Home Assistant - am I missing something?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨rarkgrames@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

I decided to spin up Home Assistant on a VM on my server yesterday, and so far I’m not having much luck getting to to much that is actually useful.

I’m wondering if it’s me doing something wrong, but I can’t see what that would be.

I’ve signed up for the free trial of the cloud services which all seems to have gone fine, and I have a couple of integrations working (Roomba, printer ink levels, Sonos and a couple of others) but mostly everything else I’ve tried just doesn’t want to play ball

Apple TV - won’t pair - I press the pair button in HA but the ATV doesn’t respond with a pairing code
Ring doorbell / cameras - these are found but won’t display a live feed
Ring alarm - not recognised at all
Netatmo thermostat - widget displays but doesn’t sync correctly with thermostat and if I try to adjust temp it sets the target temp to 137 degrees C
Hue lights - having issues but this one might be my hub not HA

I was really hoping I could set up automations to, say, turn off my TV, turn off the lights, arm my house alarm - all with one press of a button but it looks like currently this isn’t going to happen.

Is it just me? Am I doing something wrong perhaps? Maybe I’m missing something obvious but it just seems like the integrations with these devices just isn’t quite there? I’d really be interested in other people’s experiences and whether they were able to solve these issues (if indeed they had them at all).

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nekusoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I’d guess that it might be related to how you’ve set up the virtual network adapter. Depending on what kind of virtualization software you use, the adapter for HA should be be set to something called host mode or bridged network, meaning the VM gets its own IP on your home network, no routing or NAT in between.

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- rarkgrames@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I’ll double check but pretty sure all my VMs are set to use bridged mode (I use proxmox which I think does this by default).
  
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Kushan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Yeah to echo other comments in here, it sounds like there’s some kind of config issue somewhere. The hue integration should “just work” and it’s where I get most of my own utility from.

I will say though, HA isn’t as user friendly as it could be. It has come a long way and it’s getting better (and there is definitely nothing better at the moment), but there are still some gremlins in there that require you to hand edit config files or understand obscure device names and things like that.

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- rarkgrames@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I got Hue working, as I suspected it was a me issue (well a Hue Hub issue) rather than an HA issue :)
  
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- markr@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Yeah, as soon as you need to customize anything you are inside a very odd scripting system. On the other hand, in my experience, most stuff just works.
  
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  - Kushan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Yeah, it’s very powerful, it just needs a bit of a UX refresh.
    
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lemming007@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
HA is geared towards selfhosted, locally controlled stuff (zwave, ZigBee, mqqt, local WiFi, etc). Because the cloud and privacy invasion is the mainstream, HA may require a bit more tweaking and technical knowledge to get up and running.

With that said, once you get it to how you want it, it’s been working rock solid for me for a few years now. I’ve built my house around HA automations and can’t imagine living without it.

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agressivelyPassive@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I have similar experiences. Everything seems extremely clunky and pseudo-simple. Some very basic features are utterly impossible, for most things you have to write config by hand and there’s absolutely zero guidance.

To me, HA looks like a legacy enterprise project, that only works if you just happen to follow exactly the path someone had in mind when building it plus a bunch of half baked add-ons, where it seems like the maintainers lost interest after a while.

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- unknowing8343@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  In my experience, HA is simply a fuck-you to all those companies that want you to use their closed, cloud-based solution.
  
  It’s not perfect, but it’s basically all we got, unless you want the crappier experience of being forced to buy only one brand of things and being forced to use really, really simple automations.
  
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  - agressivelyPassive@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    If HA is the “answer”, then vendor locked solutions don’t look that bad in comparison.
    
    Xiaomis cloud might stop working in two years, but HA is already not working today. That’s not really appealing.
    
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- Clou42@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Can you give some examples? That has not been my experience at all.
  
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  - agressivelyPassive@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Sure.
    
    My setup here is pretty simple: a handful of temp/humidity sensors that push their readings to an MQTT queue, which then is read by Telegraf an written to InfluxDB. Optional complexity: I would prefer these sensors to delay the acutal send events, so they can push a batch of readings in one go.
    
