I decided to spin up Home Assistant on a VM on my server yesterday, and so far I’m not having much luck getting to to much that is actually useful.

I’m wondering if it’s me doing something wrong, but I can’t see what that would be.

I’ve signed up for the free trial of the cloud services which all seems to have gone fine, and I have a couple of integrations working (Roomba, printer ink levels, Sonos and a couple of others) but mostly everything else I’ve tried just doesn’t want to play ball

  • Apple TV - won’t pair - I press the pair button in HA but the ATV doesn’t respond with a pairing code

  • Ring doorbell / cameras - these are found but won’t display a live feed

  • Ring alarm - not recognised at all

  • Netatmo thermostat - widget displays but doesn’t sync correctly with thermostat and if I try to adjust temp it sets the target temp to 137 degrees C

  • Hue lights - having issues but this one might be my hub not HA

I was really hoping I could set up automations to, say, turn off my TV, turn off the lights, arm my house alarm - all with one press of a button but it looks like currently this isn’t going to happen.

Is it just me? Am I doing something wrong perhaps? Maybe I’m missing something obvious but it just seems like the integrations with these devices just isn’t quite there? I’d really be interested in other people’s experiences and whether they were able to solve these issues (if indeed they had them at all).

  • unknowing8343English
    16·
    1 year ago

    In my experience, HA is simply a fuck-you to all those companies that want you to use their closed, cloud-based solution.

    It’s not perfect, but it’s basically all we got, unless you want the crappier experience of being forced to buy only one brand of things and being forced to use really, really simple automations.

    • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.deEnglish
      518·
      1 year ago

      If HA is the “answer”, then vendor locked solutions don’t look that bad in comparison.

      Xiaomis cloud might stop working in two years, but HA is already not working today. That’s not really appealing.

      • ashok36@lemmy.worldEnglish
        121·
        1 year ago

        The HA android app just passed one million active devices. Saying “Ha is already not working today.” might be true for you but it’s obviously not true across the board.

      • stooovie@lemmy.worldEnglish
        111·
        1 year ago

        Absolutely wrong. I have dozens of devices integrated, from a lot of brands, all working. You can of course try to get a turnkey solution from like Loxone, but be prepared to pay thousands of dollars, and good luck adding anything that’s not in their ecosystem. And there’s a lot of that. And what is there is all pretty outdated.

        Xiaomi is great and I use a lot of their stuff, but the options for automation are severely limited.