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1) Free
2) Works pretty well ‘out of the box' now if you're even minimally tech savvy. It can do AMAZING things if you have any head for programming and even more if you can hold a soldering iron.
3) If you take some care in which components you use, it never has to talk to anyone but you.
4) It'll work with pretty much any common WiFi, Zigbee, or ZWave home automation device. And your PC. And your smart phone. And the weather service.
I'm not sure if you missed the title of my post or if you simply weren't clear in yours… I was talking about using an alternative to Google.
Though Home Assistant is in constant development and sometimes that can break things for a while… you can turn off the updates once you have it set up the way you want and then just forget about it if you're not an upgrade/expansion junkie.
And yeah, unlike Google it's yours for as long as you have access to the install files, which means keep backups and you don't even have to worry about older versions being pulled; no license server requirement, all you need is an install copy and you're good.
People will choose the Google system because Home Assistant isn't trivial to set up or configure.
What we need is for someone to make it easy, maybe bundle it with some hardware. Like what Ubuntu is supposed to be to Debian, a noob friendly distro that you can give to your parents without worrying that you will be called on for tech support several times a week.
I say that as someone who loves Home Assistant. After switching my mum from Windows to a Chromebook, I've realized how important having something rob
Hubitat for hardware and alexa/google intergration combined with Home Assistant for the dashboards (if you care about dashboards).
How is Google integration these days? Last time I checked you had to go and create a token or something.
My original build took weeks of fiddling to get a 433MHz radio and a Zigbee radio working. Then I build a second system for someone else and didn't have to deal with my legacy build – and it was so much easier.
The base system installs like any other. Once it's up and running it is now trivial to add the Zigbee and MQTT integrations. Admittedly, adding the 433toMQTT package still appears to require going outside the HA ecosystem, but it doesn't require arcane configuration any longer… it just works. Wh
Home Assistant != Google Home. It's a stand alone smart home server published under the Apache license https://www.home-assistant.io/ [home-assistant.io] Night time unlock alert
metadata:
name: Night time unlock alert
description: When unlock detected at night turn on light at brightest level.
yes what could possibly go wrong there! why not have the system play the 1812 overture at max volume too!
Smart things smartly fail in all sorts of innovative ways. Give me good ole fashioned wall timers thank you very much.
yes what could possibly go wrong there!
yes what could possibly go wrong there!
You may lose a tiny bit of sleep due to a spurious activation of a device. Yeah calamity I agree. My life would be over if someone turned on the lights while I had my eyes closed
Indeed they would. And they would never ever recover from the possibility of a slight sleep interruption due to an accidental software bug. Ever. We all know humans spontaneously combust if they don't get exactly 8h of sleep.
And all the Amazon things: NO! DO NOT put Google or Amazon or any cloud based service in your home. You do not need these companies or the “cloud” to automate your home.
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