Hi
I am new to HA and honestly, I’ve not done so much. Spending most time learning.
Still, my plans for my smart home includes HA.
I would like to know in which direction HA development is heading to avoid bad decision.
Is there a roadmap for HA, and maybe a way to put my vote on direction and priority of work tasks.
Priority of work tasks is mostly down to the individual developers. There are some overarching priorities handled by the core team, but things like develop an integration for Thread is up to individuals, or not. There are also architecture discussions that shape the future of HA.
If you’re going to base your decision on what things might turn up in the next year then you’re going to be disappointed, whatever you choose.
If you base your decision on what’s already supported, and what’s already underway, then you’ll hopefully be less disappointed.
As with any IT project, your first step is to define your requirements. What’s the real justification for this? For me, it was monitoring temperatures and my heating system. Avoiding a very expensive repair after a frozen pipe easily justifies the cost and effort.
Once you address your primary issues, you can add other features just for fun. But be careful. Every feature, function, protocol, integration, automation and device type you add will add to the maintenance overhead and increase the number of breaking changes introduced with each version.
There’s a lot of good advice in this thread:
Please yes listen to this one. SO many times, you’ll see someone pop into a forum and say “Hey I have this -insert device name here- how can I use it?”
Just follow Tom and Tinkerer’s advice to always know your goal and research what’s supportable and doable before you start - you’ll be fine. You run into problems when you try to squeeze tech into your use case - rather than the other way around.
In my case I also add to the following requirements: AND my grandma needs to be able to use it without a manual. AND my wife needs to be happy with the way it looks in our home.
Welcome!
When I started on this journey, it was just an educational hobby. I researched what open source systems were available and what device protocols were used, especially ones designed for the smart home.
I found, at that time, Zigbee & Z-Wave were the two large standards with decent compatibility. I also found that all Wi-Fi based smart home devices use the crowded 2.4 GHz RF space instead of the more efficient 5 GHz one. Due to my experience with 2.4GHz as a Wi-Fi engineer I decided to not try Zigbee initially but, since I am in North America, I was able to buy a combo stick that did both. I bought some Z-Wave devices that appeared to be compatible and started my journey.
I later bought some cheap Chinese devices because Z-Wave is so expensive. The plugin switches work pretty well but the PIR sensors were basically a mistake.
I left HA for openHAB about 3 years ago when both were undergoing changes due to the poor support in HA at that time for my particular devices.
I came back here about a year ago due to the awesome zwavejs integration and because the developers here listen & respond to user concerns. I was told over at OH that I needed to wait 3 months before using my new device because they broke backward compatibility during a minor version development with no prior warning, which broke device database updates.
Okay, sounds like a sound advice.