@djsundog @twistylittlepassages I will explain myself with a reply to the original post and it will be a long and bad explanation, I warn you in advance that you will gain nothing from reading it
I called out the going-up-ladders people because there's only so many different types of danger my spouse will let me get into, given how many people she knows who've fallen off them. The ladder people tell me alright you've got some shingles damaged and some flashing leaking, that's no big deal, but the mid deal is that my chimney's so badly knackered that it's way beyond a simple slap-some-mortar-in job, there's several courses of bricks unaccounted for, I go "Oh aye I did find some underneath my window," the chimney was bollocksed is the headline, and it was gonna cost a LOT of money to fix it.
It was gonna cost so much money, in fact, that it'd be cheaper to remove the need for a chimney in the first place. The only thing left in the house that still used the chimney was the 20-odd-year-old gas water heater. I figured that thing was probably getting ready to rupture anyway so hell, heat pump water heater time.
So I order this inside-out-fridge contraption from a company called RHEEM, also known as RUUD, and yes I very much am naming and shaming this company, and after going back and forth to the hardware store eight times I was on first name terms with the lady in the plumbing aisle and the proud owner of a new 240v line and a machine that makes my water hot by making my basement cold.
And there was a QR code on the side and a thing saying Download The Econet App! and I said "Pfft no" and if all went sensibly that should have been the end of it
Things didn't go sensibly because an unrelated series of events did not go sensibly a few years before, and now I have a couch that reclines in such a way that my head enters an adjacent room.
Why do I recline into the next room over? For the same reason I had to build a four inch wide coffee table. Don't ask me questions about that today. The important part is that when I settle down at night with a glass of whiskey and some Star Trek, I press a button and lean my head back into a void in a rack that sits in my workshop, which is where this water heater lives, and the water heater, being a fridge, goes BRRRRRRRR
It occurred to me at some point that if I had the app, I could tell this water heater Dude, it's ten o'clock at night, there's no need to be actively making more hot water right now, be quiet.
So I scanned the barcode and downloaded the app, which didn't work.
In fairness to Rheem, the way the app didn't work WAS pretty funny. See, it made you register with them before you could schedule your water heater. So first it'd ask you what username you wanted.
I'm not gonna tell you my Rheem username, you'll have to wait for the inevitable data breach for that, so let's say it was ifixcoinops. So you tap the box (you have to do this on a phone, you can't register in a browser) and you tap the letter i on the keyboard and a little i pops up on the screen, quite clever really, then you press the f and the text hole has iif in it. Hmm. Alright well the next letter in "ifixcoinops" is another i, let's press the i on my keyboard, the text hole now says iififi.
Which is slightly unconventional, but okay, let's see where this is going, iifiifiiififiifix. So I introduce myself as mister iififiifixifixcifixcoifixcoiifixcoinifixcoinoifixcoinopifixcoinops, and it tells me there's not enough digits in my phone number
Now I'm vaguely aware on some level that an awful lot of android apps are just a web browser with no clothes on, and that's certainly what this feels like, and buddy lemme tell you, HTML wants to work. It takes concerted, dedicated effort to make something fail this hard. Like, you've gotta code up some truly trollish javascript to make that kinda thing happen. So I guess hats off to Rheem.
Did I mention there wasn't even a place to put my phone number
I see this on actual websites all the time, usually in the form of my keystrokes coming out in the wrong order when I *know* I typed the right thing
the good news is such fuckery is so common now that there are frameworks for such fuckery these days. you don't have to implement the fuckery yourself anymore. you just make a text box and say `React.useFuckMyShitUp()` and you're done
I'm scratching my head over this and wondering if maybe something in my autocomplete settings are screwing with the input, I eventually figure out that they've somehow managed to make a form field that only works with specific software keyboards.
This is the first time I've ever seen anything like this. There's something new in the world. It's oddly beautiful, but haunting, a little melancholy. Luckily I have a few different keyboards installed on this thing so I change around a bunch until one of them works and lets me input normal words instead of this whimsy.
But there's still nowhere to put this phone number it's been asking me for, and no way to proceed, so I cast the app out of my mind for several more months
Eventually one night listening to it go BRRRRRR I get big mad and want all the functions that I paid the better part of two grand (!) for, and I search around for other people having the same problem.
(note: I want to schedule the water heater's heaty times. There's a big dotmatrix screen and a bunch of buttons on the water heater itself. Someone at some point should have said "Wait.")
Turns out everyone's having this problem! Everyone's been having this problem for over four months! But in the meantime, instead of using the Rheem app, try the Rheem Econet app, or the Econet app.
These are real apps made by Rheem. They all do the same job but fail in different ways at different points
Eventually - and I mean the sort of eventually that's measured in seasons - one of these apps lets me register for a Rheem account (why they couldn't just give me a link to those webpages I could access in a browser, I do not know) and then crashes, but another one lets me get the water heater connected to the wifi (there's no ethernet hole on this 300kg tank of water plumbed and wired into the house, it uses wifi only like your phone or handheld game console) and holy shit it works
Anyway at some point one of Rheem's other customers got pissed off enough with this tragicomedy to just completely write their own software from scratch, and of COURSE it works way better than the dogshit that Rheem put out
So yeah, the solution is to install Home Assistant on and old Raspberry Pi, get an ESP32 module and some phone wire, plug into the diagnostic port on the front and bypass everything to do with the official app and wifi interface entirely in favour of one that works.
