This is probably a ridiculous question but I bought a Home Assistant Green a few months ago, haven’t had a lot of time to do anything but I’m looking at controlling a couple of simple Smart Life and Tuya devices. I see there’s a Tuya integration. Ok, I still have to create a Tuya account and add the devices to the Tuya account. What’s the point of having Home Assistant? What am I missing? I’m a novice at Home Assistant but not completely clueless having programmed PLCs, CNC, manage VPN and Remote Desktop applications. Actually we remote access hardware via RDP all the time.
As your home automation setup grows, you are likely to end up with lots of different apps on your phone, which can become a bit of a pain when trying to remember which one is used to handle the landing light for example.
HA brings them all together under a single app (on your phone) and has a great web UI for the PC, which makes it easier to work with, so you can have ALL of your automations in a single place.
The other benefit is that many of the integrations run locally and not over the internet to the provider’s own servers, meaning that your data is private AND your automations can work even if the internet is down.
There are probably lots of other good reasons to use HA, but the above are probably the main ones.
1 Like
HA controls and automates smart home devices.
The benefit with HA is that it is free and open and tries to integrate with as many smart home ecosystems as possible.
Many other ecosystems try to fence off their world and that means you can often not have your Tuya lights turn on when you Philips Hue motion sensor detects your presence.
I think there is a TuyaLocal integration too, but it is probably a third party integration and not a core one, so it is probably installed manually or through HACS.
HACS can be installed from https://hacs.xyz and it is probably the single most important installation you can do in HA, because it gives access to literally thousand of extra integrations and front end features.
Unfortunately Tuya may not be the best choice of device for local control. Have a search here and you will find a few ways to connect tuya devices.
As for what does HA do. If you can imagine it, chances are someone has found a way to do it. Just search the forums or docs.
At its simplest level HA allows you to connect any device to any device, therefore allowing, say a tuya switch to turn on a philips hue bulb. The possibilities are endless. Ha will then allow most devices to be local control, removing the need to use a companies server to operate.
I think one of the simplest explanations is, it attempts to centralize all the various IOT ecosystems, with an open and local-preferred system, to interact and automate across all the supported products.
1 Like
Thanks for all the fast replies, much appreciated. I had more or less understood how Home Assistant integrates many smart home ecosystems into a single unified interface. What I’m not understanding is security part of the equation. Simple example where I just need to turn power something on and off. So I’ve been using this device for probably 20 years : ::: AVIOSYS IP POWER ::: This sits on our internal network. You can RDP or VPN into the network and access the backend via IP address and login to turn switches on and off etc. No third parties involved. Completely private. This is ancient. So I figured there must be something better available now - which brought me to Home Assistant. But if all Home Assistant does is conveniently group all the various spyware apps into 1 interface… If I use the IP9258 device to power something on or off it’s done directly by me on our network. If I have a TUYA switch doing it the good people at TUYA monitor everything don’t they?
As I said tuya is not a good choice of hardware if you want local control. It is one of the brands that make local control not easy. Unless it is a zigbee device. If you use a zigbee device it can all be done locally with no Internet needed. As can zwave, matter, thread and a lot of WiFi stuff. It’s a matter of understanding the different ecosystems, before buying your IOT things.
Well I imagine that would be entirely dependent on the device and its ecosystem. I don’t have nor familiar with tuya, so I can’t speak them specifically.
As you say, there is a lot of ‘spyware’ in IOT stuff, but there is also a lot of local only/local first stuff.
Thanks for clarifying that. The tuya devices are just some cheap switches so not using them isn’t a problem. I have no problem using any of the suggested ecosystems. I guess the “buzzword” is “local control”? So if you’re using integrations like Alexa or Google there’s no security advantage doing it through Home Assistant correct? In the Integrations page would I filter by Local Push or Local Polling in the IoT Class to identify integrations that offer local control?
Both are local control.
The difference is that local push means the device will send a message to HA when something happens.
Local polling means HA needs to ask the device if something happened, which it will do with an interval, so there might be a delay.
