I recently learned about Home Assistant here on Lemmy. It looks like a replacement for Google Home, etc. However, it requires an entire hardware installation. Proprietary products just use a simple app to manage and control devices, so can someone explain why a pretty robust dedicated device is necessary as a replacement? The base model has a quad core processor, 4 gigs of ram, and a 32 gig hard drive. Admittedly it’s no gaming PC, but it’s no arduino either.
What actually happens when I turn on a smart switch in my home? Does that command have to be sent to a server somewhere to be processed? What really has to be processed, and why can’t a smartphone app do it?
Edit: I am still getting new replies to this (which are appreciated!), but I wanted to share what I’ve learned from those who have posted already. I fundamentally misunderstood how smart switches work. I had very wrongly assumed that when my phone is connected to the WiFi, it sends a signal over the local network to toggle the switch, which is connected to the same network, and it turns on/off. While there are technologies that work like this (zigbee, kinda?), most smart home devices rely on a cloud server to communicate the signal. This enables features like using the switches from outside the home network, automation, voice controls, etc. The remote server is what’s being replaced.
A service needs a server, not just a phone. Do you want to self host, or use the entire hardware installation in someone’s cloud data center?
You can run HA on lighter hardware, or use a VM or docker, but it needs something to host.
When I say “hey Siri open my garage door”, my phone does voice recognition, calls the Apple Home app, which calls my local Home Assistant server, which calls the RATGDO which opens the door.
Plus the benefit of running HA on this hardware is that you can often eliminate the proprietary hubs and sometimes cloud-based communication.
Yes, Google runs their servers in the cloud. If you host it yourself, it runs off a device in your house.
But you don’t need to use their own hardware. You can run on whatever you like, and it probably doesn’t actually need all four vCPUs.
Even then, those requirements are easily satisfied by a Raspberry Pi and most other SBCs out there. Seems rather reasonable to dedicate one to HA. It’s not too crazy when you take into consideration how powerful cheapo hardware can be these days.
I actually run mine in a 12 year old castoff Thinkpad. 4 GB ram total. More than enough to run it because I run a DNS server, a dashboard and a speedtest server on the same machine.
Home Assistant can be installed as a Docker container instead of going with the whole dedicated machine route.
Bluetooth can do it locally, but yes, for things on ZigBee or Z-Wave, it’s gotta have an antenna hub. WiFi switches and lights most likely do “phone-home” to the cloud in some way (usually for color or brightness control via app, Govee especially loves this). The down side, other than the obvious privacy implications, is that if your ISP has an outage, so do your switches.
Home Assistant attempts to mitigate both the privacy and offline issues, while putting all of the different brands and hubs into one place.
Okay — can anyone — and I mean anyone, please explain to me that allure of the so called home assistant. Our home was built in 1965. Its housed many families very comfortably. It houses our family very comfortably. Our kids are heading off to college. Tra la la. We have holidays, happiness, and we contribute to the community at a variety of events. We sleep well. Eat well. We host parties of up to fifty people sometimes… we have a yard.We have a dog, two cats, fish etc. All the things that happen in a home.
We are happy.
We have no so called smart products. We use a terrestrial radio in the kitchen on the daily. We stream from the rip-off services when we desire. We are up on the shows etc. So we have internet — each of us has a phone and a device for working. I just don’t get it.
What is the allure of the so called smart home etc?
Can anyone, I mean anyone, please explain to me that allure of so called cats. We are happy and have no cats. I just don’t get it
I’m sure they have an app to help you understand.
For many, just a hobby. If it doesn’t strike you as something you need or want, then maybe it isn’t
That’s true. It doesn’t.
I like the idea that some folks have entirely private systems run by raspberry-pi. That sounds fun.
But what can it do more easily than an mid 20th century home can do?
But what can it do more easily than an mid 20th century home can do?
One word: Automations. Everything from lights to irrigation, HVAC to surveillance cameras, fishtanks to plant monitoring, managed by a single, extensible open source platform, hosted locally in your own home.
Of course that is not trivial. If you don’t see your smart home as a hobby you enjoy putting time and effort into then the smart home scene is not for you, especially not Home Assistant.
Sounds like you are in a fine place with your home, so you are probably not the target audience here.
Nope. Just like living. Not sure what all the hoo-haw’s about. Never felt so old in my life.
Who doesn’t like hand feeding the fish? Why even have them?
Also, notifications. I’m a fairly forgetful person, so I set up notifications to let me know if I left windows open or devices on before I go to bed or leave for work.
Sounds convenient.
It’s just a minor convenience, not sure why that’s confusing.
I can set the temperature from anywhere, that’s nice.
Imagine… setting it while at home.
I have a proxmox hassio VM with 2gb ram and it runs everything smart in my house. The main purpose would be for automations IMO. Like when my phone chargers at night the house lights, TVs locks all shut down and the cameras go into alerting mode. Home assistant is amazing since you don’t have to have 5 apps to control stuff and your data is completely private unlike when using Google home etc. When buying IOT devices I would say stick with zigbee, zwave and only buy WiFi stuff if it works locally without having to have internet wccess.
While there are technologies that work like this (zigbee, kinda?),
Yes, there are many. You probably know them as “remote control”. Your TV, your garage door…
Home Assistant can also control them via gateway devices, turn them into “smart” devices and include them in larger automation scenarios.
