Stability of Home Assistant?

[shschampion (Steve Champion)]

I am relatively new to Home Assistant. I have been running a Home Assistant Green for about three months now, and something rather strange occurred. I was wondering if this sort of thing is common.

Yesterday, some of my automations stopped working properly. They are very simple ones which use a four-button Hue controller to toggle four different lights on or off. They were turning the lights ON but not OFF. As far as I could see, only these four automations were malfunctioning.

It had been working fine previously so, after scratching my head a lot and trying some different ways of doing the automation (unsuccessfully) I put it back the way it was before and restarted Home Assistant.

Problem solved! Everything worked normally again.

My question is, does this sort of thing happen routinely with Home Assistant?

I have several more complex automations than the ones that failed, and none of those seem to have done anything remotely weird

Nothing exceptional about the automations. One example:

alias: Hue button 3
description: ""
trigger:
  - device_id: 641415f16e6b203ace47768f57d627dc
    domain: zha
    platform: device
    type: remote_button_short_press
    subtype: dim_down
condition: []
action:
  - type: toggle
    device_id: f53cb02c1a7193dd40ca39d18db9c443
    entity_id: b49ff94feee39e848d6b18e97363d722
    domain: switch
mode: single

[Neil_Brownlee]

I haven’t had that sort of issue, but I don’t use devices, only entities. If possible try not to use devices in automations unless absolutely necessary.

[Rodrick]

@shschampion

My question is, does this sort of thing happen routinely with Home Assistant?

I fairly new to HA also, the first thing I learn about automation was not to use a device as a trigger, it becomes unreliable sometimes. My issue was similar when I started and I was advised to use entity and state instead of device.

You can try that to see if it helps.

[shschampion (Steve Champion)]

Interesting… why do entities work better than devices?

I was just creating them using the visual editor. After adding the remote in ZHA, I followed my note to “Automations +” and added them thus:

… etc., etc,

I’m pleased to have solved the problem by restarting, but a bit perplexed.

[shschampion (Steve Champion)]

I will certainly try that! Thanks.

[francisp (Francis)]

Why and how to avoid device_ids in automations and scripts

Background When you start writing automations, a device trigger seems the obvious choice. Everybody knows what a device is and it comes at the top of the UI dropdown list. [image] It works… but it is certainly not a “great way to start” because it is storing up problems for the future. Far better to use an entity, with state or numeric_state. Device_id problems The yaml will be longer and harder to follow, which may make maintenance difficult, especially a few months down the line when y…

[shschampion (Steve Champion)]

Thanks. That seems to make sense.

However, I can’t find entities for the buttons on the Hue controller. There only appear to be these in the entities list:

[francisp (Francis)]

For Zigbee buttons, the preferred method is using events.

[tom_l]

@shschampion

I put it back the way it was before and restarted Home Assistant.

Problem solved! Everything worked normally again.

Next time this occurs there are things you can do to see what went wrong.

1. Look in Settings → System → Logs for errors related to your automation or the entities (tags, sensors, etc…) it relies on.

2. Look at the automation trace (if it triggered): Troubleshooting automations - Home Assistant

I have a few hundred automations and they only ever fail if there is an issue with the entities they rely on or I have made a mistake in my configuration. None of them use device ids.