I like home assistant but I feel I'm always so behind with my own instances everything feels very outdated how I have it. But I just have no time to modernize it.
I think the beauty of home assistant is that if everything is working, why worry.
Some of the updates are great though. I'm quite new to home assistant so I'm eagerly always playing with the new stuff, but soon I'll just throw my Raspberry Pi in a dark corner and forget to update it for months at a time.
Currently leaning towards the Lenovo m710q or m910q, both under 150 at microcenter (6th Gen i5 6500t). It's overkill, but it's small. I have to put my hands on it before making the purchase though, make sure the refurb models they have the io I want
I always keep Home Assistant as up to date as possible. Home Assistant keeps improving a lot. Month to month each update goes fairly seamlessly if HA is kept up to date, but the further it falls behind the harder it is to catch back up. Recent optimisation improvements have also made the update process faster.
If you can make the time it's worth the effort. Even if you have to "start over" somewhat there is probably a lot you have learned since that you can use to improve your setup.
Yeah that's what I'm doing too. On top of that I have 3 instances, my own at home, the one at my parents house and then another one at their summer house.
I don't want to do that because once there are new features you want, upgrading in a big bang is basically impossible because there are too many breaking changes. So it's better at least to fix small things all the time. Also on top of that security updates are very important too.
Most mobile apps do something like this. One reason is to improve battery life - your phone can have a single connection to a Google server instead of every app needing its own separate connection.
There used to be a way to use local notifications (meaning you have to be on the same network, either locally or via a VPN), but I can't find the setting any more so maybe it's gone now. (edit: this is still possible)
The data these two companies receive includes metadata, detailing which app received a notification and when, as well as the phone and associated Apple or Google account to which that notification was intended to be delivered. In certain instances, they also might also receive unencrypted content, which could range from backend directives for the app to the actual text displayed to a user in an app notification.
I don't see anything in that article that says that Google store the contents of the notification. It just says that they link push tokens to emails, which is true - they have to know who to send the push notification to.
In any case, if you don't want Home Assistant notifications being relayed through Google, you can use a persistent connection so that the app connects directly to your Home Assistant server.
My friend, did you read what the article you linked says? That isn’t storing the data, that’s capturing the data and relaying it, as directed by court order.
I’m guessing you aren’t a programmer or network engineer, because a relay does not necessitate storing anything. Your router does not “store” your webpages when you go to a page on the internet. Something like mulvad vpn doesn’t store anything when using it.
Let’s say notifications are like walkie-talkies. You push a button, it sends an alert or your voice to the paired device. Neither one is storing the information, they are just relaying to each other. Now, in this case the government has issued a court order stating that a third party be given a walkie-talkie with the ability to understand the information transmitted by the first. There is still no storage being done, but a second party now receives all the information being broadcast.
It’s not about not having the information. You don’t actually need to store it anywhere to facilitate communication, at least beyond it being in memory which most would agree doesn’t constitute storage in this situation.
Now, could that third party store the information? Absolutely.
It definitely threw me the first time I was out of the house.
I decided the best solution was just to limit alerts to non-sensitive things.
While I'm generally very big on privacy, I really don't give a monkeys if Apple/Google is relaying a message that says "Cat in garden!"
You can enable a persistent connection to get alerts directly without relaying them through Google, but then you need to have a connection to your Home Assistant server all the time (eg by using a VPN or by exposing it publicly)
I tried Room Assistant a year or 2 ago and it SUCKED. I have a 4 storey townhouse and had 2 nodes running Room Assistant and I could be stood next to 1, two floors away from the other and that's the one it said I was closest to.
The idea is that by detecting the strength of the Bluetooth signal, the node with the best signal was closest, but it just didn't work (for me).
Anyway espresence is better, especially because I've doubled up and I bought 4 esp32 boards with pins off AliExpress for under £12, and arrived within a week.
You connect the little chip to your pc and flash a firmware from Google Chrome, then hook it into your WiFi, go to its page and give it a name, and hook it into your MQTT.