Unfortunately this means you now have Home Assistant in your home, which means you now have a new hobby whether you want it or not
So here I am, whiskey in my hand, trying to watch Captain Picard being competent, head in one room and feet in another, hearing a fridge getting my shower ready, big red angry face shouting at a cylinder
I played with it for a bit, but honestly it felt like an unreasonable time suck. Moving widgets around, making the best dashboard, etc so that I could change my lights in one high maintenance place.
Until an update mysteriously makes it stop working. Ain't got time for that. I'll just use light apps, heating apps, and physical switches.
You've broken free from the deflection shield/excuse of waiting for the Matter (and Thread) standards to, well, matter…
May you survive without critical damage to your wallet or your free time. I might need to look away unless I succumb to the pull of Home Assistant as well.
Actual quote from the Home Assistant Community Store:
"To download HACS
"How you download HACS depends on your Home Assistant installation type. In the instructions below, select the tab that matches your installation type (OS/Supervised, Container, or Core).
Warning
If you don't know what type of Home Assistant installation you are running, you should not use HACS (or any other custom integration)."
Is there a link to find that out? Is there any further explanation of what these terms mean? Is there so much as a crumb of information available to help answer this question?
Did the operator of this website install a sense of smug FOSSbro elitism where they should have wired in, say, competence?
This is the most useless documentation I've seen in years. And that includes the monitor schematic that had the middle third replaced with a lewd limerick.
"If you installed Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi using the Raspberry Pi imaging tool, choose OS/Supervised" there, fixed, wasn't hard. Jesus.
Nothing winds me up harder than people w
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Actual quote from the Home Assistant Community Store:
"To download HACS
"How you download HACS depends on your Home Assistant installation type. In the instructions below, select the tab that matches your installation type (OS/Supervised, Container, or Core).
Warning
If you don't know what type of Home Assistant installation you are running, you should not use HACS (or any other custom integration)."
Is there a link to find that out? Is there any further explanation of what these terms mean? Is there so much as a crumb of information available to help answer this question?
Did the operator of this website install a sense of smug FOSSbro elitism where they should have wired in, say, competence?
This is the most useless documentation I've seen in years. And that includes the monitor schematic that had the middle third replaced with a lewd limerick.
"If you installed Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi using the Raspberry Pi imaging tool, choose OS/Supervised" there, fixed, wasn't hard. Jesus.
Nothing winds me up harder than people who chat like they're clever while being aggressively, stubbornly incompetent.
This whole saga is infinitely more funny, if you, like me, thought the water heater meant the device that makes hot water for tea. That idea started to seem wrong, after the mention of a 300kg hunk of metal
You know how when you go to the house of an absolute colossal nerd and you ask them
🐇 Hey, how do I watch Netflix?
🦝 Yeah no problem, well first you've gotta turn on the amp. That's the power button on this remote here. The right-hand power button that is, the left-hand one isn't programmed to anything yet
🐇 OK
🦝 Sometimes that makes the TV come on automatically, but if it doesn't then you've gotta turn on the TV. That's this button here on this other remote.
🐇 So we're on two remotes now
🦝 Nearly finished. Oh by the way, if you want to adjust the volume, use the first remote, the volume on the second remote doesn't do anything. Well it does, but it sounds terrible because that's the TV speakers, so leave that at zero
🐇 But I'm *watching* tv
🦝 Yes but you're *listening* to the amp. Oh, sorry, forgot, set the amp input to 2.
🐇 on the amp remote?
🦝 Yeah, the video goes through the amp too.
🐇 In my house we set the TV to a different
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You know how when you go to the house of an absolute colossal nerd and you ask them
🐇 Hey, how do I watch Netflix?
🦝 Yeah no problem, well first you've gotta turn on the amp. That's the power button on this remote here. The right-hand power button that is, the left-hand one isn't programmed to anything yet
🐇 OK
🦝 Sometimes that makes the TV come on automatically, but if it doesn't then you've gotta turn on the TV. That's this button here on this other remote.
🐇 So we're on two remotes now
🦝 Nearly finished. Oh by the way, if you want to adjust the volume, use the first remote, the volume on the second remote doesn't do anything. Well it does, but it sounds terrible because that's the TV speakers, so leave that at zero
🐇 But I'm *watching* tv
🦝 Yes but you're *listening* to the amp. Oh, sorry, forgot, set the amp input to 2.
🐇 on the amp remote?
🦝 Yeah, the video goes through the amp too.
🐇 In my house we set the TV to a different input, should -
🦝 Don't do that here. Don't. The TV stays on input 1 with its sound muted. Next you've just gotta use this third remote, for the -
🐇 for Netflix?
🦝 Well, technically for Kodi, but that's nothing to worry about yet
🐇 yet?
🦝 We'll come to that,
🐇 I'm being *so* patient right now, I'm really proud of myself
Anyway, imagine that, but your your lightbulbs. This is what Home Assistant promises
(at least I just have a tablet stuck to the wall in the hallway for Home Assistant shiz though, and mostly it just adjusts the colour temperature automatically)
@HauntedOwlbear That's what Home Assistant is, basically; it's cloud-connected smart bulbs and home automation, but without the cloud, it just goes on a raspberry pi in your basement.
