Never trust cloud solutions when it isn’t your cloud.
It’s just someone else’s computer.
My previous house was smart down to nearly every light being RGB Hue. For movie nights it kicked ass to be able to sync the lights in my living room / kitchen to the movie.
The challenge in IoT is the “I”. Many companies make cheap products that REQUIRE internet to work and are not going to work longer than a decade in most cases.
When I was designing that house I had made it a point to not purchase any device that was not Zigbee, Z-Wave or Natively compatible with HomeKit which led to a very robust setup that would continue to function even when the internet was down.
If you are dabbling I recommend making the same decision even if you plan to use GoogleHome or Alexa. The HomeKit compatible things usually cost more for a reason.
The only devices I have that are on Wi-Fi are ones I got before learning about HA. Zigbee FTW 👍
ZWave is also another great mesh network, and Bluetooth can also work if the right integration is there.
I’m saving this comment.
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.”
Gross. Hard pass.
This is what it looks like now. The ad always occupies that space at the top
Ahhh, subscription for being integrated in a car. While instead with home assistant you could just say hey [assistant] open the door
Too bad they have a monopoly in the NA market
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 😁
Anything that only uses a phone app creates a mediocre experience by definition.
If it uses a standard API, it can integrate with anything and is convenient. You can use the phone if you want to.
All in all, there’s definitely a worrying trend for the worse in the market.
The myQ app sucks so much, it doesn’t even have Siri integration or widgets. Plus it’s riddled with ads for their $100 camera.ARE YOU KIDDING ME‽ I’m 1 starting this actively (meaning at every update I renew my review)
Companies should be held accountable for bullshit like that.
My idea goes like this: In order to be able to sell some device you need to deposit its source code and the sources for all updates with the proper authorities.
If you then don’t provide updates maintaining a) security and b) functionality of said device, because for example you go bankrupt, financially, or like in this very case morally, all of those sources are released and from then on are open source.
A Deadman switch on the source sounds like an eff thing. I’d support it. Heck, while I was still maintaining a well-used oss app, I’d’ve wanted a Deadman switch on the signing keys so distro could continue without stress, but the sad fact was no one picked up my project even when I announced its impending doom.
I kind of like your idea… But I am not sure if the authorities would be great for this…
This shit makes me fucking howl with laughter every time. Anyone that expects a device with a vendor supplied cloud connection to not get bricked a couple years after release is a goddamn idiot.
This is why I just wired a zigbee relay in parallel with the wall button for my generic garage door opener
This is the way. At least you can troubleshoot it and it doesn’t need an internet connection. The amount of HA users that still rely on outside APIs is ridiculous. I won’t run anything that needs an internet connection to work, that’s the litmus test.
I hope you dont use a weather integration, you of course get your weather information directly from NOAA satelites or another non-internet source.
Sadly, that trend looks more true with each year.
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 itYeah, not this thermostat.
Bloody proprietary shit that, fortunately, another fella managed to write a reasonably well-featured HA add-on for. But it still goes via their cloud service, and the problem is it uses a proprietary protocol over 2 or 3 pair wire,. Additionally the evaporative A/C plugs directly into the heater unit, which handles C&C for both appliances.
I haven’t ruled out having to separate the buggers out and control each individually. As long as I can find a thermostat that can handle them.
Ecobee has been absolutely amazing for me. I’ve used both the cloud API and and homekit integration with home assistant flawlessly. Note: homekit was a bit annoying to first set up, especially without an iPhone. As a bonus, I see my power company offering discounts and rebates on them all the time.
power company offering discounts and rebates on them
That sets off my spidey sense.
It shouldn’t. My electric company offers rebates and discounts on any approved smart thermostat, and my heat isn’t even through them. My Honeywell one ended up costing me $50 because of the rebate.
It’s a state-wide thing for participating utility providers, at lest here. They had about 20 models on the shared store (no markup as far as I could tell, but not really a deal either) or provided a list of models that would qualify which contained dozens upon dozens of models.
It’s not just that one single one that has rebates/discounts. That would be silly because those are some of the most expensive.
I hope you went investigating and found a good discount on a smart thermostat for yourself as well.
I ended up building one from relays and a DHT22 that I run from NodeRed.
I have an ecobee 3 that I’ve been using for about 7 years now. It works reasonably well. But I didn’t like that eco+ or whatever they called it that they rolled out to everyone a while back.
Is there a thermostat logic add-on for HA that would replace the ecobee? I know I could program it with scripts and such but it’d be nice if there was some kind of “smart thermostat” module that could use the temperature sensors from around the house and learn the characteristics of the HVAC (how long does it take to heat/cool for a given outside temperature, for example, and take that into account when hitting a programmed set point) and maybe even integrate multiple sources of heating or cooling. (We have a pellet stove for supplemental heat that the HA could fire up, for example.)
