this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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Home Assistant - am I missing something? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by rarkgrames@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I decided to spin up Home Assistant on a VM on my server yesterday, and so far I'm not having much luck getting to to much that is actually useful.

I'm wondering if it's me doing something wrong, but I can't see what that would be.

I've signed up for the free trial of the cloud services which all seems to have gone fine, and I have a couple of integrations working (Roomba, printer ink levels, Sonos and a couple of others) but mostly everything else I've tried just doesn't want to play ball

  • Apple TV - won't pair - I press the pair button in HA but the ATV doesn't respond with a pairing code

  • Ring doorbell / cameras - these are found but won't display a live feed

  • Ring alarm - not recognised at all

  • Netatmo thermostat - widget displays but doesn't sync correctly with thermostat and if I try to adjust temp it sets the target temp to 137 degrees C

  • Hue lights - having issues but this one might be my hub not HA

I was really hoping I could set up automations to, say, turn off my TV, turn off the lights, arm my house alarm - all with one press of a button but it looks like currently this isn't going to happen.

Is it just me? Am I doing something wrong perhaps? Maybe I'm missing something obvious but it just seems like the integrations with these devices just isn't quite there? I'd really be interested in other people's experiences and whether they were able to solve these issues (if indeed they had them at all).

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[–] Clou42@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago

Thanks for elaborating. While I think that is a far cry from "some very basic features" being "utterly impossible", I see the point, but I disagree that this a common experience.

HA is meant as the central point in home automation, meaning it is consuming sensor data, automating actors and showing everything on its dashboards. Following that philosophy, long term storage is meant to be written to by HA, but not consumed from there.

Then you are also running a very non-standard MQTT setup that does not conform to the usual conventions. If it were, you could make use of the autodetection capabilities and make sensors (and actors!) work very easily with HA/MQTT. I played around with this myself in a little toy project which I use to control my linux machine via MQTT and this worked wonderfully.

I'd argue you are very far away from a typical use case and naturally you will run into problems making it work. That's FOSS software for you, you can try to work around it, you can work on the missing features yourself or you can leave it. But it's not fair to pretend your very special use case is some kind of measure of the project's quality. People have built amazing things with HA, far from "exactly the path someone had in mind".