Hacker News Reader

Comment by vessenes | Hacker News Reader

Oh man. I love Home Assistant. But I think of it as a really fun hobby. Maintaining, getting dashboards working, integrating with wireless local network standards… It ends up very technical, very quickly, as Mr. Petersson so ably demonstrates. That said, using it has put me hard on the side of preferring home devices with open management platforms. I keep feeling there’s a chance my smart home could stay off the cloud and have good automation if only I buy the right nerd tech..

View on HN

I have been using Home Assistant since before "Lovelace" UI was available. It has come a long way but there's still an ongoing maintenance demand. It's less than it used to be... but it's still not zero.

> That said, using it has put me hard on the side of preferring home devices with open management platforms.

I feel like this is the true purpose of HA and the ecosystem around it. Similar to how matter is forcing IPv6 adoption on micro-controllers, really.

Every holiday season, I go looking for a bunch of cheap stuff on Ali express to tear down. Every year there's new LED light controllers and 2024 was the first year where the manufacturers were almost _bragging_ about how they label the GPIO pins and expose the programming interface so you can throw your own firmware on there if you want. Seriously, never before have I seen these controllers BRAG about how they support WLED natively. The FOSS / DIY / I'm not using _your_ cloud, I have one at home, already movement is ... actually being catered to!? That's _new_.

"Offline" has been my number one rule for home automation since I started using HA about a decade ago.

I have a couple of hundred devices connected to it now, and the _only_ cloud integration I use is Spotify, for obvious reasons; I have been careful when buying smart things that they're completely offline, and anything I buy that _is_ smart but isn't offline-only gets hobbled into a "dumb" appliance; e.g. my new dishwasher has "smart" stuff, if I connect it to Wi-Fi, I found the maintenance menu and disabled the network interface entirely and it's just a regular dishwasher now, which is how I like it.

I try to avoid all smart devices, but I moved into a house that already had "smart" garage door openers installed, so I thought I'd try the smartness. It is indeed ridiculous in that it requires an Internet connection to work. Here I am, with a remote control device (my phone) that is on my LAN and a garage door opener that is on my LAN, but I need to do a round trip to the Internet to communicate with it? What idiot designs these things?

There has been some uproar lately about a particular manufacturer shutting down access to the API used for their garage door openers to HA, I forget the name but there was a Q in it I believe.

The solution, as I understand it, is a little device which talks the protocol of the door opener that gives you fully local access the way it should be.

I'll try and dig out the link now in case it's of use to you.

EDIT: Here you go https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/11/06/removal-of-myq... Hopefully that can point you towards a solution for your opener (and the state of affairs).

Yea, that's the kind I've got. I solved the problem by simply not using or caring about the "smart" feature, since it's pretty pointless. Why would I even need to open or close my garage with an "app" when the button is right there by the door?

You could open your garage when coming home by pressing a button on your phone.

I like knowing if the door is opened or closed from remote. Kids sometimes forget to close the door, and it's reversed direction before because the tracks needed lubricated and it raised the door again after I had pressed the button.

I don't have a garage door opener myself, but from what I've gleaned from US YouTubers is that they like to know the _state_ of the door, open/closed which is handy if you use home automation.

I imagine if you're driving into the garage from outside you have a physical button in the car with you to open it, and if you don't run home automation, the "automation" part is likely not very useful.

Mine shows up on car play on my dashboard when I get near home.

And the fix for this is ratgdo[1].

I got one for my decade-old not-smart opener around the time the manufacturer was shutting down API access for their fancy new smart models. Works like a dream. Why would anyone want to spend $$$ buying a fancy new cloud-smart appliance when a simple little chip can make the old one local-smart?

[1] https://ratcloud.llc/

Thanks for providing the name/link for everyone, I remembered it had "rat" in it, but couldn't quite recall what it was.

> What idiot designs these things?

This is carefully planned.

Look at it from the vendor’s perspective. Most people still want to be able to access and control their home from outside their home network, which generally means going through a hosted server, so why go to the extra trouble of implementing a separate method for local LAN only when you could just use the same central server? It’s almost always the case that the local LAN can access the internet, so there’s not much incentive to make it more efficient.

Yes, ideally the local user should just hit the local hub directly, but it’s double the development effort for negligible benefit.

> It’s almost always the case that the local LAN can access the internet

Said vendors and I have a disagreement about what constitutes acceptable failure modes...

I agree there isn't much incentive, and this is where standardised local protocols like ZigBee, Z-Wave etc come in; I can buy the hardware I want and run it how I want and those who want simplicity can buy a local hub, which can cover the cost of the hosted servers I have no interest in.

Failing that, I'd settle for manufacturers adding an option in their app of wherever suitable, that will let me change the server URL and leave me to it, I'll reverse engineer then protocol, or if they're feeling generous they can open source or provide an API doc.

Unfortunately, my experience reverse engineering lots of devices over the years is that they're often sharing more than they should, and subsidising the devices they sell you with your data.

There is also an overwhelming number of hardware manufacturers who just have piss poor software with atrocious security who should probably be embarrassed to release their code.

We already know what it's like in home WiFi router world.

I worked around this by exposing most HA entities to HomeKit using the built-in HomeKit bridge.

That way you get all the "this is just integrated with Siri and it's easy for non technical people to control" as well as much more powerful automations.

For example, my home presence detection is actually powered by HomeKit automations which flip binary sensors I've exposed from HA.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com