anybody using homeassistant and having success? i feel like everything i try with it is extra complicated, but i’d love to hear others’ success stories.
I have no interest myself, but if I wanted a home assistent I would take an Amazon Echo (either from a dumpster, or 2nd-hand), and put lineageOS on it to liberate it. The more Amazon hardware that gets converted to a liberated platform, the better. People have done this successfully with the Echoes that have a screen, but the headless Echoes need the same motivation and effort so we can liberate those too. Otherwise they are going to waste.
My success is that my wife loves it and complains when I take it down for maintenance. I’ve successfully moved her and the kids away from Google Assistants and internet connected everything.
That’s what a win looks like, 100% WAF.
*edit: spelling.
Oh yeah, I use it for everything from automated lights to server monitoring notifications to Web scraping for when Publix chicken tender subs are on sale. Most everything you can think of is pretty well documented, and someone’s done it before. They have made some UI changes recently that make creating automations easier, but if you are ok with copying and editing YAML files, you can steal what other people have created pretty easily.
Stay way, it is way too addictive. If you are not careful you will end automating from window blinds to toilets.
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Can confirm. Started with replacing my Tuya lightbulbs. Last thing I automated was hydrometers for my house plants to tell me they’re thirsty.
How will we achieve fully automated luxury communism if the house plants are thirsty and we don’t know?
do you have tips for someone who hasn’t gotten there yet but would want to and has 20+ plants that would be nice to monitor? I already build an indoor HA automated lamp house for tomatoes (ESPhome)
I guess I wish I had switched to zigbee earlier. I have been slowly replacing all my tuya wifi devices. Zigbee Home-assistant App and Zigbee2MQTT are both local-only. For Hygrometers, buy in bulk and expect 1 in 4 to be useless garbage. I get them on Ali for cheap.
No problems here. Pretty basic use, outside light scheduling, tying inside lights together (if a on, turn b&c on), bathroom fan timers, and sensor notifications. I haven’t really messed with the dashboard.
Used it for a couple of years. Moved away from it being in docker to HAOS and took the opportunity to start fresh. I was really blown away how much more user friendly it has gotten. Adding devices and setting up basic automation I find pretty easy, but some blueprints can be a hassle to setup
Is HAOS free of containers? #iso27002
Yep, been running it for a couple years at least? Mostly ZigBee and Zwave devices. For lights, some other powered devices, temperature control, and in-house location tracking.
It’s not always intuitive, but always figure it out eventually. There’s a homeassistant community at !homeassistant@lemmy.world which might be helpful if you have questions.
Automations can get pretty clunky, but I manage with my simple needs. Some people swear by using NodeRed on top of home assistant, but I’ve never tried it.
I have one for a long-ish time, started really using it now. It is daunting at first (still is) but I can feel the potential. You just have to invest some time in getting to know it and how to set it up.
Proprietary apps might be more user friendly, but I guess that’s how they get you. Also, I imagine HA is easier if you want to set up something overly specific.
I’m still in the daunting phase though.
It really is a pain in the ass if you’re not the type of person who likes to tinker with everything all the time. And, if you want something that isn’t the most common thing, you have to SSH into the server that runs it.
i had a pretty effective google home setup but have tried to transition away from Google devices, and good lord. it’s so much more complicated doing it myself!
good on you for moving away from Google!
How so? Most things should be detected automatically. Dashboards can also be populated automatically, same as with google home. If you want better dashboards, it will take more work.
Which points give you pain?
Yeah I like it a lot. Didn’t use anything else so I don’t have a comparison, but I found most things very straightforward.
It’s getting messy when you have to do non-standard tasks like removing some entries from the database
Its amazing and addictive lol especially once you start taking back control of your local devices. Rtl433 would be the followup ;)
Yeah. It was pretty easy to setup, then again I work in tech for my job.
I feel like they over engineered the heck out of ‘simplifying’ automations, to the point I stayed on Core v2025.8.3 for about 7 months. I disliked their menu changes and hate the big ol card that comes up on mobile when editing - much prefer the older style.