4 boards later I have a node per floor.
Next I added our phones to it by pairing them to it, then deleting the pairing on the phone. Add the Bluetooth connection to HA config and you're away! Well...
So you have to connect what the boards say to what it means in HA yourself. You get "bedroom" off Espresence and have a Bedroom zone but you have to put the pieces together yourself.
I ended up making binary sensors for each room in Node Red. Did I leave the room? Who else is there, nobody? Ok mark it clear... You could just make helper switches and use them but I was feeling fancy. I've already posted recently about the Binary sensor.
But once you've done that, you just base your automations off the state of the switches you made.
So the age old "The front room motion sensor stopped detecting, should the lights go off?" question, now becomes...
Huh I must have stopped typing there...
...much easier to solve. I can still have the old "TV on?, wife's laptop connected to Bluetooth?" bits in, but having Bluetooth presence detection AS WELL makes it much more reliable, for a measly £12
This is very interesting, thsni thanks!
How fast are the base stations? Is it all down to the smartphone speed to connect to a BT device?
What smartphone are you using?
You pair the device to a base station once to create an entity but you don't have to if you know the mac of your phone. So there's no pairing involved in the tracking.
You can use the HA app to create a beacon on your phone when you're on your home WiFi and not pair anything, just plumb the id into HA.
The speed is quite fast but there is still a lot of false positives. I've sat and watched mine and my wife's phones just pinging around the house, but if you add some "for X seconds" to your automations it becomes much more stable.
I've got 3 android phones and an iPhone tracked at present
But... how much faffing did you have to do to get the tuning right?
I've recently started using this and have 3 different ESP modules and I'm having a hellofatime getting them to show near-enough results, let alone accurate.
1 of them literally has the phone on top of it and it thinks it's 4m away.
I've gone upto absorbtion factor 10 (Spock) with an RSSI adjustment of 6, and that's passible on 1 device, but not another
The secret is not caring it's 4m away as long as it says you're closest to that one. It's not accurate, it's a guess made with software.
As I've said I've sat at my PC on the front room and watched it say I'm in my bedroom and kitchen.
So for example my front room lights are based around an input boolean. They're triggered on by motion but back off by whether the TV is on, my wife's laptop is connected to the WiFi, the pc is switched off, and everyone's presence is not in the front room. I already did all that and now I have presence as well.
It used to be that my wife would be sat there on her phone and the lights would go out, now because her phone is on her person they stay on.
Like I say, they're not perfect but they are better than not having them.
I don't think I'll ever have my music follow me around the house.
Oh also try instead of basing automations around whether you are in a room, instead use "is not"
So for example when I get out of bed and get up for work by bedroom lights come on with my alarm. When I go downstairs and make a brew I am no longer in the bedroom so my automations turn off the lights in there. Is not "bedroom"
It's triggered by the motion sensor outside my bedroom door, then it waits for my presence to be anything other than bedroom. Since I'm moving around the house it'll trigger at some point.
Similarly my sleep automation turns off when the bedroom is no longer occupied. But that's when my wife gets up 2 hours after me. It's also triggered by motion, but then waits until my bedroom presence sensor no longer reads anything
Ah, ok... I see. I guess you've not filtering on distance then, ok. I see all my neighbours stuff on 1 sensor, so automatically started filtering (and then attempting to tune)
Good point on the negative room sensing, I think I need to start this again... but also ditch the crap module.
Yeah I have a million Bluetooth devices picked up but I've only put 4 of them so far into my Ha sensors. Fuck knows what the others are, but we have soany devices in the house that I can't keep track, then there's the neighbours' stuff too...
Interestingly I stumbled across a YouTube short yesterday about hacking an android device from only knowing it's Bluetooth Mac address, so theoretically I could really piss off my neighbours if they drove me to it.
Just coming back in to say that yeah, now I've used it as a primary trigger instead of a secondary check it seems I'm all over the place in Bluetooth land...
