Home Assistant - first impressions

Well Home Assistant is being talked about in quite a few corners of the internet lately, so i thought I’d give it a go in my house. Now I am no ordinary user, I am in the top 10% of programmers in the world, so there is nothing that will stop me from getting this up and running, so I thought I would give you a unique perspective on Home Assistant from a fresh set of eyes.

• Firstly I run windows python (all good, the instructions to install python and home assistant should work, wrong) I have a ton of python experience, I had to go through 4 different very harsh error messages to get HomeAssistant and its dependencies to install and run, all of which google helped to resolve. With ZERO help from the error messages produced from Home Assistant itself, leads me to think that not much error handling or thought is going into what might go wrong in the code and handling it gracefully. I video recorded it from the beginning, but the recording crashed because it took me soo long to install home assistant, the snagit video recorder seems to not handle itself either, so i lost all the video sorry.

• There is a rather large problem in branding between Home Assistant and Hass and Hass.io there seems to be some split personality disorder going on, and its confusing for the average user. Pick a name and stick with it. don’t abbrev. it, and don’t create shortcuts called hass to run it, just use homeassistant, and stick with it! I can type hass into my cmd window and it runs from anywhere. why not just stay with the brand name homeassistant?

• The fresh clean Home Assistant is now up and running, but there is nothing inside it, out of the box, except looks like some sunrise/sunset thing going on, and a bunch of errors in the error logs, and a restart button. Where is a nice web configuration editor? Why can’t i just click add component. or Enable Component like i can in WordPress or Chrome.

• I am now up to installing the components, which the components webpage looks great… but do you think I can install them like an addon? nope. do you think that I can edit configuration files, yeah piece of cake. do you think it verifies ok, yep. do you think I can see anything in the frontend other than out of the box? nope. I can restart the HomeAssistant service in the shell of a ui, but thats about it so far, lol.

• I can only take 4 hours of this at a time. It feels like Home Assistant is only for the very hardcore.
To Be continued…

2 Likes

I’d suggest a search and review of the many other similar threads. The TL/DR version (from memory):

  • HA’s version number should give a strong hint that it’s a long way from “production ready”, there are many rough edges and breaking changes are normal
  • The “nice web configuration editor” is slowly coming together, that automation editor didn’t exist a few revisions ago. If you want something with an all singing and all dancing GUI, there are plenty of commercial solutions
  • If you can look past those, and embrace the use of a platform that’s under heavy development, you’ll find a very flexible, powerful, platform

Oh, the Windows install page comes with a warning banner for a reason :wink:

14 Likes

I am on the bottom 10% of programmers so I used google a lot to resolve error that occur in HA. I found asking on this forum saves a lot of time as many run into similar problems.

22 Likes

I agree that Homeassistant is far from ‘Production Ready’ but it still remains one of the best Home Automation platforms out there, including commercial ones.

4 Likes

Then I hope you plan on contributing to this great project. :slight_smile:

34 Likes

wow.

Humility is definitely NOT your strong suit, eh?

34 Likes

My 12 year old son got it going on a rPI3 and had his sisters lights scaring the crap out of her in under 2 hours,

I then took notice of the yelling going on and ‘took over’ the project. I do suspect he’s got a secret account on the rPI still waiting for Halloween hyjinx…

Perhaps your abilities are so fine tuned to the top 10% work you do that watching how to videos is beyond you, But they worked for a 12year old, watch the Bruh Christmas tree video as it’s what got my son started.

16 Likes

Installed Hassio on a Raspberry PI no issues.

Only frustrating part was setting up the wifi , which took me 3 attempts to get working (frustrating part was turning off the Pi removing SDcard, configure, turn back on, not working, rinse and repeat lol)

I have had some experience using OpenHAB and that has helped with configuring HA, I had no issues setting the configuration and finding my devices.

I can see the point about branding, however Hass.io is a specific setup for the Raspberry Pi, while Home Assistant is the application itself.

Coming from OpenHAB, this has been surprisingly easy to setup with the documentation up to date and easy to follow.

1 Like

Thanks for making me feel better about my abilities. :wink: I am definitely not a top 10% programmer and I was able to get it up and running first time about a year ago. And this was before there was an automation editor so I have been doing the old style (non-editor) myself and never had a problem I couldn’t solve. Especially with a little help from a really great community.

You do have some good points as the branding needs more clarification but I think your whole purpose posting this was a little harsh given it’s only on version 0.52. Correct me if I’m wrong, but anything with a version number under 1.0 is still alpha or beta software so maybe you need to give it a chance to mature.

