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[–] 33 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I wish I had some water meters that I could monitor to take advantage of the Energy dashboard, but sadly I don't have a submeter I can access.

Home Assistant just keeps methodically getting better!

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  • [–] 21 points 8 months ago

    This update seems pretty tame from the release notes, but I was worried about the python update.

    I have a lot of HACS integrations, and several HACS custom repository integrations that are updated very slowly when things get updated around them.

    I'm happy to report that all of my integrations work just fine after the update.

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  • [–] 20 points 8 months ago (10 children)

    HA is fantastic once you’re past the learning curve but is still aggressively unintuitive sometimes, and I find little irritants all the time. Why can’t you make the Settings pages and sub-pages top level menu items? Why are entities and devices buried so deep in Settings? Why can’t you edit Zones from the Map view? Why can’t you easily rename entities in bulk on a per-device basis? Why can’t you automatically replace entity references in Automations with an updated entity name? Why isn’t there good documentation overall about how the system works instead of just technical documentation with narrow focuses? Why is the discord full of Linux elitist types who expect you to know the system when you’re trying to learn it?

    It’s the little things everywhere that make me long for a Valve Software level of polish. There has been progress like the push to not manually configure things with YAML, but it’s so slow.

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago (9 children)

    The fact that dimming a room turns ON all the lights in the room is actually wild

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  • [–] 11 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Dimming is just light.room: turn on > XX% so it makes sense that it would turn on all lights assigned to that specific entity. I use Adaptive Brightness so that I don't have to fiddle with dimming lights manually. The sun does that for me.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    I know how it works, I'm just saying it's unintuitive. It's not how any other smart home system works.

    I use adaptive brightness too, actually. But nearly every time I'm manually adjusting a room's existing brightness, I don't want every single unpowered devices to turn on, too.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    What would you expect it to do? I would think you're telling it to set all lights to whatever level...

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  • [–] -1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (4 children)

    I would expect it to behave like all other smart home systems, or like a physical dimmer switch/power switch.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Dim the lights that are already on, and ignore the ones that are off?

    I'm just pointing out here that you and I have different expectations; how could the software know what you intended?

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  • [–] 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

    99% of the time I want to adjust the current lighting, I don't want to first turn on all lights and then adjust all of those lights to a uniform standard before individually toggling them all individually. Powering on all unpowered lights when adjusting brightness should be the edge case, IMO (also again not just my opinion, but the industry standard)

    For the record all other smart home systems treat room groups the way I am describing (like a dimmer knob and power switches). But there isn't even an option in HA for rooms to "only adjust devices currently in use". The smart home companies seem to have researched how people naturally intuit such things.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    If you're adjusting the same lights repeatedly, you could set them up as a group.

    It's more work, but you could also write a script that detects the current status of each light then sets the brightness if it's on. I use something like that for our smart porch lights that are on a smart switch - if the switch is off, turn it on, wait a bit for the lights to get on the network, then set them to the right color or whatever. (The switch normally stays on, but it gets turned off occasionally and it doesn't automatically turn on after a power outage.)

    I haven't used other automation systems - I avoided them because I didn't want to get locked into one, until I found HA. I also have never thought to "dim a room" - actually I've never used entire room controls at all, they never made a lot of sense to me, but then I generally only have one or two lights in a room to control.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago*

    The conversation topic was unintuitive aspects of HA, I'm aware hacky workarounds exist, but I find this (pretty central) behavior quite clunky.

    I also find it crazy that you've never wanted to dim or brighten more than one light at a time lol but then again, diversity is the spice of FOSS!

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  • [–] 15 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    This one broke zigbee2mqtt for me but I'm not sure why. I rolled back for now.

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago (11 children)

    Wake word on mobile is very exciting, but it doesn't seem to work on my device. It won't even let me turn it on, and says that HA is not my default assistant even though it definitely is.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (10 children)

    I've got it working on my S24. I've been waiting so long for this.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (8 children)

    I was excited too! But they mention it kills the battery as Google doesn't let the access the system API for it, so we'll see whether it stays enabled.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    I used their advice from the blog to make an automation that turns it on when I'm home, and off when I'm away.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    I spend 90% of my time at home so that probably won't help my battery much 😅

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    You probably have a charger at home, though.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Haha you got me, I do have a charger at home. I'm just not used to charging in the day, I normally charge overnight. But I guess I could charge more if needed.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Following up. I found the mic/wakeword being active overnight prevented my Android Auto-Restart from occurring. Setup another automation to turn off wakeword overnight and turn it back on around my usual alarm time.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    I turned it off because it kept triggering when I (or someone else) was talking to my Home Assistant Voice Preview (which the blog says it won't do...). I also never really worked out good uses for it. My HAVP is in my kitchen/living room area, and is mostly used for playing music and kitchen related things (setting timers, unit conversions, etc).