I don't have a motion sensor in my bedroom. I do have an old phone on a charging stand that I use as a Smart Clock, and the camera of that can be used as a motion sensor. It's pointed at my head when I'm in bed so it's not in an optimal motion sensor position... Just setting the scene for you.
Now I had an automation that turns bedroom lights on based on motion so when I wake up in the middle of the night for a pee I have a lamp that turns on for five minutes.
Well of course I wanted MORE from this extra from my clock, so I've added presence in the room as a primary trigger of my lamps.
I'm stood in my room watching my lights popping on and off again every 30 seconds...
Not great as a primary trigger, more a secondary check.
Anyway I'm gonna try and change it by adding "in room FOR 30 seconds" to my sensors, seems to be helping so far.
Also limiting reporting distance in the settings for each node to 4-6 meters.
Or maybe stop trying to use it as a primary sensor lol
I already have motion sensors everywhere but I also have cats. They make it seem like there's people wandering around the house all the time.
I've placed a lot of them on top of door frames that seem to miss the cats, but in the front room there's sofas for them to climb up on which means they still get picked up.
I have also since this post purchased MMwave sensors. But they're worse for picking up the cats.
So what I'm trying to do is add more sensors so HA has a better picture of who is in the house, and when.
To give you an idea, yesterday I took my wife to a Dr appointment, my kids are at their grandparents, but when I was sat on the car waiting for Wifey I noticed my kitchen lights were on in the app.
The Drs turned into the hospital and I was out for a good 4 hours, but got home and added "Is anyone home?" to my lights automations.
When GitHub processes a DMCA takedown under our circumvention technology claim review process, we will offer the repository owner a referral to receive independent legal consultation through GitHub’s Developer Defense Fund at no cost to them.
You know what that means, soldiers. Clone, clone, clone the repo, far and wide, online and offline. Fuck 'em. Give them the PirateBay whackamole treatment.
I must be too old school because my first thought when i read this was “with an old solenoid lying around and a few lines of code, an AtTiny could strike a key on the bluetooth keyboard, waking the laptop!
I'm mildly surprised OP's laptop keeps the bluetooth radio powered up while asleep, but I would be a lot more surprised to find one that doesn't work with USB HID.
"Specifically, the plug-ins are using our services in an unauthorized manner, which is causing significant economic harm to our Company."
Presumably, they don't charge customers extra for hOn, so surely the only people using it via HA are the same people that would otherwise have used their (presumably) shitty app that isn't meeting the customers' needs in the first place?
Not clear on how this causes them "significant" economic harm. Dick move.
Yeah - in an ideal world, the dev would have the means (and legal standing) to challenge this, just to force the fuckers to admit it in court.
Not that it isn't written into their ToS somewhere - just would love them to admit exactly how that harms them so much, financially speaking. Shine a light on the whole thing.
The only way I see a company like this having "significant economic harm" from you not using their free app is if 1) they eventually plan to charge a fee to use the app or 2) they profit from data their app collects about you (third party data sales, for example).
Not something I'm interested in either way, so they've lost a potential customer.
Looking at the brands they already own, it's not hard to picture a future where they'll own a brand I want to buy.
Although, I'm really interested (and haven't done reading up on hOn yet) - just what level of automation are people looking for on their appliances? I used smart plugs with current measurements, so I can easily get HA to just tell me when my washing machine or dishwasher are finished.
Im expecting that HA provides a better experience because it might be hitting their services more than their own app, and they haven't costed the resources for hosting their service to include those extra requests coming from HA?
Possibly, but we're talking about appliances here. I know for a fact that my HVAC controller polls their cloud service just as much as my HA does (using a similarly-developed plugin to what we're talking about here).
Of course, that could mean it's doubling the number of times they're being hit, but I somehow doubt there's millions of customers doing that - the forks and stars on the repos are only in the hundreds.
I'm guessing it's what others here have already said - loss of usage data that they've been able to sell.
