This isn’t a complaint, but I’ve come to the conclusion that home assistant isn’t for a filthy casual such as myself. I can program a little bit, but YAML is beyond me, I can’t understand the format of the HA objects, and just in general I can’t accomplish things that really shouldn’t be that hard, or it takes waaaaaay too much effort to accomplish simple things. I want my lights to dim at certain times of the day - great. I want them to dim only if they are already on though, not turn on if they are not being used. I have HA doing this but it’s a real mess. Again, I’m taking responsibility, not blaming HA.
I was using HA and stringify with some other tools to sort of cobble together what I wanted, and now stringify is going away, and the simple things I want to do (fade-in wake-up alarm easy enough for the SO to use, for example) just aren’t (still) simple.
Is there another product I should be investigating? Thanks for the advice and not getting offended.
If you have a Google home hub or speaker (and it’s linked to HA), you could set up routines through the Google home app to schedule your lights to do different things at whatever times you need. The hue bridge can manage schedules, too, if you have hue bulbs.
You may also try out the node red hass.io plugin for more of a visual representation of devices and functions.
Beyond those, the best visual platform that I’ve used is Wink, but I’m not sure how well they’re doing, or how much longer they’ll be around.
Smartthings is pretty nice and easy to navigate, especially the new Samsung smartthings app, but it doesn’t have the smart apps function of the classic app at this point. I’m not sure how many devices you’re needing to automate.
Have a look at Node Red. Either use it in conjunction with HA as an add-on, or stand-alone. If you go with the add-on, you have your devices defined in HA, but put your automation in NR. If you go stand-alone, you find NR add-ons for your devices. NR is a very visual means of programming which takes out some of the learning curve. However, at the end of the day, you’re trying to integrate devices from competing companies and standards. Don’t hold your breath waiting for it to be simple.
I use the NR add-on to HA. I have a shared Google Calendar for my alarm that triggers a NR action (10 minutes before the alarm) to set the Google Home’s volume to zero, then stream the radio, then fade the volume up to 40%. Using a shared calendar makes it easy for anybody to adjust the alarm. It also monitors a generally available calendar so it doesn’t wake me up early on public holidays.
Just stopped by to say your comment is laudable for its honesty. No bitching or moaning, just frankness along with a request for assistance to head in a new direction. Kudos to you. There are plenty of other fish in the home automation sea and I hope you catch one to your taste.
Should you decide to remain with Home Assistant, we’re all still here to help you. Good luck!
Currently I do use routines with GH, and Wink, and Yeelight’s app, but those generally aren’t sophisticated enough to do the more complicated things I want to do.
I actually don’t necessarily need visual interface, but YAML is just (whoosh). I’m not a developer, but I have programmed in C#, C, VBA, and so some bash and regex and so on. But it doesn’t seem like there is a middle ground.
Thanks, I was peripherally aware of Node Red but you bringing it up gives me a bit more impetus to check it out. I don’t necessarily require a visual interface, but I can’t hack YAML. I’d actually prefer something text based, but it is what it is. Thanks for the suggestion.
Yeah, I don’t blame you. I really haven’t done anything beyond programming lights because there seems to be a learning curve, a plateau, then another steeper learning curve.
Alternatively, given you’ve programmed in all of the above - you could take a look at the Appdaemon add-on.
Can run all your automations through Appdaemon, using home-assistant as the state engine. Same concept as with Node Red, but all in python instead of the visual interface. That’s what I use.
Let me second or third Node-RED. I have a lot of programming experience and I would never go back to YAML from Node-RED. Changed my whole outlook on automations.
Fell upon this post by accident… but it hit home… and being the person I am… I cant let things just go LOL
First… I’m not a hater… when I began I read this…
But theirs a problem…
VentMode On *************
I’ve been trying to bring my instance of HA to life for about two weeks now… it IS NOT a friendly environment.
I’m a SW Engineer with 25 years of experience… from VB to C++ …Windows to VAX… and I have never carried so much water to end up still thirsty after all the work I’ve put in over the past two weeks.
I’ve found that there is TOO MUCH old information pointing to older solutions. Whats needed is a COMPLETE SIMPLE EASY TO FOLLOW NON TECHNICAL How To for the components.
HA is not a plug and play system… although in its heart it wants to be.
Granted theirs allot to understand that I don’t and that’s problematic and not HA’s fault. Its just the nature of the beast… And trust me… I’ve taken that into mind in my approach…
Case in point… I’ve been working on getting life360 component up and running in HA… ( the gent who supports it has been a great help BTW… thanks again!) it took a week but its working… But I just came across a post (old post) that noted that 4 value fields were no longer needed and should be removed… I commented mine out to test… broke the system… WTF what changed?
