Yeah, Home Assistant Supervised really is the way to go for people who want the simplicity of the addons but also full access to the host OS.
As for Tradfri, I have many devices from them but never used their gateway, mainly because a lot of people were complaining about its stability even without getting HA involved. Tradfri devices+Conbee+Deconz are rock solid and very easy to set up.
Thanks. I have indeed chosen for Home Assistant Supervised. I will also see if I can move away form the ikea hub. Thanks again.
Yeah I use node-red extensively as well. almost all of my HA automations are in NR now.Together they blend great.
as i sit here in a household with apple devices, nest devices, and google home, none of which let me access things outside their ecosystems without either 1000 hacks or private API access, i think you and i have very different definitions of “walled garden”
i’ve tried ‘all’ the different HA configurations and found that using my pi4 with their raspbian lite os + HA unsupported supervised install to be the most flexible and stable way to use HA. (i did not install networkmanager and install gives warnings during install that its missing, but find the default networking with raspbian lite work fine for wifi, ethernet, and usb tethering)
if i didnt have the pi, i would probably feel comfy doing a debian lite + HA supervised install
lol, if you can relate to Paul Hibbert then there is no hope for you
have a look at this post to see what the methods are and what each offer
Then look at the community supported ones
if you cant find one there to your requirements. then my first statement stands.
More like solitary confinement
Surely since you are only just starting out with HA anyway, you could use a short patch lead and have the HA RPi right next to your router… it runs headless so there is no need to have it anywhere overly accessible.
As the author of the guide, let me explain. The method in the guide works without issue - however, it is not an officially supported method based on recent changes discussed and made per ADR14. No official dev support will be provided if you face a problem, however, the community will always help.
I don’t see Home Assistant as a walled garden. As already noted, you can run Supervised or Container if you want more control over the environment, you can edit/add/change individual integrations and introduce custom components, you can contribute to the project via Github and the forums to assist with making it better for all user. Walled garden, it is not.
I have been a user for over 3 years and have run every iteration there has been, Hassbain, Venv, Hass.io, HA OS, the list goes on. In the past, it was far harder to have a complex yet successful HA instance running. Today, it is a breeze. I almost never face a problem with an update, and have many different technologies, RF433, Zigbee, WiFi and hubs all working seamlessly together. In my home, I run Promox with 3 VMs for my main machine, and a Pi3 with Supervised (as per the linked guide) as my backup machine, and don’t face any of the issue you have described. I also run a Pi3 instance at my parents house and another Proxmox instance in my business, all work flawlessly 99.9% of the time.
We see often on the forums people who are experienced programmers or devs face issue with HA. Take off your programmers hat, read the docs and follow the examples provided. If you need help, ask - the HA community is awesome. Search the forums, you will most likely find whatever issue you are facing has been covered, if it hasn’t, start a new post and provide detail and someone will help. If something isn’t documented well, update the docs - anyone can do it.
I found HA to be very easy to use. Maybe it’s because I’ve been using Linux since first loading Slackware Linux back in 1993 from 30 floppy disks on a Packard Bell 486 sx 25MHz. It had no math co-processor so you had to compile the Linux kernel with the math co-processor emulator enabled. I soon after upgraded to a 250 MB hard drive and a 486 dx2 66MHz. What a difference in performance that made! I’ve always loved python and have used is since the late 90s.
I’ve tried HA every which way possible including via python on windows. I found that I much prefer running HA on Linux in a docker image with Supervisor installed. I’ve tried running on raspberry pi but I have 20+ cameras and no Pi can handle them or all the custom apps and scripting I run on the device. I settled on a fanless Asrock motherboard with ssd drive. It’s not super fast but it’s plenty powerful to handle everything I’ve thrown at it. With a power supply that adjusts fan speed automatically based on power consumption, it’s just about silent.
