some positive reactions in the news from the new #HomeAssistant dashboard UI and appearance.

[emory@soc.kvet.ch]

some positive reactions in the news from the new #HomeAssistant dashboard UI and appearance.

if you're a HomeKit house, I do recommend you consider #HASS as the backbone of your household automation. you can present parts of your HomeAssistant #householdIT selectively to your Apple Home, so my fam can control lighting and whole-house audio.

https://www.howtogeek.com/i-switched-to-home-assistants-new-dashboard-and-its-now-my-favorite-hub/

you can do incredibly powerful orchestration and AI automations inside of HASS and let the polished product be what they see!

[winterschon@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@emory Looks nice, but I had nothing but issues with Home Assistant on a mostly Z-Wave + Zigbee network. Switched to Hubitat and all of the issues disappeared. I really wanted to like it, even built a whole CM4 8GB system for it, bought separate radios as necessary, validated everything via HCL, and it simply refused to operate consistently with my equipment no matter how much debugging or replacement parts were tried.

There might be some issue with running HAS when everything is decoupled from HomeKit, Google Home, Alexa, etc and not using any manufacturer apps (Tapo/Kasa, Hue, uuuuuuugh, no more). So all of my devices use raw protocol without those secondary apps, and they're much more user friendly and stable.

I do like that dashboard you described, very well rounded.

[emory@soc.kvet.ch]

@winterschon oh no that sounds like a nightmare and one that i also endured at one point!

i actually made (imo) an error when i first started. i should have gone for wifi wall plates and zigbee lighting. i have some hue bulbs using their bridge but their bulbs are astronomically more expensive e.g. i have two ceiling fans that can only use candelabra bulbs and my g-d those are $$$ just for white!

so i have a lot of WiFi lightbulbs. like 40. 70% HomeKit 24% Matter 6% Tuya/Branded-but-Tuya?

[emory@soc.kvet.ch]

@winterschon i do most automations and orchestration in HASS and then present selected devices (lights mostly) to HomeKit via the HASS Bridge.

Exceptions:

- Ecobee App and Smart Cameras, Ecobee Doorbell are directly integrated to Home.app for a variety of reasons. HomeAssistant can't even talk to the cams only contact sensors and room sensors. When someone comes to the door all the TVs in the house show a PiP of who is at the door before they press the button. love it.

[emory@soc.kvet.ch]

@winterschon but Apple requires a HomePod or AppleTV or iPad to act as the Home Hub and it must be on the primary internal homenet wifi network your personal devices use. most of my IOT garbage is on a dedicated network but for HomeKit-First things like the Ecobee and householdAV have a source of truth as HomeKit.

sometimes one of my homepods will end up on the wrong SSID and it's a pain in the ass. it happens when i have my iPad hop on the private backplane wifi network i use for gaming 😂

[winterschon@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@emory Yep, everything about HomeKit eventually stopped working after one or another of their OTA updates which offered zero guidance about Thread border router default devices, what happens when the mystery ipad is taken elsewhere (office, perhaps) and now the entire HomeKit network is confused and does not promote another device - it just stops working until that ipad returns.

There are no thread controls anywhere for anything which Apple makes - the Homepod itself is a complete tragedy, we ended up throwing one in the trash after two years of it randomly dropping off of the network (and oh look there can't be TWO dualing thread border routers - why didn't we think of this unknown info when spending money on yet another apple product which crumbles over its own bloated broken features - maybe v2 for HomeKit will require liquid glass. 😏