I like Home Assistant.
I like it a lot.
But I am slowly finding myself start wondering if it can handle anything with any slightly complicated logic.
I came here after trying out OpenHAB and to be fair I liked that a lot less but in the short time I ‘evaluated’ it I felt it was better documented so less of an ordeal to learn.
I am however finding some quite fundamental things apparently missing from the functionality of HA to be frustrating. Such as the lack of the ability to have a dynamically defined delay
and now what appears to be a lack of any real logic programming. Specifically. I have re-worked my project (which I don’t consider to be particularly complex) several times to try and get around the foibles of HA and today I thought I had cracked it, but when it didn’t work I found this [Calling scripts from a script] which although only two posts from Jan '17 and Jun '17 seems to preclude scripts being used as a useful logic processing feature. I have not seen that documented anywhere and indeed, do these two posts even make it true?
And yes, I am new here so I could be wrong about all this - I would love it if I was and apologise in advance - but the main issue I am having is not how to do things, i am happy to read, learn and try, but that the most fundamental ways in which HA works do not seem to be well documented, or if they are I can’t find them.
I am not complaining as such, I know this is open source with all that that entails, I have nothing but admiration for, and am very grateful indeed to, everyone who has contributed in any way to this project. I will also continue working with it because as I said at the beginning I like it a lot. I just wish it were easier to at least find out what HA is capable of so that at least I don’t spend my time chasing solutions only to find that they are simply not possible!
This post is born out of frustration, not anger or criticism - there are some people here doing some very, very clever stuff - I just wish I knew where to find the resources (if they exist) to enable me to learn more about what I am able to achieve. Learning how to do things is the easy bit. First you need to know what is possible.
In the unlikely event that after having said all that anyone wants to tell me (with some pseudo code to suit my situation?) I am happy to share what I am trying to do