Hopefully you can turn that frown upside down and help contribute to this project than cast it off. It has great potential and I know one day will be very easy to use. In the meantime, there’s a new release every 2 weeks!!! This is to me the best feature of Home Assistant. I don’t have to wait 3-4 months for an update or new features. Kudos to the developers and contributors. They are a very talented and dedicated group and my house (and wife I must add) thanks them!

Anyways, I wish you all the best and hopefully you stick with Home Assistant.

6 Likes

I am the bottom 0,001% of the worlds programmer, and I made it to work … so its not that difficult. But yes if you are in the 0,00001% (the majority of the population) you will not bother with HASS

6 Likes

What sort of programmer in the “top 10%” uses windows… c’mon.

28 Likes

I’m a terrible programmer, having only studied for a few years, and did have some issues getting it installed. Google and the forum helped. It is visibly improving with each iteration these great volunteers submit and I hope it continues with the same velocity. Yes, the configuration is frustrating, docs and examples and demo videos need to be more readily available for beginners to follow, and i agree about the many different ways to install and branding need work, but it is improving all the time.

Perhaps you could contribute a beginners how-to guide with the relevant gotchas as its all fresh in your memory. I’m sure it would be a very welcome addition :slight_smile:

2 Likes

@wingers1290 I was thinking the same thing! Hahaha

2 Likes

I started using Home Assistant when it was a lot more buggy than it is now and got it to work fine. I have no programming skills and I barely know how to read Python. Show m C++ and Python and I wont be able to differentiate.

Home Assistant is the name of the software and ‘hass’ is the name of the service (Home Assistant System Service, I believe) and HassIO is a method to run it (ResinOS, Docker, Addons and extra GUI on the Frontend) so different names for different things. That makes sense if you ask me.

The recommended setup is on a Linux based system and most people use a Raspberry Pi 3 but Ubuntu is also a common choice. HassIO is getting more and more popular as it is almost plug and play.

Other solutions might be easier to use and trust me I have tried loads but Home Assistant stands out with regards to its flexibility and the huge amount of different components. The focus has been and I think still is to make it compatible with as many services as possible. There is now more focus on making it user friendly with HassIO and an Automation Editor but as you certainly know as you are in the top 10% it is no easy feat to create a reliable editor with the huge amount of flexibility Home Assistant offers.

6 Likes

It’s not even hit version 1.0 yet, why does everyone seem to forget this?

5 Likes

@nzhome, I’m curious how do you know u r in the top 10%? I want to know how I ranked too…

11 Likes

I’m more on the lower end of the “top programmers” but I didn’t really had too many issues so far. OK, I just started and try to find my way into the different components (SLOWLY gut goaly) but with this community and some common sense, everything is easily fixable!

I’m even a newbie when it comes to RPi and Linux and I was able to install Home Assistant, secure it and make it available on the internet via NGINX :slight_smile:

I agree that dealing with the yaml files via text editor is not the easiest and most comfortable way, but like everyone said: we are still far away from a version 1.x So who expects a perfect GUI with fancy online editors??

As soon as you read about Home Assistant, you should be aware that it involves a lot of DIY and programming / testing / fixing.

@nzhome, you joined this community over a year ago. So you should know the differences (and IMPROVEMENTS) that were done over the last 12 months?!

And this community lives from GIVE and take. So why not help to make it more stable and user friendly? Should be quite easy for a Top 10% programmer?

Thanks,
Daniel

4 Likes

I am the 100% of the non programmers in the world :earth_americas: but as mentioned here several times I figured out how to run home assistant by try and error asking the great community and being active in the chat :thought_balloon:

2 Likes

I have my Home Assistant running in a Docker container on a NUC. Also running in a Docker container on this NUC is Syncthing. I have syncthing syncing the entire home assistant config directory to my desktop, which is running a syncthing client. I use Visual Studio Code to manage my configs, and after I save it is almost INSTANTLY in my Home Assistant Docker. I find this to be the best method for me and actually do not mind this workflow at all for configuration. I don’t want to configure the whole thing from the Web GUI.

2 Likes

I don’t mind even using nano or any other text editor. :slight_smile: I grew up with DOS and I’m fine with working on the prompt and “stupid” editors. I even like PowerShell better than all those stupid Windows GUIs :slight_smile: I can get my job done easier and faster on the prompt…

It looks like our “top 10% programmer” is more into a “I click some buttons in the GUI and it creates my config” solution and that’s why I (partially) agreed that this would be more “user friendly” - but probably not needed in a 0.xx version of a program. Once HA hits a 1.x or 2.x version number, it should be considered to be more consumer friendly. Right now it’s just an awesome playground for some nerds and techy people who likes to play around and figure stuff out… But that’s just my opinion :slight_smile:

4 Likes