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in a nutshell
This is how the control and information exchange of smart devices work:
Phone App -> [Server] … [Server] -> Smart Device and vice versa
There’s no way around this concept.
Now, Google gives you the phone app and the (public) server part. but these only work with their servers and apps, keeping you locked in.
HA gives you the same, a server and an app, but allows you to keep the server private (access via vpn for public)
Also who guarantees that Google Home will be there in the next few years? HA will still keep running even if it ever gets abandoned.
Technically there is. If the device uses BLE or the phone has some built in hardware shenanigans. There is also a local gateway via ble. I’d argue a simple gateway is not a “server”. Scheduling can be done by the device via internal non-volatile storage and RTC
Sure, but I was talking about the basic concept of how things work in general to keep it simple for OP.
Gateway is a more specific name for a server.
Like web host is a more specific name for a server.A server isn’t anything fancy, it just serves a service.
If that is just a relay between your phone and local devices, that’s what it’s serving
Wifi smart devices can have that sort of completely local control, not just zigbee. LIFX devices use local control if you don’t connect them to the cloud. However, you’re then limited in lots of ways, such as you can’t then use a smart switch from a different manufacturer to control the lights. Home Assistant takes over the job of Google/Apple Home, which allows different manufacturer’s devices to all work together harmoniously. Those services also provide things like automations, turning the lights on when your smartphone arrives within a geofence for example. HA can do even better because those automations will work across Android as well as iOS. It also maintains the advantage of just one app to control your entire home.
As well, as far hardware, I think you’re misunderstanding a bit. Nabu Casa, the org that controls the open-source HA project, sells a couple of pre-built devices that run home assistant already. They’re designed as turn-key solutions for people with less technical know-how, and provide a bunch of expansibility so people don’t waste money needing to upgrade. The proceeds from those go back into supporting the projects costs. But you can go out and buy a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W (512mb RAM) for $15 and it’ll happily run the kind of basic setup you’re after. But you will almost immediately run into it’s limitations if you try to do anything more complicated.
My HA server is running on an x86 VM with 2c/4t and 8gb of RAM to itself. Have a full music server running on it serving ~6 devices around the house though. Edit: 6 fixed devices. It can also be cast to a bunch of places from mobile devices. My music collection is in FLAC so it’s transcoding to lossy on the fly where needed.
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My homeassistant is running on a pi2 with 2GB RAM. it doesn’t need much.
But yes, it is a central place for processing and recording data, either from phone, imstalled electrical hardware or other devices.
The issue with the combination of rabbit holes I’m going down is all the damn pis Im gonna end up being lol
You just need one Pi. get a pi5 for future proofing. Docker addition , so you can host more than just home assiatant
Get any old enterprise workstation (they practically give Dells away for free) and get to know Docker.
Using multiple Pis for single applications is a fool’s errand - my Optiplex was free and it is running ~30 containers with plenty of room to breathe.
But then I don’t get to justify my 3d printer purchase with custom enclosures with their jobs engraved on them
Don’t worry. There’s still plenty of ESP32 waiting to be flashed with ESPHome and placed into their own little enclosure out there.
Source: Me, who’s got a Bluetooth Proxy for my adjustable desk and some small LED strips running, with a soil moisture sensor planned as my next quick project.
so can someone explain why a pretty robust dedicated device is necessary as a replacement?
The cloud is just someone else’s computer, so when you cut the cord from the cloud, you gotta run your own server.
And you don’t need to buy a (robust) device to run HA, just install it on a spare system and start playing with it. I started building mine about 1.5yrs ago when I bought a house and I think I only gave mine like 2 CPU and 8gb ram.
What actually happens when I turn on a smart switch in my home? Does that command have to be sent to a server somewhere to be processed?
Yes, you have to have something that accepts your commands and sends the action to the end device. Just like your Google home did.
What really has to be processed, and why can’t a smartphone app do it?
Because that’s not how things work. Your app has to talk to a server to send the commands, Google home has cloud servers and a local bridge. HA has an app that you can use to control your stuff, same as Google Home.
Smart Home apps are worthless without hardware required to connect the app to your home.
I think others have generally caught this, but I wanted to simplify the point: the apps on your phone are not controlling your home, a computer is. If you don’t use Google’s, then you’ll need to provide one.
That’s helpful. It seems like a system an insane person would come up with, but I understand it.
A dedicated server is needed because something needs to keep a catalog of the smart devices available on your network and ideally be accessible to many people in one household. You could make a system that went phone -> device but you would need to set up each device on each phone you wanted to use, which isn’t a great user experience. You could also run into issues where devices would need to handle multiple conflicting commands from different users coming in at once. Since smart devices are usually trying to use as little power as possible, that extra complexity would hurt you in that department. The third reason is that having a separate server enables automated workflows that would depend on an always online server that orchestrates multiple devices. For example, let’s say you have some automatic insulating blinds, a smart thermostat. You want to raise and lower the blinds to maximize your energy efficiency. Since you have the dedicated server, that server can check the temperature set point of your thermostat, current weather, and sunrise\sunset times. If it’s sunny out, and your set point is higher than the outdoor temperature, the server can raise the blinds to let warm sunlight in, and vice versa. If only your phone could control the devices a workflow like this couldn’t work when you were out of the house.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System Git Popular version control system, primarily for code HA Home Assistant automation software ~ High Availability IP Internet Protocol NAS Network-Attached Storage SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage Zigbee Wireless mesh network for low-power devices
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.
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