The other thing that Home Assistant is, is a baited trap for the terminally curious
@HauntedOwlbear I have the UK bin collections plugin on mine. No idea how to make any use of it, but I have designs on getting a couple of smart solar LEDs and mounting them above the bins, to signify which one is due to go out.
Chance of that ever seeing the light of day is... slim
🦝 Anyway I got some Tradfri lightbulbs and a ZigBee dongle plugged into a spare Pi on a long USB extension to avoid radio interference, and I went on aliexpress and ordered some cheap ZigBee knobs and buttons so I can set up cosier circadian-rhythm-respecting lights as a sidequest to schedule my water heater and monitor my eventual photovoltaic setup.
^ see that sentence? That's both a legit telling of what I've been up to lately, AND a self-parody shitpost. The only people who recognise it as a legit post are other doomed individuals.
my partner brought some Philips Hue lightbulbs with her when we moved in together. she also passionately hates the use of the overhead light. upshot is I need to open the Hue app on my phone if I want the bedroom light on
it's been warning me for six months now I'll need to create a Hue account "soon". to operate the light next to my bed
@jackeric See, on the one hand you could set up Home Assistant and buy a little battery-powered switch or knob that you can magnet or glue near the lamp so you don't have to use your phone. It'd also take over the whole Hue thing so you wouldn't have to involve Phillips anymore.
But on the other hand, if you did that then you'd be doomed.
I'm sorry for telling you this information, and please extend my sincerest apologies to your partner also
@jackeric I had my business partner on the phone to me the other night, berating me because the pub staff were able to turn the lights in the back room of the pub to slightly too white a colour, when they turned them back from "purple" after their Halloween party a couple of weeks ago.
Apparently Home Assistant needs a feature that lets you lock down light colours now...
I have mollified him by making it email him the colour temperature of the lights each time they turn on. Ha!
I ended up getting a bunch of smart dimmer switches and room presence sensors (PIR + mmWave), so now I have automatic lights that turn on dimly when it's late at night.
Do not ask me how long I spent doing this, you don't want to know.
you're telling me "I'm doomed!" Tell me something I don't already know! LOL Maybe not. I haven't had time to start down the Home Assistant rabbit hole. I just started the Obsidian Notes rabbit hole to maybe organize my PowerShell rabbit hole and if that goes well I'll be transferring my SQL notes there, and maybe my other stuff. Still need to see if I can remote host Obsidian and self-sync to local devices.(Sorry, I'll pay for a product, but not for a service I can do myself.)
ZigBee stuff everywhere, weather monitoring, ambient monitoring in the house, or even tells me which bin to put out when thanks to something that scrapes my local council website.
Maps, location tracking, lights, a Geiger counter in the shed, the doorbell even has an ESP8266 inside to tell me when the bell rings.
I'm not entirely sure if this is a call for help...
I feel called out, even though I'm not (yet!) on Home Assistant.
My bedroom lights are controlled via a rickety combo of SSH, HTTP, or an ancient speech recognition Python script made by a Googler in 2014 that uses an API key registered for local Chromium browser development.
Better minds than mine have been warning about this shit since The Twilight Zone was new. What happens in every show that ever had an episode about The House Of The Future? Everyone's impressed for about five minutes and then it all goes wrong and there's usually at least one death.
But on the other hand, cosy lighting and RGB LED coolness so, y'know,
*Rod Serling voice* Imagine a house, with a mind. A mechanical mind. Not one built by scientists, but by a pinball machine repairman. One unlucky family is about to discover the ramifications, in, The Twilight Zone
jesus, what a voyage. On the other end, I figure, there's a friend of mine who recently bought a ceiling fan (the cheapest one, of course), on the box there wasn't even if it had a remote or cords to operate. Turns out it had a small box with a switch and a knob.. almost primitive, but 100 times better than this modern app/web/wifi appliances hell.
There are some things, if you shit all over them on the internet and say all the ways they messed up, their fanboys will come out and tell you hey no, you just don't understand it yet, it's not shit you are
Home Assistant, the fanboys come out and say haha yeah join the club, wait hold on I've got some even wilder stories, just you wait lol
HA is always the opposite, it's more like competing for who's had the weirdest shit happening. And as a result maybe people finding answers! Definitely found answers to weird shit I had going on when laughing at weird shit and then workaround I hacked together. x3
haha my wife is absolutely the queen of home automation in sundogistan and I shuffle around muttering very softly about when the light switches used to turn lights on and off.
Although now I'm remembering two years ago, during the spring thaw, when the float switch on the pump that lifts our sewage up from under our house into the city's system failed. I put the pump on a smart switch and timed how long the well took to fill, and then made an automation in Home Assistant that ran the pump for 30 seconds every X minutes, and that kept us from disaster until the new switch was procured.
Everything in our lives is connected to the internet, so why not our toilets? Take a tour of Smart Pipe, the hot new tech startup that turns your waste into ...
🐴 "I use Home Assistant so I ripped all the lightswitches out, wired all my light sockets to be live all the time, and replaced the switches with Smart Switches that radio the computer and tell it to radio the bulb to turn off" ~ actual things that people do with Home Assistant
As someone who works with electricity, my absolute favourite thing in the world is components that are energized while giving the appearance that they are not
this sounds like an entirely sensible approach and I'm sure it won't ever cause them any issues should they at any future point need to change the bulbs or the fittings.
