I think you should include a call out charge, just like virtually all tradies, service techs, et all. You would have already have had to do some research, as well as initial discussions, and your travel costs you too.
No matter what you charge, it won’t be as much as the big automation companies charge, plus the consumer is actually getting someone who understands the system, rather than a tech who just does some programming and leaves.
How do control 4 and similar organizations charge? I for one would not want to pay for someone to fix a system that broke of its own accord. In fact in many countries you cannot charge for that sort of thing.
Fair enough if I broke it by fiddling, but consumers have rights. Expensive rights. Rights that you cannot always contact out of.
Also what is a call out fee supposed to cover. There is no travel cost for an ssh login.
If someone wants HA, I assume they know a little but not enough to do it. Whether there is enough trust for SSH is another thing.
A call out fee covers vehicle and time costs. Why can tradies charge it and not another, arguably, greater skilled person not?
No argument with consumer rights, but anyone who makes a choice for HA must be told the repercussions. It will still be much cheaper than the big commercial systems. The gastroenterologist around the corner has two separate and different installations, and it costs them a fortune for any changes.
Thats great. Could you please explain to us what setup are using? Are you using zigbee? what brands are you using? This will help us which systems are reliable and best to install.
Thanks.
After losing my job at the start of covid, I decided to go my own way… It would be good to start sharing resources (marketing etc etc etc)… to this point, feel free to use any of my material you find on my site…
Here is a post I published today on my site: https://iotci.co.uk/10-questions-to-ask-your-smart-home-provider/
… if we can all join forces, follow each others pages etc this will massively help in SEO rankings and hence help keep funding our passion…
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I was going to make a post here but I think it deviates a bit from the original post. Here it is Another Topic on Commercial Applications with Home Installations (Rough How-To?)
hi @coolmonkey5 ,
Which hardware do you install at the client to run HA? Odroid, NUC, other?
Do you give the client full access rights on HA, like installing add-ons, updating themselves, etc?
Thanks.
(So far I installed one HA instance at my father’s, on a RPi+SSD drive. This is imo not a good hardware configuration to have running at clients, but was a cheap way to go. )
In order for HA to be used in a commercial installation, several things are needed 1) Long time support releases, where the found vulnerabilities would be fixed for several years. The clients will not want to change the hardware right away if the new version of HA requires new hardware. Security fixes if no backing changes maybe applied automatically 2) An official map of installers in each city with customer reviews. 3) Trouble-free operation all times, which is achieved by duplicating equipment. HA should support duplication out of the box. 4) certified approved hardware (a list of SSD drives that provide more than 10 years of operation without failures 5) A reference contract with a house developer, where the whole house is on HA with a beautiful landing web page so that the customers can see how cool it really is 7) showrooms with HA 8) Normal display panels that work with HA 9) normal voice assistant (option to select a paid voice assistant but very high quality, which will be built into the smart panel)
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An update of HA never requires new hardware. The only thing that can happen is that your hardware is not supported anymore, because the manufacturer of the hardware decided to change his API or closed access to the API for third parties. There’s absolutely nothing that HA can do against this. The way around this is to only use hardware with local integrations instead of manufacturer specific cloud services.
My system runs for more than 5 years trouble free without any duplication. I only restart my machine when I update HA and then it’s offline for a few minutes max.
The lifespan of an SSD is not specific to HA, every SSD that has a lifespan of 10 years will work with HA for 10 years. There’s official hardware such as the Home Assistant Blue or the upcoming Home Assistant Amber.
What is a normal display panel?
What is a normal voice assistant? Are Alexa and Google not normal voice assistants?
