You’re making assumptions about things that haven’t been added yet, based on how things currently work.
It’s probably because we don’t see why everyone in the home needs to have access to the Home Assistant instance. I can see the adults that live in the home needing it, but I don’t see why the kids need to.
If HA is how you control your lights, it’s probably at least useful to be able to let the kids control the lights. It’s also useful to allow kids in some cases control of things like unlocking the front door, opening the garage door, etc.
If you don’t see why some of us want our kids to be able to access some things controlled by HA, then perhaps you have put less of your home into HA than some of us.
I can think of a few ways to do those things that don’t involve needing access to the Home Assistant instance. Are they as easy as installing the app on their phones? No, but they do work quite well. A couple of them even have the side effect of applying to everyone that visits your home.
Hard to evaluate them as you haven’t provided any specifics. Nonetheless, ideally, I would like to continue controlling those things through HA and not have to manage multiple UIs due to the inadequacies of HA that resulted from incorrect assumptions baked into it by the developers.
That said, if you are willing to share specifics, I’m certainly not opposed to evaluating alternate solutions as a stop-gap at least.
NFC Tags, Motion Sensors, and even Zigbee or Z-Wave scene controller light switches are some of them. I’m actually doing this so my stepdad doesn’t have to start carrying a smartphone instead of a regular flip phone, which he prefers.
The lights are already (mostly) Zigbee-based (Philips Hue for the most part, though a couple are MyQ based). The kid has a smart phone (She’s 15), but she also has an unfortunate tendency to want to set the thermostat to crazy values when unsupervised.
However, if I give her access to the Hue application, I have the same problem, she gets control of ALL the lights, not just the ones I want to let her control. HA, at least I can hide the ones she shouldn’t be controlling and raise the bar for mischief slightly.
The application for the locks in question is also woefully inadequate in this area and doesn’t have the ability to do geofencing (I don’t want her unlocking/opening the door unless she’s close to the house, for example). Same issues with the garage door. Sure, I could add NFC readers to operate the garage door and door locks, but that seems like a lot of additional cost to overcome a software deficiency.
Seems like you have a parenting challenge and not a software challenge.
Jokes aside, you can do other things too, like an automation that prevents the thermostat from being set too high, or a notification to alert you. Granted, if they know how the whole system works and where to fiddle, they could turn these off too.
To me there’s a difference between controlling dashboards vs getting to the system’s settings and configuration. I’d place a higher priority on the latter. A single, true admin role that (really) limits accessing an entity’s settings from a popup or any of the system dashboards would already go a long way.
EDIT: Another thought: If you are into the Apple ecosystem, you can avoid direct HA access and only expose certain entities via HomeKit.
Why do you need dashboards if everything can be arranged to be controlled without them? Could we remove dashboard from HA?
I, on the other hand, really like to have the ability to control various things with my phone, even though I agree that everything in a smart home should be controllable without a phone or automated in a such way that control is not needed.
There are things that don’t make sense to be controlled outside of the app though. For example changing colour of the lights, if it’s not something you and your family do regularly. Why shouldn’t I let my daughter have fun changing the colours to whatever she wants? But I don’t want her to accidently change some automation. Or maybe I’m using HA to restrict her access to games or whatever.
Or, when I go on vacation and a family friend is going to check the house when we are not here, I would love to be able to leave them NFT tag that opens HA guest account for them, with a dedicated dashboard to control some basic features, and you know, brag about my nice smart home a bit ,.
I’m using it now a couple of months. And I was shocked that a RBAC is not implemented. I hope it will come soon. Is verry strange that’s not thought about it in the first design.
I’ve got the Life360 integration working again. Please see:
That ability is available in 2024.6.
And it was already possible before with the conditional card too.
But what you’re describing with turning lights on to reach the bathroom isn’t really Home Automation as I understand the concept. To me, what you’re describing is Home Control with a remote device. To me, if it’s something everyone that visits you or lives with you should be able to use, you find ways to make it possible without a smart phone or tablet, like using motion sensors and time-based light dimming.
100%. Why would anyone want to replace turning on lights via a simple wall switch with having to open an app on a phone and find the appropriate entity all whilst walking through the house…
So AUTOMATE it. Opening an app and MANUALLY turning lights on is not the point of HA.
Are you telling me that your house doesn’t have light switches in the hallway and toilet?
As Petro pointed out a few posts up… you can.
eg:
The point of this thread…IMHO…is that while you can change the VIEW of a user you can’t keep that user from accessing everything in HA.
Likely fine for the 6 year old, but no real security.
Hate to see new users get confused on that point.
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You can’t, that’s not built into the system. No I don’t know if it’s on the roadmap.