You should aspire to new favorites like "components that are energized but should never have been" like the time that I was getting 120v shocks from a (now disused) gas pipe in the wall.
I finally configured a smart knob so my daughter could adjust the light colour in her room.
🦝 Alright, here we go, it's simple. Well, it's not simple, and I'm sorry, but here we go anyway. 🐇 o...kay? 🦝 So right now it's in colour temperature mode. Turn the knob for brightness. If you PRESS and turn it, it'll change the colour temperature. 🐇 What's colour temperature 🦝 Turn it this way for more like daylight, turn it this way for more like cosy. Press and turn it I mean. 🐇 Alright. But how do we make it colourful. 🦝 Well. You'd press and hold in, without turning, for four seconds. Like this. *awkward four-second pause* 🐇 It's green! 🦝 Yeah! Now to change hue, you press in and turn clockwise, and it goes all the way through the rainbow and cycles back round. If you miss the colour just keep turning until it comes back round again. And to change saturation, 🐇 What's saturation 🦝 Controls whether it's colourful, or light. To change the saturation, press and ho
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I finally configured a smart knob so my daughter could adjust the light colour in her room.
🦝 Alright, here we go, it's simple. Well, it's not simple, and I'm sorry, but here we go anyway. 🐇 o...kay? 🦝 So right now it's in colour temperature mode. Turn the knob for brightness. If you PRESS and turn it, it'll change the colour temperature. 🐇 What's colour temperature 🦝 Turn it this way for more like daylight, turn it this way for more like cosy. Press and turn it I mean. 🐇 Alright. But how do we make it colourful. 🦝 Well. You'd press and hold in, without turning, for four seconds. Like this. *awkward four-second pause* 🐇 It's green! 🦝 Yeah! Now to change hue, you press in and turn clockwise, and it goes all the way through the rainbow and cycles back round. If you miss the colour just keep turning until it comes back round again. And to change saturation, 🐇 What's saturation 🦝 Controls whether it's colourful, or light. To change the saturation, press and hold and turn anticlockwise. It gets lighter and lighter and then cycles back round to bold colour. 🐇 Coooooool 🐇 Dad... can we make this go on a timer
I put a remote pack in her ceiling fan / light 'cause she couldn't reach the pull cord for the fan, so between the SMART KNOB and the remote control and the lightswitch itself she's got as many competing lightswitches as my dad's Frankenstein Land Rover has gear levers
The ONLY sensible thing involved in this is that if the bulb loses and then regains power, it defaults to being an unremarkable warm white bulb turned on at full brightness.
So we've had the conversation about how the knob works and how the remote pack works and how the light switch works and how if any of these things fails and she needs the light on she's gotta just flip the switch off and on again
I'm using Shelly 1s with ESPhome behind my light switches. They are configured to always keep the power on for the bulbs. Using the switch sends a signal to Homeassistant to turn the smart bulb on or off. If that souldn't work or I need the power to turn off, I can quickly toggle the switch 3 times to have the Shelly toggle the relay to cut or restore power to the blub.I feeld like this is kinda the best of both worlds...
So you decide to mess with Home Assistant and find out that this means you've gotta program your own dimmer switches.
(at this point, you've already had your Naked Lunch moment and you know the sensible thing is to run screaming but you're ploughing on regardless knowing whatever happens next, it's on you, bought and paid for)
So you write your dimmerSwitch.yaml in yaml which simultaneously stands for "Yet Another Markup Language" and "YAML Ain't a Markup Language" and is a cursed way to try and program, and you've filled your little yammal up with comments so when it breaks you can remind yourself what any of this crap means:
# dan it's 2am and this is the bit that registers the knob turning anticlockwise
# dear future dan, hi from tired past dan, this next part is a sin and I'm sorry
And you can do all this in an editor in the browser that's surprisingly capable, and hit Save.
You'll find out the next time you open the file that your comments were automatically and silently deleted, and you'll go "Huh, yeah, that tracks"
Note for normal people who actually work for a living: code is the part of the program that makes it work and paradoxically isn't all that important, comments are the part that make it keep working a couple of months later and Very Much Are Important.
