Founder of Home Assistant here. If anyone has any questions, let me know!

Besides being able to install it as a Python package on Python 3, you can also install it using our Hass.io OS. Based on ResinOS and powered by Docker, it offers over the air updates and management of your device via the user interface: https://home-assistant.io/hassio/

I'm a co-founder of Snips https://snips.ai, we are building a 100% on-device Voice AI platform which protects your privacy as it does not rely on sending voice on servers like Google and Apple do

You can use the platform for free (we will also open-source over time), it can run on Raspberry 3 and we added an integration with the amazing Home Assistant: https://home-assistant.io/components/snips

Is anyone else here completely confused at how much hype there is around automated light management systems? I don’t get it. Is it really that hard to turn on and off lights manually that people really need all this stuff? What am I not getting?

How does it compare to OpenHAB 2, other than the language (OpenHAB is written in Java)?

I'm currently running OpenHAB and it's rock solid (I have one with >2 years uptime on a BananaPI). If I want to extend it, I usually write Python scripts that either use OpenHAB HTTP API or send MQTT messages, so I've not yet felt the need to write Java code. While I'm proficient with Java, I'd have to set up a development environment.

But the OpenHAB scripting language - while very powerful - has a very steep learning curve. It's hard to work with if you don't use it all the time and you end up having to google everything single thing you want to do.

The Home Assistant community appears to be more active (about 2x) and the barrier for entry is much lower.

For people interested in the tech stack:

Backend is Python 3 with asyncio. Source: https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant - License: Apache 2

Frontend is a PWA powered by Polymer 2 Source: https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant-polymer - License: Apache 2 - Demo: https://home-assistant.io/demo/

I've experimented with both Home Assistant, Domoticz and OpenHab. They're all pretty good in different ways, but in the end in decided to roll my own.

They all have built-in scripting, but it's pretty common to send events to mqtt and use some external tools for scripting. In ended up using node-red, because it looked interesting and was really easy to get going.

After a while it seemed like the only reason for using any of those 3 systems was the device support, and since I was just using z-wave, for which there is a nice node-red library, I decided to do it all on my own. It only took a couple of week nights before I had most of the things I needed.

It did feel kinda silly to do drag and drop programming, and I did en up using the function node a whole lot, but in the end I stuck with it because it allowed me to show the family what it does and how it works.

I was able to get Home Assistant spun up via Hass.io on an RPi2 very rapidly, switched to RPi3 for improved UI performance though.

OTA updates have been seamless, but the out-of-box still requires some conf file editing, which may be a turn off for some. It did automatically discover AppleTV, Roku, and Hue (easy pairing).

For integrating "homebrew" sensors I was able to roll MySensors[0] platform with parts lying around in drawers to get house-wide temperature monitoring with a few lines of yaml.

Looking forward to further refinements to the platform!!

[0]: https://www.mysensors.org

This thing seems to be mostly an interface for other home automation devices. In the demo, it doesn't directly control anything important. It's not like there are motor control relays connected to the Raspberry Pi's GPIO ports.

A big question is how this fails. It needs to fail into some safe condition. Raspberry Pi machines have a full Linux and no stall timer, so they can end up crashed or hung. If this thing turns devices on and is relied on to turn them off, that's a problem.

Assuming I have a few lights controllable via GPIO on the Raspberry pi (with custom circuitry to power the lights), what’d be the easiest way to integrate them with Hass?

(btw, hass means 'hate' in German)

Here is a really nice post from one of the home assistant contributors on visualizing the home using home assistant and some other goodies:

http://www.vmwareinfo.com/2017/07/visualizing-smart-home-usi...

Reasonable satisfied user here. I love python and even contributed support for one particular device to a component library.

But my plan for the next free weekend is to look into Node-RED and a fully MQTT based system. I feel like that's the way to mix and match different frontends, automations, components etc.

Looks interesting, can this function as a ZWave controller hub when used on system with a ZWave USB stick?

One of the best things of HA is the Emulated Hue Bridge. It allows you the mapping of any kind of Hardware on the corresponding Hue Device. It basically translates e.g. MQTT to Hue. This nicely allowed it to me to integrate my custom built devices in my Home Automation and control them with Amazons Echo Dot.

I had a lot of challenges running home-assistant. Wouldnt find devices properly, issues with devices falling out of the zwave network. Would constantly have to "re-sync".

I went and spent the money on HomeSeer and it has been so much better. Tons of great plugins that just work like MQ for the garage, IFTTT, etc. Has schedules, adhoc scripting integeration so you can run your own shell scripts on events, multi-event groups, a decent UI, logging and strong device support.

Its strangely written in VB but from a device support standpoint has been extremely solid and finding any device i throw at it quite easily.

I originally tried to use OpenHab and was turned off it because it required me to define all my stuff manually instead of discovering it automatically. Does HA do the same thing?

The home IoT world is broken - I got lots of devices (Sonos, Hue, Alexa, Roku, ...) and they don't play well with each other.

Shoutout for data and API integration layer for Home IoT.

I love Home Assistant, by far my favorite automation platform. I couldn't recommend it more. At home we use it to automatically dim the lights based on the luminance outside, send us messages when laundry is done, activate and deactivate our alarm system based on who is home, turn the radio on in the morning when we enter the living room, turn off all lights in the house when we go to bed, etc. etc. !

I really really wanted to set this up and have it working, but configuring devices and actions with it is so unnecessarily complicated that I ended up writing my own scripts to do whatever I wanted rather than writing templating code inside YAML config files (literally) to do certain things.

If you want to build everything yourself you can get stuff for very cheap eg a pir sensor for 1$ and it will be a good learning experience. If you think it's fun you can even start selling stuff, there's a huge market with huge margins.

Is there anything out there for setting up a DMX controlled light strip to something smart?

Has the automation scripting improved recently?

Last time I looked into this there was an uninvuative (for a newbie) config file that required a server restart to see changes. Not exactly the easiest way to learn as it was a very slow feedback loop.

I have used this for a while now and say it's the best choice I've made, Still a WIP but really really good

The Android client is on F-Droid. Nice. People who don't use Google services can download it easily.

You might be interested in this analysis (that I co-authored) showing Home Assistant as one of the 20 highest velocity open source projects: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/06/05/30-highest-velocity-open...

I love Home Assistant. I do wish that the auto-discovery feature was working in Windows 10.

Is it right that home automation is really just light automation? Or did I miss something?

How would you maintain all those APIs ?