Hi,
Home Assistant can do a lot, depending on various things such as the hardware you run it on and the type of technology you want to use for your connected devices (e.g. bulbs, door sensors, motion sensors, etc.).
For example, I run HASS OS on a dedicated PC with the following setup:
- Yeelight bulbs (WiFi → local only via the Yeelight integration, manually blocked in the firewall)
- 1 Tuya LED strip (WiFi → local only via the Local Tuya integration, manually blocked in the firewall)
Using a Zigbee ConBee II stick, I have:
- Philips Hue bulbs
- Aqara motion and door sensors
- Roller shade motors
I also have a 433 MHz antenna (RFXcom) for some motion sensors (I started my Home Assistant experience with this one).
Containers / Add-ons:
- Frigate Add-on (or “app”
) for local AI person detection (including a Coral accelerator) for my local Foscam cameras - Local DNS and AdGuard server
- Local time server
- etc.
Then you have automations, scenes, templates…anything is possible when you spent some time to learn about it.
Yes. HA can combine local integrations as well as cloud, but it cannot make what is cloud less cloud. Unless there is a way to access said devices locally and shut off internet to the device.
With regard to Google and Alexa: they require cloud to cloud connections to your devices. You can limit the attack surface somewhat by exposing devices to Google or Alexa using Matter/Thread locally, but Google and Alexa themselves stay cloud based.
The alternative is using local voice ( ald/or local AI) with Home Assistant. So basically you choose with HA and the devices you buy.
1 Like
Thanks to everyone for the answers and info, much appreciated! Personally I think that this distinction between local control and cloud based control is a major/primary one. Maybe I’m just slow but I would have expected that to be more clearly presented, particularly in the general Home Assistant overview.
it is not necessarily ‘cloud’ specific, but ha does indicate which components require internet with this icon/text for example
Not sure where the screenshot is from but thank you! I did see a similar indication on the integrations page. Thanks to everyone for the clarification!
WHAT IS HOME ASSISTANT?
We are 99% volunteers. If you are looking for a paid consultant you can ask here: Social - Home Assistant Community
Otherwise start in the Home Assistant Docs here: https://www.home-assistant.io/
If you run into a specific problem, pick a topic and ask sharing what you have done and what you are trying to do.
Oh, also stay away from AI chat bots, they are not based on current data and will mess you up…
yes that is the google nest integration, you can see the globe icon on the integrations list
I think there is a difference in what aspects of “cloud” you mean.
if you use Tuya devices and you have to use a Tuya cloud app to send a request to Tuya that then sends a command back to your device and Tuya tracks your devices and controls if your device works either now or in the future (as we’ve seen with other cloud only companies intentionally bricking otherwise working devices) then that is a big concern.
if you are simply using Alexa as a voice interface between HA (which is local-centric) and other non-cloud based devices (as the mentioned zigbee, zwave, local wifi, etc devices) then alexa doesn’t really have any control over your devices. All you are using Alexa for is for you to tell HA to control some device on your local system. Alexa is simply a translator in that sense.
Tuya or other cloud based device:
your command via their app->tuya servers->your device
If Tuya servers stop working then so do all your devices.
HA via Alexa voice control:
your voice->alexa->HA->your device.
If alexa stops working then all you devices still work via HA locally. Alexa can’t break any device on your local network. you just lose voice control capability.
All the big voice assistant offload much of the passing to supercomputers in the cloud and in order to understand the text they need some context, so they might not directly control the device, but they sure know about you and your house and habits.
In reality they also indirectly control the devices, because it translate what you are saying into actions. Who is to say it will not translate text into something it wants your house to do, like Amazon buying a lot of stocks in oil and gas, then tell all the climate devices to go full out from like 9am to 16pm.
I didn’t mean to imply that the cloud voice assistants are benevolent.
Even human translators could keep records of what you say or are guaranteed to translate honestly/accurately. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t still a translator.
It’s just that the translator doesn’t have nearly the control over your devices as a purpose built cloud app that has total control over your devices.
fully local is obviously best and total cloud reliance is obviously the worst but cloud based assistants fall somewhere in between.
1 Like