Like, there's practically infinite ways to write a bit of code that does a thing, but the important part is the comment above your mess saying that the following bit of code does this thing, and the comment underneath apologising
Part of the problem here is the whole YAML thing is an abstraction on top of whatever programming language home assistant is actually written in
And all of computer programming is like this. When I was a very tiny boy you just had to know "A chip is a thing that sends a little bit of electricity out of some combination of its legs in reaction to electricity going into some other combination" and then make a cup of tea and read a thick book and bollock around a while and end up with Manic Miner, but that was too hard for most folk so we invented programming languages that took a best guess at what electricity to send where, and then it turned out those languages were also too hard for almost everyone so we gave those languages little hats, interpreters that went "If this crying man types GOTO 240 then we tell the body wearing us to tell the electricity to go the way," and we made more and different hats and some were good and some were bad and then we started stacking the hats on top of each other and forty years go by and suddenly we find ourselves fiddling with the top of a
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Part of the problem here is the whole YAML thing is an abstraction on top of whatever programming language home assistant is actually written in
And all of computer programming is like this. When I was a very tiny boy you just had to know "A chip is a thing that sends a little bit of electricity out of some combination of its legs in reaction to electricity going into some other combination" and then make a cup of tea and read a thick book and bollock around a while and end up with Manic Miner, but that was too hard for most folk so we invented programming languages that took a best guess at what electricity to send where, and then it turned out those languages were also too hard for almost everyone so we gave those languages little hats, interpreters that went "If this crying man types GOTO 240 then we tell the body wearing us to tell the electricity to go the way," and we made more and different hats and some were good and some were bad and then we started stacking the hats on top of each other and forty years go by and suddenly we find ourselves fiddling with the top of a stack of fifteen hats that are making suggestions to the hats beneath while arguing and trying to topple off each other and shouting DON'T LOOK AT THE HAT UNDERNEATH ME while the aforementioned crying man shouts back GET OUT OF THE WAY AND LET ME SEE WHAT YOU'RE HIDING
It's not even that hats are bad, everybody likes a good hat, but wearing so many stacked on top of each other is asking for a mess every time you walk through a door
Computers are hard and most of the stuff that computer people do to try to make them easier ends up making them harder, everybody who remembers Clippy can tell you that
So I did some digging and apparently this mess is because Home Assistant itself does not speak YAML but JSON, no YAML files exist, and if you click the button labelled "Edit as YAML" then Home Assistant looks at its JSON files and conjures up a YAML for you to look at. When you hit Save, HA converts the YAML to JSON (which doesn't support comments (which makes it useless by default)) and discards the YAML, poof gone
WHY DOESN'T THE BUTTON SAY EDIT AS JSON AND JUST LET YOU EDIT THE JSON THEN FFS
It seems HA is removing all comments expressed as # in front-end cards. I find it super useful to document why I do things a certain way (especially since I cannot always design things without duplication due to gaps in my own knowledge or limitatio…
For all this nonsense, home assistant has actually saved me a lot of time by telling me that JSON doesn't "do" comments, because I was gonna use it for an unrelated thing and now I know not to
I found someone else having a problem with the whole YAML thing and they mentioned that it does occasionally swallow or rearrange chunks of code and HOLY SHIT I THOUGHT THAT WAS ME.
Going through my lamp thing the other night going "Huh, that's weird, this was working yesterday, what's the story with this... wow, I don't even remember putting that there, I must've been really tired... wait where'd the rest of it go..."
It's an interface that seems to do one thing (letting you edit a file) while doing another (the file doesn't exist, it never existed, it was conjured into being when you clicked Edit and it is converted to something else and then destroyed when you click Save)
considering solar panels but the thing that puts me off is the whole system is controlled by an app. Did think maybe I was being ridiculous but after reading all this.. maybe I do need a new hobby idk.
Though this doesn't actually fix anything in the HA world, I thought I should let you know the joy and l lolsobs that dramatic readings of your HA threads bring to this programmer household.
Dan I have read this entire saga and while I was planning on putting Home Assistant in my house to control some RGB lights ... I am much more dubious as to this being a good idea.
In most cases (for me at least), the apology has less to do with the thing not working and more to do with my having made us late/not paying attention during dinner/just generally being engrossed because I'm hopelessly trying to debug it on my stupid phone because I can't handle the fact that it didn't work right.
With wifi-enabled, voice-activated appliances too clever by half, analog, app-free abodes are suddenly tempting A-list L.A. buyers. Welcome to the new “Dumb House.”
I've started writing a set of documentation on how to "unsmart" the house as and when I shuffle off or become significantly less capable of doing that myself.
Funny how being told you have a terminal prognosis (albeit several years away) makes you do stuff you never thought of previously.
People are boosting the part of this thread where I had only just installed Home Assistant and didn't know how bad it was yet, where I say "Home Assistant is really neat and interesting" and this now feels like libel
Friends, Home Assistant is troll software. It's a trap for dads who dared to dream of a dignified future
there's that old meme about how the real technologist has no smart devices at home save for a printer, and keeps a gun near the printer in case it makes any unexpected noises. I love how HASS is supposed to be the exception to this but instead is exemplary. I should probably keep a gun near my HASS server.
🦝 Smart home? Pfft, sounds like an unreliable pain in the arse
🦝 *fur slightly disheveled* Huh, they make lightbulbs where you can set the colour temperature with a switch now. It'd be nice to have them go warmcosy in the evenings without having to reach into the fixture and flip the switch...
🦝 *scratching ears, something falls out* Yaknow, that whole Smart Home thing would actually be pretty neat if it didn't involve any big spyware companies, I don't want google selling my bedtime to advertisers or whatever, if it could all just be locally-controlled then that changes the deal somewhat,
🦝 *eyes bloodshot, chewing on a pizza crust found behind the dumpster* Like if it were all open source and community-maintained. That might actually be really neat and interesting, you know that?
🦝 *abandoned by society, living in a box, tongue lapping inside a broken whiskey bottle* Like, Linux for your Lightbulbs! That actually sounds AWESOME
thank you SO much, you've saved me from creating my own personal torment nexus. I live on a boat with inverters and a pellet stove which are already connected, so this definitely counts as a near miss event!
"FAQ: My SO is looking daggers at me after all the lights in the house turned on at 03:00 for the second time this week. Is there a YAML fix for this?"