    If I ask home assistant on my phone to play music, it plays it on the HAVP speaker in my kitchen. I don't really have a need for timers or conversions outside of the kitchen where I already have the HAVP so didn't find any use for it on my phone.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Any smart bulbs we can still flash? Once they're set up and joined, I want to use the BT for presence detection.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    Flash with ESPHome? Not that I'm aware of (but would be nice to know)

    Edit: just found this: Smart Bulb (9W/RGB+CT) - Preflashed & Preconfigured

    I'm happy with the Shelly bulbs, they work without internet shenanigans and can do MQTT, etc...

    I have used Pi Zeros and ESPresense for prsence detection... seem to work ok, but if you're wanting to do room-level detection, (ie who's where), then that seems to be really difficult to tune the sensitivity

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Really impressed with the way they keep building this out.

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  • [+] -39 points 8 months ago (18 children)

    Oh, and before I forget: have you seen our brand new merch store?

    🤮

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  • [–] 24 points 8 months ago (7 children)
  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago* (4 children)

    The software is free, but no dev works for free.

    Thay have a company that pays for dev time, that company will need funds.

    Might get some socks for work

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  • [+] -7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

    The software is free, but no dev works for free.

    It's possible to engineer software well and still earn a living.

    That said, engineering software poorly is often a choice, usually made by people who are poor engineers. In some cases, and I suspect this may be the case for Nabu Casa Inc., the people are such poor engineers that they aren't even aware that their software is poorly engineered. Many technology companies are better at business than they are engineering.

    Edit: actually no, I don't think Nabu Casa Inc. are unaware of their poor engineering, I think they just don't care. They're far more concerned with maintaining their company's profits.

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  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago* (7 children)

    Why so negative? Bands also makes merch to increase their income, should we hate on them as well?

    Oh, look at that: the Linux Foundation also sells merch https://linuxfoundation.store/ - maybe you should stop using Linux?

    Microsoft also has merch; so does Android.

    I can't find any merch store for Apple, so I guess your an Apple fanboy.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    Also, merch for organizations providing free shit is a way to financially contribute and to get the word out about the project. Especially something like home assistant where most people have never heard of it, and many may think it's too hard, you can get the word out and maybe even get some people interested in getting free from corpo ecosystems.

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  • [–] -4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (4 children)

    Why so negative?

    It's clear that the Nabu Casa Inc. people, who also happen to be the Home Assistant project leaders, are focussed on making money over making well engineered software.

    For example, Home Assistant's settings page includes an entry for Nabu Casa Inc.'s cloud services product as the first entry in the list and there's no option to switch it off.

    Home Assistant is engineered in such a way as to make it difficult to install on operating systems that aren't under control of Nabu Casa Inc., like Home Assistant OS or Home Assistant Container. If Home Assistant were engineered well, it would be simple to take individual Home Assistant packages and build and install them on any distribution, as has been customary in the free software community for decades. As far as I know, there's no reason Home Assistant must be an operating system rather than simply individual packages. See https://feddit.uk/post/17543373 and especially https://feddit.uk/post/17543373/12207671 .

    Bands also makes merch to increase their income, should we hate on them as well?

    If a band makes selling merch their purpose, over and above making decent music, then I would likewise scorn them.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    It's clear that the Nabu Casa Inc. people, who also happen to be the Home Assistant project leaders, are focussed on making money over making well engineered software.

    It's clear that Paulus created a free home automation product and developed it for 5 years. For free.

    In 2018 they started a fund raising system which also helped provide secure remote access for those that don't know how to do it themselves.

    I'd say they are focussed on making well engineered software over making money.

    Source

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  • [–] 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

    I’d say they are focussed on making well engineered software over making money.

    I think you must have a different idea of what "well engineered software" means because to me, nothing you've said implies a focus on making well engineered software.

    Writing software without remuneration doesn't imply a focus on well engineered software. A person can write software without remuneration with a focus on anything, not necessarily good engineering. For example, one can write software without remuneration with a focus on financial reward in future. Which is exactly what appears to have happened. Working without pay to build a business with the expectation that the business will be profitable in future doesn't imply that the business will be built on good engineering.

    Helping secure remote access for those who don't know how to do it themselves doesn't imply a focus on well engineered software. Educating people isn't the same thing as engineering software, let alone engineering software well. Ease of use isn't the same thing as good engineering; one can engineer easy to use software well and one can engineer easy to use software poorly. Nabu Casa Inc. have done the latter.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    This comment thread is about your opinion on the developers wanting to gain renumeration for their efforts.

    Considering their influence on standardising open protocols across the home automation industry rather than proprietary lock-in protocols, then this is a much wider commitment than just software development... attending conferences is not cheap.

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  • [–] -1 points 8 months ago*

    This comment thread is about your opinion on the developers wanting to gain renumeration for their efforts.

    No it's about the Home Assistant developers valuing profit over well engineered software.

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