I’m checking alternatives to my smart home automation.
Five years; it’s still fine, however, lacks some integrations.
Note that’s all below had been written as a prone to mistakes first look at the system.
Oracle’s VM installs just hang often on restart. No working solution on forums, all issues not resolved and closed as ‘stale’. Restoring from a backup over a clear image isn’t a solution - the point of containers of any kind is stability. In addition, - the restoring doesn’t work sometimes. And the same feeling persists in dealing with any HASS problem. HyperV is fine by now.
Integrations looked sheer. However, almost half of them (for not too rare devices) isn’t really working. Most of the reported issues on GitHub seemed like just waiting for ‘stale’ for 3-4 months.
Aquara Gateway - looks working at first glance, de facto it’s unusable, see the screens.
Miio - Quinping integration hangs. Philips light is unresponsive. The vacuum seems ok, but I won’t notice if it waits for a few seconds before its scheduled task. All Xiaomi stuff works fine with an app and Domoticz.
ESPHome - can’t upload images over COM ports. My local install of the dashboard works excellent.
Bluetooth stuff like tracking devices just not working. Bluectl is fine in the container.
…
Questions.
Is there a way to deal with HASS problems like stable install, version, or better issues search, something I’ve missed?
Is python automation scripting viable? I hate the YAML idea, won’t argue about it, just want any real programming language.
Is it worth it for my installation, right now it’s C-, who needs a such unstable home automation system?
The solution depends on what you wish to achieve. The following is my personal opinion derived from my personal experiences.
A few years ago i found similar issues with HaOS with Oracle’s VM.
For optimum stability I now run containerized HA ( Docker) but run the stable release PRIOR to the current one. I am currently running 2021.12.10.
If you insist on having the addons from HaOS ( I prefer to avoid them.) you can run HA Supervised on current vanilla Debian version ( nothing extra installed) Installing anything else in that OS makes it :unsupported" you should be able to run the Debian OS in an Oracle VM.
Why do you avoid addons? As a user, I’d found them very useful, zero-config ssh and Visual Studio. I hadn’t used Python scripts, HASS had been proven buggy and unuseful before I even touched the automation. Ok, VS and ssh I can configure myself, but AppDaemon looks like a must-have… as I said YAML, Blockly, Node-red, etc., are, maybe, good for non-tech users, but, their comfort goes with a price. Personally, I won’t consider home automation without real scripts.
Some addons. like zwavejs & zwavejs2mqtt are written by HA developers because, for some reason. they do not want to use the officially released versions. That means delayed bugfixes, etc. I can get everything I need without the complexity of addons and without going unsupported if I so not run on plain vanilla Debian. With HA Container I can choose to upgrade to what I believe s the most stable version. I am currently running one major version behind.
To those who are reading the topic. The main cause was a very unstable HA release, it was fixed. Also it was a lack of self diagnostic inside the official Xiaomi integration. There was no broadcast traffic getting its way inside the VM, the integration silently turned that problem into cryptic states. 2 (Miio - Quinping part) and 3 are reported by a lot of users yet still ignored bugs. Bluetooth is just a muddy subsystem, if it is broken inside HASS (working via other tools from HASS OS) - you are out of luck. It’s quite hard to find what is wrong, is the bluetooth proxy fine, etc. Additionally - Sqlite as a core DB appears to be a pain, power failure or other common things like connection of a side tool (even readonly) which normal DB should shake off easily, sometimes resulting in HASS dropping to trashcan for you the whole corrupted DB. However, after running it for years I can recommend HASS against its competitors.