One of the problems with the cloud-polling integrations is that they will frequently poll the back-end APIs to get the current status of that device. A normal user might only open up the app once or twice a day and call the APIs, but these integrations will go 24/7 every 10s-5m. That can add up to a non-trivial amount of traffic. If there's 100 users opening it up once a day, that's not a lot of traffic, but 10 users polling every 1 minute is equivalent to 15k people doing something once a day.
I actually saw one of my integrations I used defaulted to updating every 10 seconds. I decreased that because I didn't want to draw attention to it.
A business will look at their usage and ask why there's more than expected traffic. They could be running their server on a potato. They could go back and support Matter, that costs money, requires skilled engineers, and cuts into profit margins.
While it sucks, that is something they could point to in a court about "economic harm".
I reckon it's probably not that much. There has to be tens of thousands of customers worldwide that are using their shitty app.
Forks and stars on the original repo numbered only in the hundreds.
Cloud services and API gateways usually charge once you get into the millions of requests. Amazon API Gateway doesn't even charge for having the APIs active - only for the requests that are received and the data transferred out.
I'm finding it very difficult to believe a few hundred HA users even came close to putting a dent in their cloud bill.
I've never used either, so I can't speak to their actual quality, but cheaping out on cameras defeats the purpose of getting cameras if the footage is too grainy or blurry to be used for anything.
The wireless Reolinks are not great. Like, nothing against the camera itself, however, the WiFi antenna must be smaller than the one in my watch. The range is truly abysmal.
Tapo ones are perfectly fine, good quality all around, but it’s important to specify that I have experience with external, solar powered Reolinks and indoor Tapo, so it’s a bit of a different category.
can these be configured to stream TO a remote frigate server?
Example: I'd like to install one at my parent's house, connect it to my parent's wifi, but have it stream to frigate, that's hosted on my server in another city?
i had frigate running locally and could integrate them. That said i grabbed the stream from the local network. I guess you would need some sort of local pi to forward the streams. But that is well above my pay grade ^^ sorry
It might not be original quality, but this should be fairly straightforward with a tunnel or VPN connection to your parent's house. You'd also lose quality in having a WiFi camera instead of wired.
Based on the verbiage of the threat from haier it kinda sounds like they don’t have a leg to stand on. Short of just the financial cost of fighting this blatantly bullshit lawsuit should they file one. The TOS isn’t the law, so to demand the devs to cease all illegal activities means nothing here.
You are right, TOS isn't the law. However businesses will try to trick you with this technique, especially if they don't think you have any legal support. You can't commit a crime just because the victim agreed to it, no amount of contracts negate this. Employers often pull this trick to force employees to accept illegal practices.
The person hosting and publishing the code may have never agreed to the TOS. So can't be bound by it. They also can revoke their agreement, and no longer have to comply with it. However, continued use of the businesses web services likely requires agreeing to the TOS and this plug in may be using the businesses web services to make the plugin work.
I hope they’re still Zigbee devices. No info I can find at the moment but I quite like that I can use Trådfri stuff with Zigbee2mqtt and I’d love to add more functionality
If my experience in both IT and lock picking has taught me anything, it's to stay away from anything "smart" 'nd also don't secure your house with schlage or masterlock
Edit:
Abus, zeiss and squire are good choices in locks though
Picking a lock is a lot more likely than somebody finding an exploit and hacking your lock. In either case, locks are minimal theft deterrent, not prevention.
So can nearly all physical locks you'll find on a house door. The ones nearly everyone puts on their doors are super simple. Most thieves won't bother though, if your lock poses even the slightest challenge they'll go through a window if they really want in.
The point I think is that while most locks are really easy to pick relatively, the people that it's really easy to pick to, aren't the same people robbing your house.
The ones that sit and practice picking the locks are the ones that install them, or come out when you've misplaced your keys and get you in the house.
The robbers are mainly opportunists that wander around looking for open doors and windows, knock to see if you're home then try to force a way in.
Our smart lock has an external 9v battery plug so the worst case is that you will have to walk to the store and buy a battery before you can unlock using the keypad.
But that hasn't happened to us yet because the lock will warn you before it runs out by beeping.
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