I have run into wireless issues using various older Raspberry Pi devices and I tracked the problem to the high power requirement of the USB wireless dongle. No matter how many amps the power supply can produce, the Pi devices were just not able to provide enough power for the WiFi dongle to properly function. There was no way to easily get an Ethernet cable to the location so I first went with a tp-link mini wireless router which allows you to bridge Ethernet to wireless. I then switched to a powerline network adapter. I know use a different wifi adapter with a different chip and it’s much less power hungry and I no longer have issues.
Another network issue I keep running into is having trouble figuring out which network manager the Linux OS is using. It seems like I can install the same linux flavor on 3 different devices and 3 different network managers will be used. I consider myself an expert level Linux Engineer but having 30 different ways to manage the network across the various Linux Distributions is a real pain.
Thanks everyone. This is all super usefull information. The getting started section of the docs should have some pointers to it.
i’m a relative linux newbie but getting better. after working a little bit with pi’s and other tiny minimal iot type machines now, i don’t understand why there isnt more interest in using HA with the openWRT os. It seems to be a much wider distro for tiny appliance type machines, rather than something like raspbian distros. dunno, maybe im missing something obvious.
HA has it’s own OS, that’s what you get when you install HA OS.
for people who think of HA (i.e. Hass core) as an app that runs on linux, who would want to use the HA os?
i could easily see buying a gl or ubnt router that ships using openWRT os and wanting to run ha on it. not totally sure, but i think openWRT supports dockers to make a supervised ha install possible.
Yeah… what a pitty that it’s deployable only on very limited HW range. It’s rather part of embed system and because of this it looses all pros. For sure it’s not “for people who know half as much as you do. These people do not understand what SSH is, let alone any linux commands.” (quote from some posts above)
IMHO HA is one of worst designed systems I’ve ever seen. Or to be fair: at least it behaves like this from end-user/maintainer POV (let’s exclude a few fans for whom everything works as expected and never caused issues). If I had to guess, I would say it started as school project to expore some exotic approaches, not necessarily appropriate ones (yaml, inflexible and limited GUI). All glued together just to survive exams. This is what school projects are about, isn’t it?
Eventually turned into longer project… 7 years of development still without gold release speaks for itself. Inconsistent integrations ie feature-wise, incomplete/outdated documentation, needs of system restart to apply almost every small change even for main integrations. GUI still must be “hacked” with use of custom/community components (not officially suported) because it’s not possible to make such basic customizations like color changes. And even with that in hands it’s still not easy to achieve it without learning yeat another meta-language (forget about css and javascript on FE).
It boasts 1600 integrations. But I can bet most of them is disfunctional, not fully implemented, inconsistent, requires quirks and a lot of manual work just to make it work (or even to remove it)
Recently I can see some movement towards “the better” but imo if not changed fast enough, the project is doomed to end up to be used by small group of users and eventually disapear.
Sorry for tough words. Maybe for some it might sound unfair. Maybe it is entirely not true. But until now nobody even tried to answer OP’s question: why is it made so difficult? What is the idea behind this?
To me some decissions made in the past are at least “strange”. Maybe the goal was to create a system installable/maintainable by pros only (to make money)? Problem is that the system is still in beta phase being unreliable and not production ready.
Let’s face a truth: IT IS difficult (or at least non intuitive) for skilled ITs. It’s not accessible for common non-IT person for sure.
It will run on a number of devices, but why are you so obsessed with running it on some ramdon router or whatever anyway when you can run it on a simple SBC? A RPi is cheaps as chips, uses hardly any power and can be hidden away to just work. If thats not powerful enough for you, run a NUC, or VM, or whatever… there are HEAPS of options. Just because it might not run on some openWRT router doesn’t mean it’s bad. openWRT is for people living in the past anyway… get Ubiquiti gear and enjoy a real network solution.
So don’t use it, walk away and please don’t complain on here.
Every doc page can be edited by the community. Feel free to spend your time submitting update PR’s… just like others spend their free time bringing you this FREE software.
Why are people so keen to install HA, then want to do random stuff in the back end, then complain that they can’t? If you want a HA system that JUST WORKS, install HA OS and not have to do any backend stuff. If you so desperately want to play with Linux in the background, install Core or Supervised. It’s not hard.