If you’re having to edit YAML to control a dimmer, your device might not have the best support or maybe there’s an alternative module on HACS. …says one who has shouted their share of Home Assistant curses into the ether.
the yaml editor for the dashboards and the one for automations likes to swallow parts right while I'm editing my "yaml"
Change an indent -> the thing I'm working on doesn't match some mysterious schema -> poof it's gone
Especially fun when I'm trying to use a template in an automation:
text: hi {{ username }}
will save just fine, because the "value" starts as text, so the whole thing is treated as text and subsequently runs through the template processor.
This however:
text: {{ greeting }} {{ username }}
Is actually an object, because it starts with a curly bracket, and because it's not a valid object, the next time you hit save you'll end up with text: null.
Especially great when you run into the "this input doesn't support templates" issue, and it switches to the yaml editor while you're typing - including the lovely null conversion.
I have fun with computers. When they get not-fun, it is called work.
Related: I have light switches in the door frames that dis/reconnect the active power line, an electric car I plug in when the sun shines, and sold the 'smart wi-fi enabled' washing machine when it sent data back to LG. [A washing machine FFS. Making digital chaff, FFSsquared]
yeah, JSON is purely a serialization format for computers to talk to other computers. The fact that it looks like text is an artifact of its creation, and also sometimes helpful for debugging.
But if you intentionally have a human reading or writing JSON I'd consider that to be a design issue :/
That’s actually a feature. JSON, for all the horrible things it is (who the fuck thought exchanging JavaScript code was awesome?), has never included JavaScript comments in the specification.
If it had, we hacks, when facing a frustrating parsing problem, would add meta-directives as comments, inventing another flavor of JSON; and the world doesn’t deserve such suffering.
"To properly edit JSON in HomeAssistant, include in the first line a comment in the form of:”
“George, we have a customer yelling at us about using YAML instead of JSON! Can you get it working today?” “Um, sure…” <frantically Googles “convert JSON to YAML and back”>
Oh Dan there's a super easy solution to this, you see you just put your YAML files in a directory that HA can see and then don't edit them through the interface, but with a real text editor.
You then use git to push them into the HA directory (and it also gives you a history to roll back) and all you've gotta do is click the reload button and you're away!
This started out as a shitpost reply but then I realized this is actually how I do it and now I'm deeply ashamed of myself.
Personally, though, I'd avoid HAOS and supervisord installs - I had quite a few issues with them - I just run the docker image and pass my zigbee dongle through.
But also, yeah, there's a bunch of YAML that I manage outside of the UI 🙁
This add-on is provided by the Home Assistant Community Add-ons project. About This add-on allows you to log in to your Home Assistant instance using SSH or a Web Terminal, giving you to access your folders and also includes a command…
Keep up to date with Software Circus events & activities: http://softwarecircus.ioJoin our bi-weekly meetup: http://meetup.com/Software-Circus--Joe Beda"I'm ...
I still remember that YAML was invented because someone in the late 1990s had a Big Mad about how slow XML parsers were, and wrote their own "Yet Another Markup Language".
Our computers are many, many times faster now, but we've still got to deal with stupid YAML because someone decades ago had a hissy-fit.
I appreciate the analogy, but I don't think all abstraction layers are equal some of them allow you to write better code, some just add shortcuts for lazy people and some do both and also help democratize programming, which is not a bad thing it's not just wearing hats, it's a whole set of clothes, even tho some people do want to wear only a stack of hats mostly enterprise heads
I'm sorry you're having such a horrible time with all this but it made me laugh. Hope you get it sorted out to your satisfaction. I don't suppose a longer cord would have worked that she can reach?
This summer, I was speaking at an astrophysics summer camp for kids. They had great questions.
One of them was 'how do I go about writing clever code?'
I replied 'I try to avoid being clever in my code. The most important parts of my code are the well written comments'
Adding that 'I try to write my comments as if I myself have to use them to figure out what the code is supposed to do, 3 months or 10-20 years, later.'
And yes, I've thanked my past self for good code comments.
in December the @homeassistant project collects stories like this in the "month of WTF" (maybe WTH but I said what I said). In case you want another outlet for this annoyance that has a chance to make a difference 😅
I'm moving in 10 days and I'm currently taking my apartment apart piece by piece. As I settle in the new house, I'll be a WTF machinegun, but mostly towards me. (I plan on starting the config from scratch so I'll dredge up old wtfs)
yeah, I just told my tales of getting a dimmer switch to actually dim and do the things a switch should do. In short it took me about 5 minutes in hue, but I didn't like the quirks, so instead I spent the better part of a full workday to set it up in home assistant. Half the time to set it up, the other half to set it up again because the first time round I had missed some cases or assumed things worked in a way they didn't.
this is why I went with dumb bulbs and smart dimmers. Doesn't help if you want fancy colors, but all I wanted were bright 3000k bulbs that I could make dimmer. And now I don't have to worry about what happens if someone hits the switch instead of using an app, or what happens if there's a power outage, because it's still just a regular LED bulb
lmao this is like the prime example of what I WANT from smart devices: if the "smart" part quits working I want them to be regular devices. If my Home Assistant PC explodes I want my light bulbs to still work
I kind of see the point of calling it stupid... I mean, a) broken bulbs happen anyway, b) if I'm smart enough to set them to zero brightness, I'm probably smart enough to be aware (and correspondingly annoyed) of that, and c) just like you should always verify there's no cartridge in the chamber of a gun, even *if* you'd literally trust the last person handling it with your life, you should always *explicitly* check whether wiring is live before fiddling with it.
