Newbie question: return lights to previous state

Configuration
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When I first started none of this existed. It’s so easy now in comparison. As I said before, you may want to abandon ship and come back in a year or 2. It might be more your style by then.

Edit: just for a comparison… I started in 0.2x, hassio didn’t exist, the only option was hass in a venv. Everything was yaml. Nothing was discovered. All configurations were done through raspbian instead of add ons. It was a STEEP learning curve for someone who had 0 Linux experience. That was 3 years ago. I can’t imagine how easy this will all be in 3 years. I’m expecting it to wipe my butt tbh.

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I feel like home assistant is just not for you if you have such a hard time even with the documentation. Home assistant isn’t meant for people who want a smartthings like experience and expect to condigure things once and then it works. Currently it’s still in development and meant for people who see home automation as a hobby, because you need to invest time and maintain the system. And with every release there are breaking changes, you need to adapt your system etc. So it’s for “nerds” at the moment.

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I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s just for nerds. If you have zwave or zigbee it’s stupid easy. And with the planned zwave changes it’s onlu going to get easier.

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Yeah, if someone finds this thread, jazzisj’s post is a little more informative, as it contains a concrete example and removes the doubt if it works.

I dont know. I have to say, in general Im hugely disappointed in my little foray in to home automation. The devices you buy are usually not smart, they are just as dumb as they used to be, only remotely controlled, and in most cases, the remote is not included. Someone else controls it and wants to charge you for every “click” of the remote, or capture and probably sell your data.

Then there is the interoperability issue on every level from communication protocols to the integration software. Then the complexity. Oh the complexity. IFTTT is simple. Simple is good, but thats taking it too far by not allowing even “if this or that than that” let alone constructs like when or except. I couldnt believe that. How did that get so big? So I ended up here. Well, its less simple :slight_smile: For a hobby project this is all fine and dandy, but per my other post, if a light bulb needs replacing, you shouldnt have to hire a software guru to replace it.

Anyway, I cant speak for speed of progress of HA. I just started using it. I will say I see a lot of room for improvement :). The interface is honestly a bit of a mess. Overall it strikes me as lacking a unified vision. Some things are almost over the top simplified, while others seem to assume users are completely fine writing code, even though they may be required just to get started. There is no consistency. Anywhere. Groups have their own yaml, but light groups have to go in configuration.yaml. Groups and scripts can be reloaded, but light groups not, you have to restart HA. there is a million little things like that, that either suggest devs all doing their own thing uncoordinated, or issues that cant be fixed because of legacy / backwards compatibility.

So before it starts wiping my butt, I do hope someone tries looking at it from a holistic perspective and perhaps rethinks a few concepts. Like integrations.

Anyway, enough ranting, lets see if I can make some lights switch, its getting dark LOL.

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Well you came in during a transition. All components are in the process of transitioning from yaml only to the GUI. 3 months ago there was only 15-20 integrations in the UI, now there is 90ish.

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Two things; first, I contested the notion that setting up HA was so easy. I got it working using the documentation and persistence, but I think I made my point. Its not intuitive, not with my mix of devices.

Secondly, if I knew of a better alternative, Id use it. Smarthings doesnt support my thermostats, or Id switch in a heartbeat. Openhab does, and I may still switch back, but its “paper UI” is ugly as sin and too limited, and habpanel UI pretty much seems to require you to be an affluent web developer. Give me openhab backend and lovelace UI, and I might be happy. Until then ill just rant and moan while I struggle to make progress :slight_smile:

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I feel the need to jump in here (don’t I always…:wink:)…

But I feel for all of the new people coming in. And vertigo’s situation is kind of the example of the issues.

Back in the day when many of us started HA was kind of “in the groove” of configuring everything thru yaml (with Jinja thrown in for templates, of course). Not that yaml was necessarily “easy” and not that there wasn’t a learning curve involved but it was kind of standardized at least where yaml was involved.

Then there came the concept of “making it easy for new people” by moving everything to a GUI point-and-click interface. I believe that is kind of where things started actually getting harder for new people and experienced people alike.

Those that have been around for a long time generally for the most part already knew the backend and yaml. They already know how the stuff that happens “behind the scenes” mostly worked at least on the configuration side of things.

Then the GUI configuration elements started to be introduced and offered the promise of it being “so easy a caveman can do it”. And the people who already knew how things generally worked could then relate the things they already knew to the shiny new way of doing things and mostly got it. But that also meant that there was a whole new set of things to learn but everybody kind of “oohed and aahed” over it and tried to start using the new stuff and could hack away at it until it worked. New people don’t have that prior experience.

And to make it even worse the GUI config has been introduced bit by bit over many many months so it increases the confusion on what is now configured thru the GUI/integration/entity registry/device registry/automation editor/script editor/scene editor and what can’t be done thru those avenues and you have to revert to the “old ways” of doing things. Let’s face it, how many people who’ve been around since before all of the new GUI stuff has been introduced now exclusively use that to configure their HA instance? I would bet there’s not one. Everybody uses some form of hybrid between the GUI and hand coding everything. I know for a fact that most of my configuration is done thru coding things by hand. Not all but most - a hybrid approach. And the reason for that is because the GUI stuff kind of sucks right now. But new people don’t know that.