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- Normal display panels - best panel is Ipad, but with removed battery, because li-ion battery can catch fire
- voice assistant in HA (when you press microphone sign in mobile App is very poor), it is better to develop such device with Ok Google, but which can change Lovelace panel, when you speak. To navigate to camera view for example, when you speak “open camera” Also, on main panel when you speak, it must be shown recognized words
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- More serious support for systems like Legrand Netatmo, which are look like regular sockets and switches and work flawlessly. 11) Much better work with video, multi-room, HDMI source selection, partly I described in this request. Drag-and-drop camera video scenarios, actions, image recognize. Visual camera editor 12) translate the site into more languages 13) make HA approved WIFI router that comes with HA. Smart devices must have their own network, the user must not get access there, only the installer, so that the user does not accidentally update the firmware of the devices 14) The HA installation must have the ability to install virtual Android, the HA installer must have access to the screen of this Android remotely. On this Android, the installer will be able to update the firmware of devices remotely. Check the state of the devices, it will also save passwords in the password manager 15) an approved list of 4g modems and automatic transition to modems if the Internet is not available 16) easy binding of HA to a domain if a nabu casa subscription is purchased 17) drawings and layouts for 3d printers, how to do racks for ha so that approved HA installation hardware can be nicely positioned. 18) smart hardware watchdogs that will try to restart HA several times (but will not cause an endless cycle of reboots, but will send an SMS to the installer that the system has completely died at a certain address) There should be no false positives. This is only if the automatic rollback to the backup did not work 19) the recommended certified overvoltage protection equipment, UPS for HA, which is as integrated as possible with HA and, before shutting down, will inform the owner of the house what happened to the current and why all systems will have to be turned off 20) HA must be able to clone an existing system onto an installer’s system. At the same time, all the equipment that the customer has, must be simulated on the simulator by the installer. Each turn of the real equipment must be used to create a mathematical model of stimulation. Accordingly, if bugs appear, the installer will be able to fix them on the simulator without coming to the customer.
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You can show you HA interface on an iPad, there’s even an official Home Assistant companion app for iOS and Android.
I don’t get the obsession with voice assistants, for me a smart home doesn’t need a voice assistant, but to each his own. I think part of what you listed is already possible.
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You have a big development list there don’t you? Which one are you going to start with first and when will you be finished?
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If anyone has any other ideas of what is needed to launch HA into business, write about it in the Feature Requests section on this forum. Also it would be great if a curator appeared, and make some kind of wiki, and ask the creators of the site https://www.home-assistant.io/ to give a link to this wiki
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Almost all of his demands requests are not things even the ‘big guys’ do, or they are just bad ideas in general (at least in the specific execution requested).
It’s like he ran through every smart home/networking/monitoring/management solution he could think of and decided Home Assistant has to handle it all to be viable. Consolidation of appliances does not always make sense, especially for ones responsible for networking or uptime.
3 - Redudancy isn’t so much a thing anymore in residential, or even lite commercial. Enterprise (mission critical) sure, but nobody is trying to install Home Assistant for billion dollar companies…
4 - The PC/server community does this already, it’s not difficult to find SSDs with high TBW ratings.
5 - Home assistant doesn’t deliver any UIs beyond the default one, so why would they advertise UIs they don’t deliver. I don’t think a ‘Community Highlights’ gallery is a bad idea, but they certainly don’t need to advertise ‘beautiful UIs’ because it doesn’t come with any. Crestron, C4, Savant, Lutron, etc only show what their stuff does out of the box.
8 - Normal display panels that work - HA is not in the user interface hardware business. They make software, and are packaging off-the-shelf available components into server appliances (Blue and Amber). Bit of a stretch to say they have to make touch panels. The touch panels that the ‘big guys’ make are glorified (overpriced) Android tablets. You are better off wall mounting an iPad, never have heard of an iPad battery catching fire before. Is there chance/risk? Sure, but you can say that with any electronics device.
9 - Voice control sucks across the board and I think companies spend way too much time into it. Alexa and Google Assistant have millions of users (data points) and billions of dollars of backing, and they are what I would call ‘barely usable’. They function, but they also kinda suck, and these are two of the biggest tech companies with essentially infinite resources (money and training data) and they still can’t get it right.
I firmly believe combination of ‘stationary’ physical controls (Keypads (tabletop or wall), Handheld remote controls, dedicated touch panels, etc) with ‘roaming’ UIs (phone apps, watch apps) and well thought out automations (time, presence, trigger based) squash any desire or need for voice control.
10 - HA already supports plenty of non-gimmicky lighting controls. Yes, the wemos, the TP-Link Kasas, etc are very gimmicky. But there’s support for Lutron, Leviton, KNX, etc - and not to mention support for Z-Wave and Zigbee subsystems. And there’s nothing stopping anyone from making any integration if there’s a supporting API.
11 - I agree there is room for improvement on this, but I would wager <1% of HA installations have two displays in a single room or a centralized/distributed video systemso it should be low on the priority list.