I watched a video about a hotel that replaced all the 120/240v lights with 5/12v leds and 'smart' switches. Switched apart, sounds reasonable... but not feasible at home level?
Ouch! I did replace our wall switches, but with ones with integrated relays rather than the described hard-wired fire trap.
Only decided on that direction once I had found switches which you can locally go "no, fuck the smartness - right now you're just directly toggling your relays fully locally".
They also feature discrete LEDs on the front indicating when the relays are switched on - no guesswork on whether a wire is live.
This is the specific model we ended up with: aqara.com/en/product/smart-wal… I'm assuming there are probably lots of alternatives.
For this one, key was getting the variant with neutral so it works as a button and network backbone regardless of whether the relays are engaged.
I turned them all 90 degrees, mapping the top button to "on" and the bottom one to "off". Presses will turn on/off progressively more lights while double-pressing controls blinds or full floors from the stairwell.
for me it's the fact that my lights will randomly not adjust brightness for certain scenes, and I suspect I'm overloading the hub and need to batch the requests, but I haven't found the will to do that yet. It was supposed to make my life easier!
yeah, thanks I guess, I was perfectly fine with my zigbee dongle, a few trådfri switches and some old hue and new trådfri bulbs. Now I am browsing Ali at 1am to check their doodads. Maybe I need some?
My dad is 82 and has been a technophile and a DJ (parties back in the 80s, and a local radio station since, playing golden oldies) for years. He loves it.
I used to live next to my elderly aunt. She had a TV hooked up via SCART to a VCR and to satellite receiver. No analogue TV any more so the tuner in the TV was vestigial. TV remote was purely on/off, SCART 1/2, and volume control. Channel selection via the satellite receiver's remote. Regularly she'd forget this, try to select BBC1 etc from the TV remote, and get nothing. So she'd think "What did Alaric do last time? Fiddle with the cables behind", and she'd unplug everything and...
my light bulbs have a physical switch on the wall, that sends an mqtt message telling the ought to turn on. Other lights have a zigbee switch which triggers the same via HA. Just get more physical buttons that do dedicated jobs?
@mike you know how this was a metaphor for home assistant? Yeah, no, Thats pretty close to the actual situation with our tv here 🙁 depending on what you want to watch, there are 3 remotes and a control panel in play. Bloody geeks! 🙁
(And there is a scribbled piece of paper somewhere that i had to make him write that badly explains what when 🙁 )
So I say "turn of my bedside light" at least twice because the first time it thinks I said something else - when I could just stretch out my hand and press the switch. But somehow I think this is cool...
Something I find interesting about this kind of self-inflicted nerd pain is how it can prefigure a trend of consumer tech that comes later, transformed into a mass market version:
i.e. 2000s nerds build fiddly media PCs for their TVs, by late 2010s every TV is a PC.
1990s home automation was domain of rich nerds, by 2020 most stores that sell light bulbs also sell "smart" ones.
(Admittedly HA isn't a good fit here due to being newer and partly a response to too many crappy consumer light bulb platforms.)
Also, goes without saying the mass market versions may be simplified for usability but are also Torment Nexus Terrible in some way, because capitalism.
@noodle see normally I wouldn't have to ask but this thread is attracting folk who think it's good that a thermostat gets software updates so you never know
I'm in a similar situation to you, I have a couple of things that would benefit from it, but its almost limitless scope and maintenance potential has kept me away so far.
I don't think it's possible, something in the engineer brain prevents it. I think whatever makes you good at doing engineer stuff also makes you bad at documentation. It's practically a law of nature.
GOD I FEEL YOU SO HARD!!! HomeAssistant is amazing but their docu - and also a lot of the encompassing ecosystem's docu - is borderline or plain useless. Also I like a lot of posts throwing about yaml snippets without saying WHERE to put them. Like 'sure, I know, I speak yaml in my dreams'??
HACS is the dark side. HACS is giving up on the community and accepting the code of people who are doing shit just because. When you install HACS you give up all pretense of being a Normal Person who has wound up running home assistant by accident and you now Take Responsibility for What You Have Done
well there's community and Community. Maybe a better way to put it is are you in the light of Nabu Casa? HACS is all that the light does not shine upon
sorry I'm drunk and in mexico. Nabu Casa is the company that the core Home Assistant devs work for. For $5 a month they'll run a remote frontend for you, enabling easy alexa integration and such, and it's... Good, Actually? HACS is the "fuck all that corporate noise, we're just gonna give you our code have fun with it" not-quite-offshoot
@cibyr this is the kind of shit I'm talking about, I was most of the way through the second sentence before I figured out that this was something to do with I guess window shades?
I was convinced for months that I literally couldn't install HACS (wasn't an option/supported) on my type of instance because the instructions were *that bad* And I supposedly computer for a living.
I just want to rotate the image coming from my camera
How is that hard
I can't physically install said camera in the right orientation, I need to rotate the image
Six hours of conflicting documentation later I still don't have it, including after installing HACS (while muttering "I don't care if it breaks, it's already not doing what I want")
I will have to say that that's bad design. It should not matter how you installed the main system unless you're an OCD keypecker like me that has to know and decide what goes where with a tome of reasons.
