Comment by nomel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nomel | Hacker News Reader

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> ... for the off->on transition and another for the on->off. It'd be nice to set a rule that defines a level rather than an edge and have it internally do the transformation

The "solution" I found was to poll, and use "choose", and sometimes some helper switches for state, to do what is needed. But, I think at any reasonable level of complexity, you're better off using one of the three python components: the one built into Home Assistant, pyscript, or AppDaemon.

Home Assistant Python: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/python_script/ No imports.

pyscript: https://github.com/custom-components/pyscript Full python. Supports Jupyter. Straightforward.

AppDaemon: https://appdaemon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/HASS_TUTORIAL.htm... Full python. A little lower level. Allows the creation of dashboards.

Related, the Matter protocol is on its way. I'm waiting for these devices before I redo my house, or put much more effort into any of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard)

Thanks for that. I just tried out pyscript. I found it a lot more pleasant to write automation in a real programming language. It also more or less addresses my complaint about needing multiple rules. In the tutorial, [1] the motion_light_rear example addresses this via sleeping + task.unique. It's not the approach I imagined, but it's aimed at the same problem.

[1] https://hacs-pyscript.readthedocs.io/en/stable/tutorial.html

Matter is interesting. But...

> The project group was launched and introduced by Amazon, Apple, Google, Comcast and the Zigbee Alliance, now Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA).

I'm having a real hard time believing that anything user-beneficial will come of this, unless you're willing to sell out your smarthome and privacy to big tech.

Another way to look at this - maybe this is a way to give a pressure relief valve for all the privacy conscious so they stop harassing them so much for the 90% of consumer case that doesn’t care?

I think people are also very unhappy with latency. The only way to get low latency is to keep things local, and for devices to work together, directly. But, people still want remote access.

> I'm having a real hard time believing that anything user-beneficial will come of this, unless you're willing to sell out your smarthome and privacy to big tech.

At this level, the way data is handled is vendor agnostic.

I see Matter as more akin to USB, or indeed, the internet, as the idea is that devices are supposed to be able to communicate via IP, not just by ZigBee.

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