    Now, ideally HA would be able to read the data from Influx as a sensor and even import the history. I tried the Influx integration, was told to configure that in the config files and literally for days I tried to get everything to work, but it just would not work. I can’t even list the different error messages here, it’s been a few weeks, but the consensus seems to be, that Influx is essentially not readable for HA for reasons. Like, there’s no error message that I could make sense of, it’s just generalFuckYouError 5446.
    
    Ok, then maybe I can read the measuements directly from MQTT? I would have duplicated data, but I can always delete old data in HA, so that’s ok. All my sensors currently write in the same topic and each message contains the sensor name, a timestamp and two measurements. That data structure however is utterly unreadable in for HA. Obviously, I need to split the messages into different (HA-)sensors based on the sensor name field and then differentiate between the different sensor values (humidity/temp). That is not possible. Like, it is completely not supported and the official stance is to put a bunch of MQTT listeners for each sensor/value pair in your config and then filter the messages based on sensor name and reading. Well, that’s really convenient! Especially for the completely outlandish case, that someone might want to automatically add new sensors.
    
    But ok, I played ball. I set up two testsensors (so four listeners in total). And it kind of worked. Until I noticed, that each message is processed once, which is perfectly in line with MQTT semantics, but it meant that messages that didn’t fit the listener they happened to collide with were just dropped. Awesome!
    
    But ok, next try, I’ve got Telegraf, that thing can probably help out. So I created new topics for each sensor and value, in a nice hierarchy and created a bunch of HA listeners, each having its very own topic.
    
    And that finally kind of worked. I still can’t batch-import messages, because HA ignores MQTT timestamps, I still can’t dynamically add new sensors, I still can’t “fuse” sensors belonging together (hum/temp do kind of correlate, after all), etc. etc.
    
    My case isn’t really unusual and not really complicated, yet it took me literally weeks to get to this point and it’s still a clunky, semi-functional clusterfuck, whos only benefit compared to Influx is, that it has an Android app.
    
    Disclaimer: I might mixed some thing up in the description above, it’s been a while. And I’m certain I could make some things nicer, but that’s not the point. I’m a senior software developer and can’t get this pile of Python to run. Maybe I’m really stupid, but I’d say HA is the culprit here.
    
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kokesh@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Install HACS, it will open up thousands of integrations and UI elements.

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mhzawadi@lemmy.horwood.cloud ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I would have a look at your networking as I have lots of cloud services setup on my home assistant running on a pi4, without more network info it’s difficult to say where you might have issues

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toma@lemmy.omat.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
You probably tried to do too much in one day :)

Netatmo had a delay indeed. There is an option to get a developer account at Netatmo so changes get pushed to HA. But still, it has some quirks.

Advice is to work on one integration at a time, read the documentation, search for your problems. After the integration works, setup your dashboard. After that start with the automatons.

Good luck, HA it’s really worth it, invest a bit more time in it.

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- phrogpilot73@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I agree with the idea of focusing on one integration at a time. I got very frustrated with HA when I first started. Then (since everyone told me how great it was), I started trying just to get one thing working. After I did, I moved on to the next. Now, I’m your typical HA fan boy.
  
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letmesleep@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It’s a feature not a bug. A feature to maximize profits for of the vendors that create your hardware that is.

For vendors a so called vendor lock-in is a great way to make money. Hence they have an incentive to make their stuff not work well with other stuff so they can sell you more of their stuff.

Now, in some cases they have to implement compatibility, because otherwise they’d have trouble getting customers int he first place, but in it’s often obvious that playing well with others isn’t a priority.

Hence solutions like home assistant rely on shoddy interfaces and that shows in the form of issues. Besides, it’s a volunteer driven application. You can’t expect the people who make it in their free time solve all the problems for you.

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walden@sub.wetshaving.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I wrote a response with links and stuff but it wouldn’t submit… anyway read the integration pages. Some things you are expecting don’t work, and Apple TV has a troubleshooting section.

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Heavybell@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Sounds super weird to me. I haven’t had any problems at all, but I run it on a RPi rather than a VM.

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- sokkies@lemmyrs.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Do you use it as a docker container or the full Home Assistant OS?
  
  I want to get it to play around but cannot really justify buying a separate raspberry pi jhst for HA?
  
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  - beeng@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I do all docker containers.
    
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