Many of you have probably heard about this before. I chose the most difficult path for myself and tried to get everything running locally, without using ready-made cloud integrations. It’s really crazy to see everything that the sensors and detectors can actually pick up.
I won’t start writing about everything right away, since I don’t know if anyone else is playing around with these things. But I already know that there’s always something you can improve, and it’s easy to spend dozens of hours on it. And I believe this is the best way to protect your privacy if you can’t live without IoT devices anymore.
Well, I struggled for probably 5 hours today to get the tokens for a couple of devices. This allowed me to bypass and remove the original app. They really make it very difficult to leave their ecosystem.
It feels like its going to suck all of my time and money tinkering a better solution to the problems I have. I already have a request and it feels like I have to run wires all over the house/compound for data and maybe power (hmm so a PoE solution…). Its a rabbit hole and I am afraid to get lost inside.
Right now I am glad that I cannot find a solution for 220V lightbulb with a non-terrible integration to HA. Zigbee or Z-wave
I have been using Home Assistant for a while now. First on a shared home server and more recently using a dedicated Raspberry Pi. The Pi setup is easier to keep everything compatible and running well. At least that is my experience. I do not port forward anything into the house nor do I avail myself of the cloud features of Home Assistant, I try to keep everything local.
If I need to access the Home Assistant Raspberry Pi from outside the house then I VPN into the house (I have a Wireguard VPN setup to access the home network).
There are quite a number of things you can do Z-Wave or Zigbee devices that are not connected to the Internet. Alarm system, automation of lights, etc. No need for those to be on a TCP/IP LAN at all. So nothing reports to the cloud of a mother ship.
For outbound communications it is easy to have Home Assistant submit an email to a specified email server. In my case I use that capability with my mail server, along with my cellphone carrier’s email to SMS gateway, to get notifications when I am away from home.
It can definitely be a time sink if you let it. In my case I try to keep things simple: A couple really trivial automations just to make things nicer.
For example: Turn on the hot water recirculation pump when the shower lights get turned on so that it doesn’t take forever to get hot water. That simple automation was the reason I got started on this at all: The cost of an electrician running a wire through some concrete foundation walls was far more than getting a couple of Z-Wave devices and a setting up HA on an existing local computer.
We also use HA as a simple alarm system with presence detection to automatically enable the alarm system when we leave the house and disable it when we return.
For what it’s worth, decades ago I played around a bit with home automation using the old power line stuff. One of my conclusions back then was that a good design would be one that a visitor to the house would not need to read a manual to know how to use. So no control tablets, no voice control, etc. It should just work (i.e. make things nicer for the occupants) without requiring explanation or lessons.
It’s exactly the same for me! I’m already embarrassed by how much technology is in absolutely everything, and nowadays, before I buy anything, I check how it works with HA. I struggled the entire day yesterday just to get a couple of things working the way I wanted… Well, I slept for 12 hours, so I guess it really took a lot out of me.
Question on this part, do you need to open any kind of port or alike?
I feel like you cannot directly connect to Wireguard àla Tailscale but maybe I just don’t know enough about networking…
Kinda goes back to this topic that I do need to go back to at some point to figure out .
Here’s a picture of the first page. I don’t dare to show more because I’m embarrassed by all the data I collect to always optimize the air quality, temperature, and humidity… And yes, I know the language is visible, but I’ve already said I’m from Finland, so I don’t really care. Everything else is local except for Philips Hue. Others in the household use it too, and they won’t accept a change… Luckily, Hue is probably the best after Home Assistant when it comes to privacy, and everything always works.
Editing the dashboard is still very much a work in progress because I haven’t managed to add everything yet. And I spent more money again when I saw a cool touchscreen control for the hallway. So I gave in and ordered a similar one.
My router has a Wireguard VPN server built in. I guess you might consider that an “open port”. I keep the firmware on the router up to date with the latest for that hardware from the open source project.
I have the official Wireguard client on my phone set to automatically connect any time I am not on my home LAN. So my phone has access to my home network including Home Assistant which allows me to use the Home Assistant client app on my phone for presence detection without using a cloud setup.
I’ve given up on the Home Assistant dashboard personally. All of my devices connect directly to Home Assistant locally, but then I use the HomeKit Bridge integration to share HA devices to the Apple Home app on my phone. I use HA for all automations, and the Apple Home app for manual dashboard controls. It’s nice because without adding anything to Apple Home directly I don’t have to worry about sync issues.
This also improves the “anyone-other-than-myself approval factor”
Yeah, it doesn’t seem very “easy” to get things organized well. You fix one thing, and then something else changes, and so on. I’ve pretty much given up on getting it finished without using add-ons. Yesterday I installed HACS, but I still need to find the motivation to learn how to use it. Luckily, I’m sure that it will eventually get the job done.
If I had other Apple devices besides an Apple TV, I would most likely choose the same path as you. Or at least that’s how it feels right now, since HA completely beat me today…
I haven’t figured out what I’ll do when I switch to Android yet, besides I suppose try to recreate this layout in HA. But HA dashboards are missing a lot of basic layout functionality I wish they had. It has been improving a lot in all the latest releases at least.
I saw at a friend’s place how the editing feature worked perfectly. You could change the positions of things with the mouse, and also change the size of the grids with the mouse, and it was really responsive. I was very excited until I saw a piece of the code. So for now, I need to build up my motivation before I even dare to start…
The built in scripting is, shall we say, arcane and I don’t find it very friendly. Fortunately the newer graphical way of editing simple scripts helps a lot.
When I first started with HA, I used an integration that allowed building scripts graphically with a bunch of drag and drop boxes which were then connected by lines. But on one update everything broke. Apparently the base HA code changes were incompatible with the integration and it took a while for the integration people to update their code. At that time I gritted my teeth and recreated my automations using the built-in facilities. Fortunately, I don’t change my integrations very often. Now that I have things working to my satisfaction, most of what I do is update the software and fix things that break when I update the software.
I already have a request and it feels like I have to run wires all over the house/compound for data and maybe power (hmm so a PoE solution…). Its a rabbit hole and I am afraid to get lost inside.