Case 2… HA cant see a new sonoff that Ive flashed… Alexa sees it… Wink sees it Younomi sees it …HA cant seem to bring it in house… I know its something I did… but as a noobie I have no clue… and I’ll fumble around lookinig for solutions until I figure it out
If you are relying on searching the forum or youtube for solutions to issues more than a couple of versions old it will definitely be very iffy if the solution will work since changes happen fairly quickly and there was a major reworking of how custom components work a few versions ago.
Generally it is best to use the current HA official docs and the current custom component official docs. Those might not be great all the time to understand how to get things working completely but generally they will give you a good baseline to start with then you can go to the forums to ask specific questions.
Once you start getting into the flow of how things are supposed to work it does get better. But even then there are times that you will have no clue what you are doing wrong.
HA has a steep learning curve and the dev team is trying to make things more “user friendly” by allowing GUI configuration. And that is all well and good until something doesn’t work and/or you are forced to go into the yaml for some reason then all of the “ease of use” makes it more difficult for inexperienced people to figure out why something isn’t working because they don’t have any real experience with how it works at the nuts & bolts level.
And then you throw in 5 years of old outdated bad information and it tends to confuse people even more.
If you can and feel that you can slog your way thru then try to hang on. there are lots of helpful people on here that can point you in the right direction. And there’s not any other software out there, commercial or not, that has the sheer flexibility of HA. But as with any other highly flexible & configurable software that comes at the price of complexity.
The people… community is great… And I’m not taking anything away from the developers or trying not to) But in my mind if Im using an UI to configure things… it ought to be dummy proof… And right now… Im a real dummy! LOL
True the learning curve its a steep one but what new folks need are explicit instructions. As I said above; I’m an engineer… Im used to reading “Geek Speak” but the docs are very high level and rely WAY too much on “Expected Knowledge”… and that frustrating when all you want to do is get HA to discover a switch…
Thanks for your input… its truly helpful… Now I gotta go and figure out why HA cant find my switch!
I’m having decent success with Node Red so thank you everyone for that suggestion.
I’ve also wasted about an hour of my life trying to get my yeelights to have a reasonable name using the expletive docs available. This is untenable. I’m not an idiot. Error messages are uninformative, docs assume way too much and/or are not updated.
Sigh.
This is a portion of my bog-standard included-from-docker-image configuration.yaml
Here’s the relevant portion from the documentation’s example:
homeassistant:
name: home
unit_system: metric
customize:
# Add an entry for each entity that you want to overwrite.
sensor.living_room_motion:
hidden: true
thermostat.family_room:
entity_picture: https://example.com/images/nest.jpg
friendly_name: Nest
So if you want to indicate that the information for customize is located in a separate file, you would do this:
homeassistant:
name: home
unit_system: metric
customize: !include customize.yaml
The key point here is that, in terms of hierarchy, customize is a child of homeassistant. In contrast, what you did was promote it one level up in the hierarchy, at the same level as homeassistant, group, script, automation, etc.
It’s definitely not too much to ask. However, I don’t have a ‘software engineering degree’ and I don’t find Home Assistant all that difficult. However, I appreciate the fact that it’s far from being a consumer-oriented product. In other words, it’s not for everyone.
So for people who find it to be more difficult than they anticipated, they can either devote more time to learn it or choose something else. Why suffer? Pick something that that makes automating your home fun and not a reason to complain about.
So you did actually join here just to complain about HA… You’ve posted three times and done nothing but complain.
As I’ve said in other threads here you can have easy or powerful or cheap. You can usually get two out of three - easy and cheap but not very powerful (IFTTT, Alexa); powerful and easy but those are usually commercially available systems maintained by third party companies who charge a bunch for the service plan to do what you want your system to accomplish. but then you are at their complete mercy - pay up or move on; or you can have powerful and cheap. That’s where HA fits in.
You can dumb it down but then you lose the functionality that draws people here from other platforms in the first place.
OTOH, HA is trying to “dumb it down” for people who don’t want to put in the time to learn just a little bit of new knowledge (not trying to point any fingers here but…) Of course, it’s not completely there yet.
I still don’t know if you’ve even tried it yet or not. None of you posts actually said one way or the other or have asked any specific questions trying to get help.
You have literally just posted four times without saying anything more than “it’s too hard”.
I checked will2568’s posting history and you’re absolutely right. Joined only a day ago and all contributions so far have been complaints. Even went to the trouble of exhuming this long-dead thread just to add another complaint.