Here is Home Assistant’s Blog Post on the subject.
Fuck chamberlain so much. We have Gates from them which were (wrongly) opened by hand. Inside of the swing arm was only a broken plastic clutch which could easily be changed to a new one. But chamberlain will not sell any spare parts whatsoever. We tried 3d printing the part but I didn’t manage to draw the teeth 1:1 so Motor load was higher than the controller allowed and stopped it.
Fuck chamberlain
I’d be surprised if there wasn’t an extremely accurate part on Thingiverse or elsewhere on the internet.
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.
I bought 2 of them, on backorder, a few weeks back after the HomeAssistant integration broke yet again. I can’t wait to get them in and get them installed so I can get my automatons working again.
Also, they are shutting down the public API from my understanding, not the ones that are sold by 3rd parties like Honda and Tesla that will still continue to work to open/close the door. So, they are pretty much going full reddit at this point.
Dude the swap is amazing. No more beeping and flashing, precise opening/closing percentages, no lag time with api communication, or downtime when the myQ servers go down. It is such an amazing improvement. Night and day to even the official app, even if you wanted to just replicate what it already does.
The one thing I wish I could do however, is access my camera from home assistant. I didn’t realize it was so locked down when I made my initial purchase, I just thought it would be similar to my ring doorbell. (Another piece of tech I’m planning on replacing, actually.)
Beeping and flashing is actually a UL safety requirement.
It’s annoying as fuck, and these doors already have obstruction sensors. I get that it’s a requirement, but it’s still dumb and annoying.
Yep. Fuck MyQ. I ordered a $15 smart garage adapter and will solder the contacts at the wall button.
Which adapter did you get? I’ve just built my own on but wouldn’t mind a less janky solution.
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I bought gocontrol units for my dumb garage door openers and had to build a relay system to get it to work with the intelligence wall plates as they were not just shorting out to trigger the door.
But it should work with any new non smart opener if I wanna stay away from proprietary crap
I have an intelligent 2.0 door, but I noticed that the mechanical switch on the wall controller is a simple contact switch on the PCB. The 12v “smart” wire cames out of the PCB to the motor. So I.a solder two wired out of that switch and it should work.
Here is the pic of the wall switch PCB.
Ya I wired the relay to that button on my wall unit to trigger the door since the signal wire between it and the motor wasn’t just a contact switch triggering it.
Careful with that, I’ve heard stories of the wiring picking up stray signals and opening the door without anything actually being sent.
If you’ve got a myQ door, look into ratgdo. There’s even an esphome version.
Interesting, this has been in place quite a while and we haven’t experienced random openings or closes.
My openers are from 2009, and have no MyQ stuff . Chamberlain Elite units with motion/temp sensors on the wall unit. That is what caused my issues with using the gocontrol units directly. The wire between the wall unit and motor carries some signal and is not just shorted out to trigger the door.
Oh, apologies I thought you meant you wired up to buttons on a myQ wall opener.
Ya, no… I bought a gocontrol garage opener to make mine smart, but its only designed to short the two wires together (simulating a door bell style button). Unfortunately, that just doesn’t work here since those wires are carrying data when connected to the enhanced wall units.
So, I bought a little project box, wired the gocontrol to a standard 12vdc relay with wires running from that to the wall unit. I soldered those to the physical button on the circuit board.
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.
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.
Well I guess that explains why mine stopped working. I’d have never bought one if it didn’t come with my house.
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.
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?
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 on the floodlight switches when the front door opens between dusk and dawn. All kinds of stuff like that that’s really useful.
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.
You can definitely have all the gear and not need it. I’ve set mine up a little at a time to do specific tasks. Some examples:
Alert me if my side gate is unlocked at night, because that is the access to my business.
Check if there is water in the chicken house reservoir, as that means the chickens have dropped a pebble in the valve again.
More cost upfront, but as we’ve seen time and time against companies will start charging subscriptions for thing they previously didn’t.
Then there’d the privacy benefits. Not needing to rely on some company to keep servers alive. Being able to more easily troubleshoot/upgrade/swap individual parts. Not having to use a different app for basically every single device. All that sort of stuff
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. ;)
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 got two ratgdo modules in the mail yesterday. Hooked ‘em up last night and it was super straightforward. I disabled the built-in WiFi on the MyQ openers and they’ve been working excellently last night and today. No regrets!
I used a Shelly 1 pulled into home assistant. Works perfectly. Very simple for opening and closing. I am building an ultrasonic sensor using esphome that I’ll use to know how far the door is open. Currently I just use Zigbee contact sensors. Open or closed.
Konnected just released a garage door controller. I’ve been super happy with their alarm system. I’m using a zwave controller from GoControl myself.
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!
