Hi All,
This is my first post on these forums - as you can see from the subject, I am giving up on HA.
I will try to explain my reasoning in a non-biased way, I am not trying to annoy anyone, just give a POV.
I have been using Domoticz for 3+ years, but started to feel it was getting stale, not much changing, I read lots of good reviews about HA so when the SD card in my RPI4 failed, I decided to try HA.
This is when my problems started - I really struggled to install HA, I tried the RPI imager version, and the recommended image from the HA user guide via Balena. Both had the same issue - the installation just froze and after waiting for 2+ hours, I gave up. I tried this with new SD cards, different USB 3 sticks, and
finally I purchased a USB3 SSD, this worked much better, and I was able to progress.
Very frustrating that SSH / telnet is not possible during installation, so a headless install is almost impossible to troubleshoot.
Once I installed HA, I started the setup of devices.
Here is a list of my setup:
RPI4 8gb
RfxTrx433XL
lots of devices working ok
Owl intuition CM180i energy monitor
ESP8266 Milight hub (via MQTT)
A few miLight RF hubs (FUT 037 I think)
Aeotech Z-Stick 5 (via USB hub) (via z-Wave JS)
Lots of Z-Wave deivces working ok
4x Philio PST02A multi sensors
128gb external SSD USB3 drive
Most of the setup of devices went well, but I had some real problems:
Philio PST02A’s
Motion detection & door opening, I had to use various workarounds I found on these forums, and the end result is not great.
Owl Intution
Energy monitoring seems to think I am using billions of kWHs, then 0, then billions again, the figures are all over the place. changing the UOM to Wh did not help.
3 phase electricity supply charts just look abysmal, no history, no overlaid charts
Just a really poor implementation
No way to visualise Z-Wave connectivity, which devices are working as a hub?
Now I have SSH enabled, I am really struggling to view or change anything in the filesystem. I think this is linked to the docker image thing. I get filesystem locked type errors.
Trying to google for help always ends up pointing to stuff telling me to add entries into configuration.yaml which I believe is deprecated (but who knows)
I still have no idea if I am running Hassio, HA, Docker, or whatever, why so complex?
I tried some automation / scenes stuff, but basically most of it does not work as expected, none of my dimmable Mi-lights could be controlled preciseley, I could automate “reduce dim level” but not set dim to 20% - no idea why?
Honestly, the list goes on, I have been struggling with this for 2 weeks, and I have decided to give up.
Domoticz is far from perfect - but I never had any of the stupid configuration issues I have with HA.
Domoticz is old school - The documentation is reliable, SSH in and set up a cron job - job done. Same for scripting, I did not find any good scripting examples in HA, lots of blueprints etc, but nothing with just a simple script sample that I could leverage.
I guess I am showing my age, but this kind of feels like trying to work on an old V8 vs a Tesla.
Sure, the Tesla is great - but if stuff goes wrong, you have no chance to fix it yourself.
/end rant
Sorry HA, I gave it my best - but I give up.
o/