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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Oh boy, I'm looking forward to going all in on Google Home only for it to be deprecated in three years!
(Hey folks, Home Assistant is pretty cool and you can run it locally on an old laptop.)
Home Assistant is great, but it has a steep learning curve imo and it takes time to set up. I would only recommend it to tech savvy people.
That being said, if you are tech savvy (familiar with Linux, docker, self hosting, etc) then it is extremely powerful and it works with pretty much everything.
This is very true. It does look like they've made it much easier lately with pre-purchasable hardware though. I know that it's a steep price compared to Google Home, but the advantage is that you're not tied to a Google ecosystem which can just unexpectedly shut down at a moment's notice. (Listen y'all I'm still mad about Google Inbox.)
I assume it'll get a little easier in the future?
There are some neat things I'd like to do, but I don't want to be in a walled garden.
It's not a walled garden, it's kind of the opposite. You can connect devices regardless of brand and it's a server you can run locally. In theory you wouldn't need to update it or ever connect it to the internet again, as long as your devices can run locally.
If you have an old laptop or a raspberry pi 4, you can always give it a try before scrapping what you're currently using.
I meant with commercial stuff like Google's. The easy stuff is all walled gardens, don't want that. So hoping stuff like Home Assistant gets easier to use.
Is home assistant a piece of software? Do you have a link, it's not a very searchable name
Here you go: https://www.home-assistant.io/
You would need to do some pre-planning before going ahead with this and it's not as simple as Google Home for sure. For example, my household went all in on Zigbee lights and switches so we had to get a Zigbee antenna to connect to our old laptop running Home Assistant and make sure all our cool LED smart lights and other cool gadgets were compatible, etc. I'm also tagging @ISometimesAdmin who did a lot of the networking stuff in case he wants to add anything.
I'm attaching an image of my dashboard setup for my room, just as an example of what can be accomplished. (This may not federate to Lemmy so I will self-reply with a link if necessary) This shows my and my household's location, the downstairs Sensi thermometer climate (which can be controlled), the light controls, temperature/pressure/humidity which is a little Aqara sensor from Amazon, and the Air Quality comes from my Winix air filter which can also be integrated to Home Assistant. You can really do a lot.
To add onto this:
Home Assistant isn't "yet another" service. It's not trying to do vendor lock in: you can think of Home Assistant kinda like a "glue" framework.
It's meant to let you systemically attach devices/software across any number of mediums, and pre-existing services, and let them play nice.
So if you've already gone and set up your Google Home, or Alexa, or Apple Homekit, you don't have to abandon them to use Home Assistant.
Sometimes you can't even get away from it: the thermostat that came with our rental basically only has a useful Samsung Smartthings integration, but we can still use it with Home Assistant.
If the image link didn't come in: here you go.
There's also purchasable hardware that comes pre-installed with Home Assistant and has zigbee built-in, it looks like, which is neat (though expensive).
Weird. It was the first result for me: https://www.home-assistant.io/
Yes it's software for managing IoT stuff, tons of addons and plugins for just about everything.
https://www.home-assistant.io/
Yea, it's not hard to search for it.
Seriously though.
Just got word that Pixel Pass, introduced less than 2 years ago that had an every-2-years upgrade program, has been cancelled.
They didn't even have it long enough to give people the main benefit. So don't rely on Google to keep anything new going these days.
Homeassistant is fun and all but it falls down for complex automations for me
Doesn't even need an old laptop, mines running on a Pi3
I tried using a pi3 but it kept crashing from going OOM like every 2 days (maybe I had too many devices?). I have it running on a more proper home server now and it's always up as long as there's no power outage.