturers will open their API’s while some do it “under the table”. (They will document it, but not actively support it). If you find a device in the Integrations section of the docs, (see post 4, also from Fumble), someone, usually another user, has written an integration to use the device. Sometimes the manufacturer will change the “under the table” (AKA- “unsupported”) API and break the integration in Home Assistant. The Life360 integration was a big one.

Home Assistant is Open Source. Meaning that most of the development and support comes from the user community. Home Assistant is not, nor ever will be, an off-the-shelf, plug it in and everything from every IOT manufacturer will work with it package.

Don’t take any of this as criticism of Home Assistant. Far from it. My system has grown to over 100 devices, many of which are DIY or OTS but re-flashed with ESPHome. You could not even begin to connect this mix of devices in any other home automation system.

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And I can add to that that most manufacturers are not open to ‘open-source’; it means the have to stay compatible.
They also tend to think it will make less money (i wonder why) :thinking:

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If you’re that busy, then I’m sorry, Home Assistant might not be for you.

You might be better off getting an off the shelf product with out of the box integrated devices because the time spent on integrating and maintaining whatever you have right now seems to be time you can’t afford.

This is a classic example:

The time I choose to spend on maintenance and new projects is my own personal “dead” time. Rather than spend a couple of hours watching a movie in bed or doomscrolling on social media, I work on HA if I feel like it.

That way, not only does it not cost me anything, time-wise, it also saves me actual quality time in the long run. When I’m actually busy with other house chores or out shopping or whatever adult life throws at you, my time is still being saved.

The notification which tells me when my laundry is ready took me less than an (idle) hour to set up, including integrating the hardware and setting up the automation. It has totally wiped out the need to walk up 2 flights of stairs after coming back from shopping, just to try and listen if the machine is still operating.

Similarly, setting up a door sensor on my front door, and a notification which immediately alerts me that my door is open when I’ve left my home zone, took me around half that time.
If you get at least one notification in your life which could have avoided a break-in or one of your pets escaping, would you say it was worth your time?

Yes, there is indeed a catch 22, but you just need to realise that not all time is created equal.

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After a while it will take less time, your system will be matured, and you will be more familiar with how the system works.
I agree it was a steep learning curve and took lots of time, but nowadays it just takes me a couple of minutes, sometimes longer when i feel the need to fiddle :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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That’s as much a failing of Amazon as anything to do with HA. You can’t view more than 5 minutes even with the Blink subscription unless you have a Mini camera. I got into HA because I had a blink setup and didn’t want to pay the sub to use their cloud. I get all the motion clips saved to a NAS and a snapshot every 5 minutes updated on HA and the Blink app. Took ages to work out but as others have said, that sense of achievement in making it work is part of the attraction for me.

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FYI Roomba is probably the hardest device to integrate into home assistant (that can be integrated). I wouldn’t let that deter you from HA.

However I will point out: If you’ve bought a mish-mash of random WIFI things, you’ll have a bad time. Most companies act in bad-faith for the customer and want you to buy and stay in their walled garden. This makes it difficult for us (HA enthusiasts) to integrate these devices into HA because these companies purposely make it difficult.

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I can totally understand how you got where you are. The home assistant certification program is supposed to help solve this mess. The problem isn’t Home assistant. The problem is that every vendor is different.

But

There are solutions. 1. Avoid the cloud 2. Use good interfaces and standards. 3 spend more time researching before buying.

Sadly it’s a huge time sink to get a feature-full and highly reliable system going.

An example of one of my time sink disasters was trying to get temperature sensors going. I tried all kinds of zigbee ones. Many people told me I was crazy and zigbee sensors are great. They are in fact mediocre and borderline junk. I finally found rtl433 sensors work 100x better and for less $$ . The down side was I had to add another radio/interface, which I was trying to avoid. What a huge time sink!

I have friends that bitch to me about how their zyz device stopped working or wasn’t working when they got home. I have zero sympathy for them because I’ve told them 100 times to stop buying cloud devices, they don’t listen.

Don’t be a cloud friend of mine.

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The advice to avoid “cloud” devices is well founded. Every vendor wants to lock you into their ecosystem, and possibly harvest your data.

I will say that I’ve had great luck with Zigbee devices. Mine have been totally plug-and-play. They just work, without any real maintenance on my part. If there’s a weak area in the mesh, I just stick a smart plug (works as a router) somewhere between that and an area with a strong signal.

That said, I use simple devices like temperature and humidity sensors, on/off switches and plugs. I’ve read here that compatibility with HA, and particularly ZHA, can be an issue if you want to get fancier, like color-changing lights or motor-operated blinds. I don’t.

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Talk about “shitty”? The solution to your problem is to stop buying shitty gear.

Is some stuff harder than others to integrate? Yes. Is the good stuff worth integrating? Also yes. Is blink good? No. Likely not much else you have good either, it sounds like.

Not entirely your fault though. You got here the same way many other people do. They buy piles of random nonsense from whatever local big box store happens to be near them, they install 2 dozen apps on their phone, and then they expect a magic wand to make it all work together when they realize what they’ve done.

The reality is that a GOOD smart home solution starts with the controller (what you mistakenly call “Middleware”), and then adds devices based in compatibility and features with that controller.

Keep working at it. You’ll get there.

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Wow, can I second that. I have just put the finishing touches on a Halloween experience that incorporates six ESP devices on ESPHome. It would have taken me months more to finish this a year ago.