12 - sure, more languages in time. You can’t cover everything at once though. You have to be able to ensure you are communicating what you want to properly, which can be tricky with such a technical project.
13 - Uhh, I don’t think anybody wants to buy a router with home assistant on it, nonetheless an all-in-one WiFi router. We’re talking about professional/commercial use, but this would be to make it more accessible for retail consumer use.
14 - Just no. Buy a $40 android tablet and leave it on-site if you really need a dedicated Android device to ‘update device firmware’ (tip: if you’re doing a professional install you probably shouldn’t be deploying devices that require an Android or iOS app to update their firmware).
15 - You want HA to be responsible for a dual-WAN failover setup? Again, nobody wants HA on a router appliance. Too many critical things in one black box = bad. Use a real router with dual/multi-WAN capabilities to handle this, there are plenty of great ones
16 - I don’t use Nabu Casa so I am not sure of the onboarding process, but I was under the impression it was relatively painless
17 - I am not sure what this is asking for. What are you wanting to 3D print? And rack elevation drawings can easily be done for your own setup in something as simple as Excel, but there are plenty of other tools available. Systems vary so wildly that there is no ‘one size fits all’ rack layout.
18 - ‘Watchdogs’/monitoring - why do you want that to be handled by HA? What if HA is the appliance that fails? Use Domotz with IP PDUs or something similar. I also do not have any desire for any system to ever ‘automatically rollback’, seems like asking for problems.
19 - Why would they specify power protection equipment. Talk to power protection specialists for your specific needs. Furman/Panamax, SurgeX, Torus, Middle Atlantic, APC, etc all make a wide range of products for different use cases. Voltage, Current, Phase, load/draw, # critical loads vs # non-critical loads all are big variables. HA should and only cares that the PC/appliance it is running on is powered how that PC/appliance is intended to be powered, what you do to protect it before that isn’t a software companies job to determine
20 - An interactive UI preview (as in, you can fully interact but it doesn’t actually control devices) is not a bad idea, but I don’t think it’s necessary. But I don’t think any simulator can be used to do anything beside squash UI bugs.
Home Assistant obviously has a lot of room for improvement, but I would call its current iteration an MVP (minimum viable product) - aka it’s good enough to be deployed in the real world.
Been working in the consumer electronics and automation business for over a decade now, and have been a direct dealer for Crestron, C4, Lutron, and Savant. Have directly experienced the evolution of their product lines and offerings, as well as the pain of all their failures (Lutron is the golden child here, the other three have made extremely questionable business decisions this past decade. Mostly in the form of botched hardware or software deployments)
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One thing I think people such as this forget is that HA is an automation platform, not a glorified remote control. The ideal UI is no UI, it should just work to automate stuff without you touching anything.
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I don’t know, I mostly use it as a glorified remote control. And it works rather well for that. Use cases are different for everyone I guess.
For commercial use, I think the most important thing is to have a viable and well maintained long term support release with bug fixes and security patches. The last thing you want is having hundreds of your customers call your support line because the HA supervisor just updated on its own and broke something.
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Thank you for your opinion.
Then, it may be possible to integrate with existing voice assistants. Example: HA is displayed on the TV. You say to voice assistant -
- Show the state of the living room - HA switches Lovelace to the frame of the living room.
- You say - display the camera image - it switches to a specific camera.
- You say - show the graph of electricity consumption, it goes to this graph
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Those don’t sound out of the realm of possibility, but using them in real life doesn’t seem practical. TVs are really bad at being dashboards unless they’re dedicated to being just a dashboard. They’re simply too slow.
- Activate Voice Command
- Voice Command Processed (this has a >0% failure rate, doesn’t work every time, nothing more frustrating than waiting & twiddling your thumbs only for it to hear the wrong thing, and either doing nothing or doing something totally unintended)
- If Off, Command sent to Power TV on
- If on different input, input command sent to TV
- HDCP Handshake Happens
- Info is finally displayed
I’d estimate that process is at minimum 15 seconds to the point where your information you wanted is actually on the screen, could be longer too.
Whereas could be displayed within seconds on a smartwatch, phone, tablet, or dedicated touch panel with no voice interaction.
If I can use a nearby device and do it faster and with no chance of miscommunication or failure, what benefit is gained from doing it over voice?
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