You’d need an assistant just to figure out the language this hunk of junk is speaking, and then a team of PHD wielding lunatics to communicate with it. Calling this platform Home Assistant is an absurd and oxymoronic slap in the face. I suggest a rebranding with the phrase “Two Thousand Deaf, Blind, and Dumb Moving Parts.”
In general to the home assistant community and those responsible for charging 200 dollars and a lengthy waiting period for the new “market ready” product, I am disgusted. There are thousands of inaccurate instructions throughout this forum, online, and provided by home assistant. Those provided by home assistant are ignorantly constructed paragraphs where bullet points are needed.
What’s worse, the official documentation often times suggests editing the configuration.yaml in ways that, when copied directly as informed to do, prevent the home assistant Hub from even restarting due to configuration errors. The official documentation often only explains ways to edit the configuration rather than how to actually do something that should be exceedingly simple, such as connect Spotify or discover a usb plugged DIRECTLY into the home assistant. This project is a joke. It will never be market ready. It will always be for tech freaks who don’t have jobs that prevent them from giving the time needed to get past the learning curve.
Going to market with this platform in the state that it is was probably the biggest mistake whoever made that decision possibly could have made.
Take it off the website as a product for sale. Focus on creating sensical, current, and succinct documentation. I simply cannot believe whoever is responsible for this POS system has put together something so freaking advanced and yet incapable of a simple connection process to any of the services and devices it connects with. I am aghast that this unruly trash pile only goes on to become more of a trash pile unfettered by the slightest hint of logical user interface and experience.
Bring it on HA fan girls, I know you’re chomping at the bit to tell me how ignorant I am for not being able to figure it out. I’m sure I could figure this out. But I ask you this: why in the hell would I bother to figure this out, when there is nothing Home Assistant does that can’t be accomplished another, easier, more intuitive way?
It almost seems like this is a community for people to pat themselves on the back for having accomplished some very basic home automation processes in the most complicated and irritating way possible. Having done that, it is then their reward to refer new users to the ineffectual and belligerently written user documentation which begins halfway through the process, leaving the first steps an utter and complete mystery.
Home Assistant the company? You should truly be embarrassed.