This decision was made so that we can continue to provide the best possible experience
The best possibile experience is having a single app that can do the whole house, not a broken proprietary app that occupies 200 mb of space on the phone and that takes 5 seconds to start because of its fancy splash screen
Don’t understand this, they are actively kicking out customers
Ah yes best possibile experience is this: (from the ars Technica article about it)
“Sadly, this app now displays advertisement at the very top and I cannot find a way to disable it,” writes one Play Store reviewer (Google doesn’t provide links to reviews). “This is very disturbing and on top of it, it moves my garage opening button out of the visible part of the screen. So to use it I now have to first look at the ads, then scroll down and hope to find my button.”
They’re not talking about your experience. They’re talking about the experience at the CEO’s summer house… That tennis court will not build itself and not for free 😁
Here is Home Assistant’s Blog Post on the subject.
This is why I hate depending on cloud services for my home automation. The last one on my shitlist is my thermostat. Just haven’t gotten around to researching options yet.
Put some
windextasmota on it
Their API breaking is nothing new. I ditched it years ago since it stopped working every couple of months.
Of course an official announcement is more serious, but still.
Anyone have good suggestions on what deserves my money, or the effort of setting up?
Anything new I buy has the ability to directly talk to homeassistant without a third party. Zigbee, zwave, ip. If its cloud it can fuck right off, I don’t need it.
Many brand names are using these protocols to talk to their bullshit hubs that then send your data out of your network. I’ve got a hodgepodge of stuff like samsung sensors, Ikea switches, ip cameras and all kinds of stuff.
It isn’t even that hard to set them up. HA can detect most devices on the network and recognise them.
Why does one need to connect everything like this? The only connected system (besides computers/entertainment ) I have in my entire house is a security system. What benefit is there to all that other stuff? Doesn’t it add quite a bit of cost?
I only tend to dabble, but I have Home Assistant set up - one example I’m on a flexible electricity tariff which is based on wholesale prices. It chages every 30 minutes. I have an automation that grabs tarrif info. If the price goes below zero (which it does sometimes when the grid has more energy than it knows what to do with, my hot water heaters all automatically turn on.
Others have given examples, but here’s one I just did: We have a pellet stove for supplemental heat. Our main system is a heat pump with electric backup - but the heat pump is undersized (thanks, previous owner), so it can’t keep up when temperatures get below about 40 degrees (somewhere around there, I forget).
I have an outdoor temperature sensor, and a temperature sensor in the room with the pellet stove. I wired a smart relay controlled by Home Assistant to the pellet stove to act as a thermostat, then defined that indoor temperature sensor and relay together as a thermostat in HA.
Then I wrote this logic:
- If the outside temperature rises above 50, set the pellet stove thermostat to something very low (so it shuts off; the heat pump can handle that just fine).
- If the outside temperature drops below 45, set the pellet stove thermostat to either 70 or 72, depending on whether it’s during the night or day.
- Coming soon, once I get around to it: If the HVAC is on auxiliary heat, set the pellet stove to something like 78 degrees, because that will be cheaper than the aux heat.
I’d also like to think about incorporating future info - for example, if the temperature outside is, say, 44 degrees and climbing to above 50 in the next 2 hours, then maybe don’t worry about firing up the pellet stove. I may also set something that if it’s below, say, 35 degrees outside, then it should keep the pellet stove running no matter what the indoor temperature is.
So here I’m using a Zigbee internal sensor, a 433 mHz outdoor sensor, that smart relay, data from the main HVAC thermostat, and potentially data from forecasts to make my pellet stove operate in a smart, energy efficient manner. HA allows me to take all of this disjoint information and merge it into something useful.
I will likely burn a lot less pellets than I did last year, which also saves me time because I don’t have refill the thing as often. The pellet stove will kick on when needed, and shut off when it isn’t, and I don’t have to worry about it.
Besides, it’s kind of fun. ;)
Most security systems these days are just whitelabeled zwave etc sensors with a proprietary hub and a monthly charge.
The nice thing about HA is that you can pull almost everything into it and then add whatever automations you want. Recent example was my SO complaining about how dark it was going to the car when they leave in the morning. Super easy to set up an automation that turns out the floodlight switches when the front door opens. All kinds of stuff like that that’s really useful.
Garages just need a momentary dry-contact switch wired up where the button is (or you can get a ladder and place it closer to the motor).
I use a Sonoff 4CH Pro which could do up to 4 garage doors. Surely there are other dry contact options, but that’s the one I use.
It’s flashed with Tasmota, and each switch is set to stay on for a fraction of a second, like a button press.
For sensors I use z-wave door sensors. The magnet is taped to the door, and the sensor is installed above it. I copied and pasted some yaml from somewhere to make Home Assistant display everything properly. It’s pretty slick!
This is in my covers.yaml file (referenced from config.yaml, of course).
garage_1: friendly_name: Garage 1 device_class: garage value_template: "{{ is_state('binary_sensor.garage_1', 'on') }}" open_cover: - condition: state entity_id: binary_sensor.garage_1 state: "off" - service: switch.turn_on target: entity_id: switch.garage_1_toggle close_cover: - condition: state entity_id: binary_sensor.garage_1 state: "on" - service: switch.turn_on target: entity_id: switch.garage_1_toggle stop_cover: service: switch.turn_on target: entity_id: switch.garage_1_toggle icon_template: >- {% if is_state('binary_sensor.garage_1', 'on') %} mdi:garage-open {% else %} mdi:garage {% endif %}I’ve been really happy with open garage https://opensprinkler.com/product/opengarage/
Connects via wifi, easy to set up, and I haven’t touched it since. Doesn’t require cloud!
Well, I swapped over to ratgdo instead of API access a couple months back, seems I pulled that trigger at the perfect time.
Fuck them though. It costs them the same whether you’re using the mobile app, or direct API calls, in fact it likely costs less. They are literally just after money.
Well, I’m quite happy with the timing on purchasing a pair of ratgdos for my two openers. I’d highly recommend for anyone looking for local only control without the myQ bullshit.
Even with the extra cost of shipping to Canada, they’re still worth it.
We inherited a MyQ opener when we moved, and I’ve never been very happy with it aside if these issues.
Has anyone already done the research into a smart opener that doesn’t suck and allows local control via home assistant, preferably over zwave?
I’m going to do a bit of research on it myself, just wondering if anyone has a recommendation to point me in the right direction.
I don’t have wifi in my garage, and I’d rather not rely on wifi to control the door.
To be fair, mechanically, the opener we have is fine, it’s everything else about it that I generally hate.
As someone who maintained an API, 80% to 90% of my time was discovering that hackers were attempting an exploit, blocking it, adding monitoring, building abuse prevention. After we shut our API off, we could turn services back on, especially free services that we only took away because hackers.
Not to mention the support volume. More than half of our support calls were, “Why did you suspend my account? I’m a poor old grandpa. I want to appeal.” Okay, yep we looked into activity and you sent 50000 requests in less than a minute and that’s all you ever did with this account. Did you know hackers lie and will spend hours getting tech support? You go to school to be an engineer to build cool stuff and instead field bullshit support requests all day from people trying to destroy the thing you want to build so they can maybe make thirty bucks and cost you tens of thousands. It sucked the life out of me and turned me eternally cynical.
This isn’t an issue with hackers though - this is people legitimately using the devices that they paid for with Home Assistant and other automation systems.
Sounds like working at a small company isn’t for you. We have dedicated tech support and a team that works with them for this kind of stuff. Abuse of our APIs does happen, but it’s usually automatically blocked or causes enough traffic to trigger our alerts and gets manually blocked.
