Hacker News Reader

Comment by astronads | Hacker News Reader

The solution is home assistant [0] it lets you manage and control all kinds of smart devices with a lot of customizable, hackable things. And it runs locally, so if you buy the right types of devices that don’t phone home to the cloud (or you shitcan their internet access) you can fully manage your own system.

[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/

View on HN

Or if you want something more of an appliance, some other Hubs with Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Thread + Matter support are: Homey Pro, Homey Bridge, Aeotec SmartThings Hub, and Hubitat.

I only have experience with the first three (besides Home Assistant) and they work very well (though the SmartThings hub is somewhat limited when it comes to device support, graphing, etc.).

I should also mention that with Homey Bridge the dashboard is in their cloud, though the Zigbee/Z-Wave devices are fully local. Homey Pro is also local. (I think they have a Homey Pro Mini in the US now.)

Imho Home Assistant is the way to go - there's just so much weirdness going on in a regular home you need to accomodate that with any of these 'turnkey' solutions, you'll run into some limitation that you can't get around.

HA is fiddly but with enough effort you can make anything run the way you want to, and the community is pretty active.

I tried Home Assistant, but found it fiddly and to have weird limitations, e.g. the recommendation to limit statistics collection to 90 days for performance reasons (so you have to set up something like InfluxDB otherwise). The UI is also weird and not very logical.

weirdness going on in a regular home you need to accomodate that with any of these 'turnkey' solutions

Homey Pro supports user apps written in HomeyScript (which is JavaScript-based). Similar to Home Assistant, there are many community extensions, including more obscure things. For instance, our not-very-common heat pump is also supported in Homey. A lot of vendors make Homey apps as well.

In a household with more than one person, everyone eventually has to use the home automation system and with Homey (but also SmartThings), I am sure my wife can also manage it when necessary if I'm on the go. Managing Home Assistant + the hardware is going to take a lot more effort to learn.

Luckily me and my partner are all Apple, so even though the smart home is backed by Home Assistant, our interface to it is via the Home app (or Siri)

Apple doesn't make water heaters, A/Cs or furnaces, and I don't think most people would junk their own because it doesn't know how to integrate with Matter.

None of my smart home devices are Apple / HomeKit, yet they're available in Apple Home.

So these things are phoning home. The exact opposite of why Home Assistant is existing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com