Now, as a new person just getting started, who’s seen all the hype about “making it easier”, how are they supposed to know why when they try to do something using the GUI and it doesn’t work for them that it’s just because the GUI doesn’t support that yet as opposed to it being just their screwing something up?

And to top it all off the documentation hasn’t ever kept up with the rapid pace of development but it’s now even worse since there are so many ways of doing things that you never know which docs are good and which ones haven’t been updated yet.

That also goes for the “google/youtube” route of learning things. If something doesn’t work for you and you have no idea if it’s you or if it’s the documentation being incomplete (or even worse when the documentation leaves stuff out because it just assumes you already know things because they’ve been doing it so long they forget what isn’t common knowledge for the average person) you do what any tech savvy person would do in that situation and go to google. How would they know which resources still work and which are outdated? Because they aren’t all outdated but a lot are. I admit I’ve been there before.

The best and most useful thing that anyone can suggest (as has been done in this thread already) and should be right in the intro to the getting started docs (if it’s not already there) is to point out that going to Google/Youtube isn’t the recommended way of getting help and people should use this forum as the go-to resource. Not that the other stuff can’t be useful as stated above, just that you can’t rely on it being current.

Ha has always been and will continue to be a “tinkerer’s toy” for a long time to come. TBH, I don’t know if it can ever get to the point where the average joe-blow user will feel comfortable using it.

There’s a reason why the commercially available products are so basic and barely make home automation slightly less dumb. It’s because average people won’t want to take the time to dig in and learn this stuff. And the reason HA is still a tinkerers toy is because being open source and having limited resources to throw at it the development of switching everything over to point-and-click (which will be absolutely necessary to get out of that “toy” phase to where average people might want to use it) is a long time off.

Using the automation editor as an example, yes, you can point-and-click a bunch of basic things in there and it will work for the basic stuff. But what happens when you want to move past basic. You will still need to learn templates and their associated languages. That right there makes HA both better than other commercial products for its versatility and worse than commercial products because there is the promise of “doing more but easier” and it can’t deliver. Not because of anything wrong with HA but the average abilities of people who might use it.

I’ve been with HA for years and I still rely on a few “Gurus” here to help with the more complex stuff.

That said,

I Love HA and find it extremely interesting and fun! :slightly_smiling_face:

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@vertigo I think your experience is valuable. People like @finity and I have been around a while. We have read the docs, avoided outdated YouTube vids and absorbed a lot of forum posts and blog posts.

Not to criticise you, but I suspect you possibly leapt in a bit quickly. Many of the things you had trouble with are documented, like a page on yaml, an early entry in the docs about configuration.yaml, and so forth. I spent a few hours reading through every page indexed on the docs link, some I glossed over, others i absorbed as much as my little brain allowed. Then I cruised the forum, mainly the Configuration section (for obvious reasons) and Share Your Projects section for examples of complete working things. I slso cruised a lot of the Integrations links just to see what hardware was supported. I did watch some yt vids.

Then I started adding hardware I knew would work, one at a time.

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Sometimes the struggle makes the end result that much sweeter.

From one newb to another, don’t give up on Home Assistant yet, it may end up surprising you and winning you over.

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I feel you. Home Assistant is pretty much the opposite of being an Assistant at the moment - i makes everything just so much more complicated than it would have to be. I also tried bringing this up at some point on this forum by saying “maybe the community should focus more on usability instead of shoving dozens of half-baked integrations into the system”. I also tried to point out that if one has to read through documentations for hours just to get a single bulb running, there might be something fundamentally wrong with the approach of the whole system. I was met with about as much understanding as you - HA really only is for nerds at the moment and unfortunately quite a few people here want to keep it that way…

I am thinking of ditching HA in favour of a pure NodeRed set-up. I already had NodeRed running within HA, before HA shot itself in the head with some random update and is now unusable. I feel NodeRed is probably the most complete and versatile GUI at the moment and easily lets you do stuff you would go crazy trying to figure out in HA.

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Yes, so you keep saying. You clearly haven’t been around long or you would be aware of the very significant efforts to make home assistant easier. And it certainly is now!

Of course you are free to use anything you like. Your refund is given at the door.

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I’m not saying there are too little efforts being made, i’m just saying HA is absolutely not at a point where it should claim to have “easy installation and updates”, that one can “install many popular add-ons with a single click” and that you can “focus on integrating your devices and writing automations” (as it says on the webpage) because that could not be further from reality! Also i have been intensely using HA for over a year now - if that does not qualify as “long enough” to have an opinion it actually proofs my point about the fact that many in this community really want HA to stay a nerd-only thing!

I actually went ahead and set up a simple Deconz/NodeRed install on Raspbian. Using that set-up I rebuilt ALL the functionality i had painfully pieced together in HA during that year in just one single afternoon - without having to write a single line of code! My choice is made.

Unfortunately there was nobody by the door to hand me the refund for one year of constant headaches with HA, so I’m still waiting for that… :slight_smile:

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I am glad you found a way to be happy with your home automation.