Home Assistant Cloud Alternatives

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While I respect the developer decision to monetize the cloud platform, I also hope to seek alternatives for those who…

  1. cannot afford to commit $5 every month just to have better integration with Alexa.
  2. prefer to host everything on your own.
  3. have free time and patience to DIY.

At the moment, the only function in the HA Cloud is the Alexa skill. So, let us discuss here what are the alternatives we have in regards to this. IMHO, these are the closest things we have…

HAASKA - Unfortunately the project seems to be outdated. The instruction and the payload version are outdated. I had trouble setting this up. If you have better luck than me, please share with me how you did it.

Node-RED - This is new to me. It seems NR can bridge Alexa and HA together using this service.

If you have more alternatives, please share it here so that we can explore more. Thanks.

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Just started with Node-RED and I love it, it works much like HA Bridge but simpler, I didn’t really care to use the implementation like you pointed out I used the very simple one that keeps it local.

Works great! So good all my automations are being ported over to Node-RED also! :smile:

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Gonna try node-red on the weekend. I also can’t see myself paying $5 a month for just exposing a few input_booleans and scenes to Alexa. Not worth the price they are asking imo.

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But it sounds like emulated hue. Does it differentiate each devices by types or just identify every devices as lights?

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@DrJeff,

I am running my HA on a RPi3. Do I install NR on the same Pi? Which is the best guide to follow for beginners like myself?

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All can be run on same Pi, are you using HassIO? If so add-on is mentioned in the awesome guide here.

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no. i’m not using hass.io. im still on the good old fashion way.

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There are plenty of guides out there to get Node-RED setup on pretty much any hardware, just look at that guid on getting the proper HA integration

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ok. i have installed node red using this guide and it was super easy. I also manage to play around with Alexa Local and Alexa Home Skill together with node-red-contrib-home-assistant. I can turn my devices on/off easily. But what I don’t understand is do I need to create flows for every single devices I want to control? For example, if I have 100 devices, do I need to create 100 flows?

Another problem is all devices discovered via either Alexa Local or Alexa Home Skill is identified as lights. This makes it unable to achieve what I described here.

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I’m not a fan of reoccurring payments myself but I understand the devs need a revenue stream to keep the project going. I kind of find a post on their forum openly trying to circumvent that to be in bad taste.

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Let me be honest here. I cannot afford it at the moment. But I have spare time. Does that mean I’m not allowed to enjoy the same benefits? Not everyone prefer DIY. Even if I have a real alternative but toward DIY approach, some still prefer HA Cloud. I’m not trying to tell ppl don’t buy HA Cloud. I’m just trying to find solution for those who cannot afford it and prefer DIY approach. If I can afford it, I will definitely go for HA Cloud. It makes my life so much easier.

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@matust I think charging for a half baked product with no customer support on the backs of open source software from all free contributions to the product to be worst taste.

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I am not keen on spending money on something that is open source software. I think the manufacturers of smart devices should contribute towards it. As like me most of the users of HA have spent 100s of pounds if not 1000s on smartables for the house. If it wasn’t for you guys I would be a rich man.:grinning:

Edit: Sorry if i offended people about this. I really appreciate the hard work and dedication of all the Devs that use their spare time to do a great job keeping me busy tinkering with HA.

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Also, let’s not forget that much of the community built up around Home Assistant is by many people who prefer to spend/dedicate time rather than money on something. Even then, some people just don’t have the money available. Others don’t even want a HA cloud service and that is why they use HA.

Personally, I’m somewhere in between, and even then only if it works.

There is already a lot of price gouging and subscription-mongering all over the relatively new Home Automation industry.

Probably best just to respect that people have different views on what they expect from something “free”.

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Guys. Stop it. Stick to the topic please.

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Haaska does seem a tad outdated now, but I think that’s more to Amazon’s push to phase out the v2 API. While i’m not up to speed with Lambda I am going to take a dive to attempt to modernize it for the V3 API, even if it doesn’t take much advantage of the new features.

My instance is still working (using v2), but I understand the setup is a massive hurdle to get over, it took me about 2-3 hours to get it actually running as expected.

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Hey, are you a Dev from that team, or have any experience with the V3 API?
Are you referring to Boto3?

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Nope, nothing to do with Haaska or HA, just a tinkerer. What i’m referring to is the Alexa Smart Home Skill, which had some serious updates recently. They did a blog post about upgrading your API usage so i’d be mostly poking at that with Haaska

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Huh, this is cool, thanks.

I’ve been reading up a lot on Boto3 lately, and trying to learn Python (AWS I’m alright at already).
Looks like there are some references to things that might be similar in the Alexa v3 API.

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I’m wondering if the “Cloud” server will be made open source, so that we can host it by ourself if we want to.
That would also enable component to use “Cloud” without forcing the user to register to the hosted “Cloud”

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