I develop things for HomeAssistant. The stuff I develop for free can be a hassle to support, so I don't see myself earning a good wage while being happy working on HomeAssistant for non-engineers.
197 karma · joined March 1, 2018
Personally, I use Amazon Fire Tablets as audio drivers around my house for Snapcast. Each tablet has USB, wifi, 3.5mm Aux, and a built in battery, which make them great for this task, especially on sale at $45 a tablet
Ideally the device can create a wifi hotspot when it isn't setup that I can join and setup all the needed config settings. WLED does this as well https://kno.wled.ge/
The community would love some passionate developers to create or update new integrations (connections to other services) and features (stuff built directly into Home Assistant)
Do you want to know what the active airflow rate is? I want to know what the active airflow rate is. Do you want to know power consumption? I want to know power consumption. Do you have a way to write unique schedules/programs that get executed on the heat pump? I want a way to write unique schedules/programs that get executed on the heat pump.
Context: Full-Stack Software Engineer (worked at a few start ups including Bird Rides). Active Home Assistant user and community-run integration creator (Linked Lovelace)
The incredible part about a company like yours is the ability to do hardware at scale. There's no reality in which I'm safely and cost-effectively building my own Electric Heat Pump, or television, or [cool product here].
Companies that make it easier for me to do my own things stand out.
If you don't want that for the standard customer, fine. Provide some way to open up the device and trigger dev mode, or manually upload firmware, or OTA update firmware.
Side notes:
- a failed kickstarter I joined shipped out their original product with bad firmware and no way to do a physical firmware update without destroying the product, so they tanked instantly despite having a great hardware setup. Despite their failure, I and a few others opened up our products and manually flashed custom firmware onto it to make use of the product we bought
- I exclusively buy LG Televisions now due to their usage of Web OS (has a local-first [HA Integration](https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/webostv/)) which used to be hackable with https://rootmy.tv. With that, my TV runs custom Linux software that controls lights just like [Phillips Hue Sync](https://www.philips-hue.com/en-us/explore-hue/propositions/e...) but free/open-source and no additional hardware. Compare that to Samsung which is like 40% ads now?
- I don't mind using a voice assistant, steal my ideas Tim Apple. I hate the part where the request goes (phone -> router -> cloud server -> router -> local server -> light bulb) instead of (phone -> router -> local server -> light bulb) or worse (phone -> router -> local server -> router -> cloud server -> router -> local server -> light bulb).
EDIT: my markdown is showing, I should stick to lurking
If that's available, this would be my top choice as I'm actively shopping for all-electric heat pumps
As luck would have it, https://rootmy.tv came out for Web OS. It's still in a very basic stage, but it's better than nothing!
I'm a HomeAssistant user, so I do want my TV connected to my network.
The kitchen in the place I rent has this island (its more like a peninsula) that just barely makes the light switch for the kitchen out of reach, so instead we have to walk around the way around.
Obviously a manageable situation, but automating things has been a covid hobby. So I automated the lights, obviously, via replacing the light switch and added a motion sensor to the kitchen wall. There's also an echo dot for voice control.
Walk into the kitchen, lights turn on, eventually they go off. If they don't go on, just say "alexa turn on kitchen" and they go on, motion detector eventually picks up and turns them back off.
Use the light switch, and it disables the motion sensor for an hour and just leaves the lights on, or off, whichever direction was pressed.
Time saved for everyone not walking back and forth, also at night, has definitely been greater than time spent for me debugging.
YMMV
They also have "press up 2x" "press up 3x" "hold up" "hold up released", and the same for the down direction.
My GF and I use these to switch the room between modes that we want. My main modes are "passive" "gaming" "movie" "meeting" "off" and "party".
The modes are a state machine written in both node-red, using a global state variable that is saved to disk, and homeassistant using a select template variable. They stay in sync through a node-red flow, so changing the mode from either has the exact same result.