I’m just sick of these threads that bad mouth a free software package produced by people in their spare time, which for most people works just fine. My system is fairly complex now after running HA for about 3 years. Sure, there have been a few dramas along the way but nothing that wasn’t either caused by my bad coding or a release which broke something, and then was fixed very shortly after.
Ehm… okay, I just pointed out HA has it’s own OS, which is supported on quite some devices and as a VM as well. Never in my life would I run the system that controls my home on my router…
I will not comment on the rest of your post, I’m sick and tired of people ranting about a FREE software, nobody forces you to use HA, there are countless of other smart home solutions. Feel free to try them and find something that better fits your needs.
This is the only relevant line from your entire post.
Please keep it civil people. Let’s try to keep this a discussion and not a flame war.
It isn’t made difficult, YOU don’t get it. That seems to be a difference, don’t you think? If you would be a “skilled IT”, you wouldn’t need to read more than two pages to get HomeAssistant up and running.
Simple as that.
If you want a more customized experience (=installation) you will have to do a little bit more. Sorry, but all I see in your post is you don’t seem to have enough knowledge, and are now desperate to hide that fact.
So let’s go through your post, and see what we can find there:
Not true, you can run Home Assistant Core on literally any computer. Pi, NUC, old Laptop - with Linux (nearly all distros) and Windows. What else did you want? The OS of a russian space rocket? Try the Python venv or docker.
Not true. Home Assistant with HomeAssistantOS is, Home Assistant Core is not. See the answer above for all the possibilities. Despite the idea that it looses, I would say, it wins. I can choose which way I want to go. More or less controllable, in comparison to easy or not so easy to use.
This is not a truth question, as it is your opinion, as you said. It doesn’t cover the reality, but you are very much entitled to your opinion. My opinion in this case is very different.
Not true. The basic UI is enough for a normal experience. If you use the automatic feature to populate new entries in lovelace, you will have full control. You might have to use a custom_component for some things, but all these are already there, maybe not as comfortable as one wants, but that is a different story, so your comment is not true.
Depends solely on your needs and wants. As above, the system gives you everything after setup. If you want more comfort, you will have to learn how that works. I can’t think of any software, where you wouldn’t need to learn a little bit. With HACS I personally would call it a breaze to install custom_components. It’s UI driven, and the installation is around four or five clicks. Sounds fair to me.
Not true. Betting is a nice idea, but it isn’t a solid base for a discussion, especially, if someone, like you, condems a whole system. So betting is out, name examples. If you can name just three outdated/incomplete/require quirks integrations, I will make a signature for my account, and will let it stand there for my next 50 posts: “Maxym was right, Home Assistant has a lot of disfunctional/outdated integrations!” Go for it, but don’t come around with sh*t like there is a typo in the documentation - I want real disfunction and not only “isn’t working for me”.
And last but not least: not true. I can call myself a skilled IT, at least my payroll slip tells me so (not money wise, title wise) and I don’t have any problems in installing/using my Home Assistant. And I do have people around me, that are everything, but not skilled IT people. A friend of mine doesn’t even have a PC/Laptop. I gifted him one of my old Pi3B+, and he is running a small but nice installation of HA on it. Not installed or maintained by me. I haven’t heard anything unusual in the last three months from him. System is running, no problems, just working.
To sum that up, I get the feeling, it may be you, and not all people, that have problems with HA. Maybe it’s your approach?
And no, I’m not sorry, if this sounds rude. I hate, that people nowadays seem to think, their personal view of things needs to be accepted and respected by everyone else. No! If you would have started your rant with arguments and examples, than it might be more acceptable, but this…this only shows your inability to get the system.
And don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of problems, with the way things are handled with Home Assistant. I find the communication a mess (<= diplomatic speech), a real leadership inside the development team doesn’t seem to exist, and being a friendly developer is def. not in the job description. But that is a different story, as it doesn’t affect the product.
EDIT: @petro If this post isn’t civil enough, please feel free to delete it. 