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…