I am posing this question out of a need for helping older non technical people in their houses.
I get asked if I could set up a HA system / instance in their house like mine.
This question always daunts me be because I know what maintenance I have to do to mine in order to keep it stable.
While I appreciate the hard work that goes into new ideas and facilities sometimes there are integrations or OS updates that really need updates in order to fix a bug and then there are the new facilities.
It would be helpful for me to be able to have a setup that maybe I needed to update every 6 months or so and have this transparent to the people but based on my experience with my system and a few other colleagues this seems to be not quite achievable.
I have tried just not doing updates for a while but that has usually led to some troubleshooting that I really was hoping not to do.
Admittedly my HA has been a Work in progress for about 3-4 years and includes a number of protocols in order to achieve certain features.
Is there a way updates could be sent out in two categories? One for bug fixes and one for new features?
Anyway I hope this makes sense to the reader.
Interested in ideas that may help
If you go with just HA, zigbee or zwave and nothing else, you’ll likely never need to update HA.
I did 2 stints of 10/11 months with no updates between 2016 and 2018 back when HA was in it’s infancy. It just worked because nothing required internet to work.
You could do the same now on a rpi. Just make sure to remove recorder and history to really make it rock solid on that hardware.
I liked a couple of the answers above. But in order of preference …
Stable and don’t update - Only if these are close friends and family that you love more than you love yourself! Because, you will have to help in some way or another.
I have not really looked at HA Green simply because my experience with RPi’s was not good so I went to a NUC with heaps of RAM and storage. Stability improved dramatically.
However I will look into the HA Green and see what it could do for non technical oldies who want some degree of automation due to disabilities.
Thank you for you suggestion.
As a further explanation on why I asked this question. I am now 73 and getting a few disabilities with movement in shoulders and legs. Home Automation has allowed me to use Voice Commands to turn on/off lights, ceiling fans, air conditioners and so on. Friends have seen this and hence the question " Can I you do that for me?"
My wife has also posed the question as to what to do about it should I pass on.
I do appreciate that HA is not quite the “consumer Friendly” product as stated in one reply but I wonder if the “RoadMap” for HA does end up here?
I think the best you could do for them is to help them to help themselves. try helping them learn how to do it for themselves. Age is no excuse to not learn new things. I posted a small poll here a while back and (non-scientifically) it said that most users (who replied to the poll - enough caveats? ) are in the over age 50 crowd.
If they aren’t willing to put in the minimum effort to just learn the basics then you aren’t helping anyone because it’ll be more trouble than it’s worth for both them and you.
I would say it depends on what they expect.
If it just is a remote for various off the shelf devices then it shouldn’t be so hard.
But if they expect device tracking and automations based on those and such then it would be though. Saying yes and then not having time to help them with those advanced features will be a bit awkward.
Placing a few devices on the dashboard isn’t that hard.
This is unfair. For many (most?) people, technology even at the mobile phone user level is not just difficult - it’s completely alien. You might as well say “Why can’t you play the piano? Try harder.”
I agree, you can reasonably say this about people who start HA themselves, but not of people who have it thrust on them by a well-meaning relative.
It’s more like saying “I want you to put a piano in my house and I want you to come over and play it for me because I don’t want to try to learn to use it. I just want the benefit of hearing it being played in my house every day.”
If I can’t play a piano and have no interest in even trying to learn to play it then it’s benefiting no one for me to buy one and put it in my livingroom.
If you can’t figure out how to use a mobile phone then you probably shouldn’t buy one and ask someone else to come over to make a call for you.
either learn to use the technology especially at its basic level or forego it’s benefits.
It’ll be “I can’t make sense of these neural net transmat portal implant thingies… Can you put one in for me?” And your great grandson will roll his eyes.
If there is an interest then it is possible.
My mom is 74 and she is a wiz in Microsoft Word and picture editing.
She started from scratch a few years back and then just went nuts, so today she is helping local and national archives with scanning and archivation tasks.
I read with interest…
An old saying is " You don’t have to be a motor mechanic to drive a car but it helps…"
As I said in one of my previous posts I am trying to help people with some physical disabilities.
The point of the question was to see if the HA ROADMAP did include a consumer friendly product now or future and I did not know about it.
I reflect when I was in my 50’s and my Mum was in her 80’s and I was trying to get her to use a mobile phone. This proved a difficult thing for her as her education was not low but certainly not of a level of most of today. She really struggled and I wondered why? I tired to teach her but she would forget a lot.
She did not have dementia but now that I am in my 70’s I too don’t have the memory recall that I did in my earlier years.
The most challenging thing I have found with HA is Change. Just as I get my head around some things they change them and down the rabbit hole we go again.
Technology & Automation should be to help & support
I forgot to add…
It has also been my experience that …
“Practice does not make perfect but makes permanent.”
By saying that if I am taught something and don’t practice it I will usually have forgotten a lot of the lesson by the time I come to need to use it.
Sorry of course I never meant to imply that there’s no excuse whatsoever. I fully understand that people with non-typical functioning couldn’t be expected to fully maintain even the basics of a system like HA. Of course they would need help. but that would be true regardless of age.
I was talking about a standard functioning person should be able to handle the basics. no matter what age. I think people tend to imply that just because someone is older that they have some inherent disability that makes them incapable of understanding newer technology. And then those low expectations of their abilities by the people around them cause them to doubt their own abilities. It then just becomes a self-fulfilling situation where if you are constantly treated like you’re not competent you become not competent.
that thinking by both young people and older people drives me batty.
I’m not that far away from that (closer to 63 than 62 right now)
I would more than likely be the one helping my grandson with tech than the other way around.
I know lots of younger people who are not very tech savvy. That’s why they need a smart phone to literally do everything for them since they can’t be bothered to get off tik tok for 5 minutes and learn something. of course I understand that goes both ways too.
my whole point is age is just a number when tech is concerned.
) are in the over age 50 crowd.