I legit do not mind them offering an easy path for folk to just buy a turnkey box so someone involved can make a little scratch but, yes, this is all very demented, and I am still a little furious that we have collectively decided, apparently, for some cursed reason, that compositions of docker images is the best way to distribute normal-ass server software.
this broke me. I read all this thread in one go, and I love how you skirt cursin (except for that post) as any bitpusher like me would do, but when you went from "I don't want a new hobby"to "weee! new hobby!" in less than 5 toots it just broke me and I laughed for 5m with tears and all.
I now have to maintain my own network because I did it when I was young and single and now I don't want to spend the money to replace the old laptop/wifi router/home server with something off the shelf. I feel you.
Fun fact, all versions of Firefox for Android had this problem on a lot of websites for a long time. Many (most FOSS) keyboards would do that same duplication of inputs, but the same sites in Chromium based browsers with the same keyboards had no problems.
@aaravchen I'm assuming it's because on the affected sites, instead of doing <input id="whatever" name="something" type="text" class="pretty"> they did something more like <SIXMEGABYTESOFHORRIFICJAVASCRIPTBULLSHIT>
I have a similar setup. I didn't need the extra hardware. Once I got the HW heater on WiFi, and discovered that the app only seems to be able to manage the temp schedule if you open it daily, I also discovered that Home Assistant has a native integration for Econet. It talks to Rheem's servers still, but that part generally works other than having to reauthenticate every few months. Home Assistant can set temp via that, which avoids giving Rheem an excuse to void your warranty.
@wesgeorge it's the getting it on the wifi that isn't working anymore and never worked properly to begin with, hence replacing the wifi functionality entirely
@SarraceniaWilds if the window is the right size. I’ve be quite happy with ikea powered blinds. Zigbee and does a great job of blocking out all the light.
@superball I forget the exact words but it was about someone sticking their dick in a flyback transformer and it didn't even have the right number of syllables
I am trying to avoid this rabbit hole. But my partner bought philips hue lights because she was mad at the lights in the kitchen not being dimmable, and not being in the right place. So now I can't turn on half the lights in the house.
The real solution is doing more electrical, but that's probably not going to be what happens (soon)
this whole thread is amazing. Well done, excellent story. Can't promise I won't fall into the home automation hole one day. So far I resisted building my own nas and bought Synology.
As someone who used to be an executive at a home automation company, this thread is pure catharsis. Home automation is such a trip. I have light switches that I have to use the "air gap" switch on at night, otherwise they reboot in the middle of the night and wake me up!
In this case, it appears to be a long-term hardware degradation issue that should be addressed when I physically replace it, but still...
I really like how this thread degenerates from "DO NOT BUILD THE TORMENT NEXUS" to "Here's how I built my own Torment Nexus for thirty quid and two years of my life."
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
Unknown parent • • •DJ Sundog
Unknown parent • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
Unknown parent • • •DJ Sundog
Unknown parent • • •Michael Kohne
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •egregious philbin
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to egregious philbin • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •"Dan you muppet, why did you buy a water heater that uses an app"
Well a couple years ago my roof started leaking
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •I called out the going-up-ladders people because there's only so many different types of danger my spouse will let me get into, given how many people she knows who've fallen off them. The ladder people tell me alright you've got some shingles damaged and some flashing leaking, that's no big deal, but the mid deal is that my chimney's so badly knackered that it's way beyond a simple slap-some-mortar-in job, there's several courses of bricks unaccounted for, I go "Oh aye I did find some underneath my window," the chimney was bollocksed is the headline, and it was gonna cost a LOT of money to fix it.
It was gonna cost so much money, in fact, that it'd be cheaper to remove the need for a chimney in the first place. The only thing left in the house that still used the chimney was the 20-odd-year-old gas water heater. I figured that thing was probably getting ready to rupture anyway so hell, heat pump water heater time.
jordan
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •So I order this inside-out-fridge contraption from a company called RHEEM, also known as RUUD, and yes I very much am naming and shaming this company, and after going back and forth to the hardware store eight times I was on first name terms with the lady in the plumbing aisle and the proud owner of a new 240v line and a machine that makes my water hot by making my basement cold.
And there was a QR code on the side and a thing saying Download The Econet App! and I said "Pfft no" and if all went sensibly that should have been the end of it
Joel Michael
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Things didn't go sensibly because an unrelated series of events did not go sensibly a few years before, and now I have a couch that reclines in such a way that my head enters an adjacent room.
Why do I recline into the next room over? For the same reason I had to build a four inch wide coffee table. Don't ask me questions about that today. The important part is that when I settle down at night with a glass of whiskey and some Star Trek, I press a button and lean my head back into a void in a rack that sits in my workshop, which is where this water heater lives, and the water heater, being a fridge, goes BRRRRRRRR
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •It occurred to me at some point that if I had the app, I could tell this water heater Dude, it's ten o'clock at night, there's no need to be actively making more hot water right now, be quiet.
So I scanned the barcode and downloaded the app, which didn't work.
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •In fairness to Rheem, the way the app didn't work WAS pretty funny. See, it made you register with them before you could schedule your water heater. So first it'd ask you what username you wanted.
I'm not gonna tell you my Rheem username, you'll have to wait for the inevitable data breach for that, so let's say it was ifixcoinops. So you tap the box (you have to do this on a phone, you can't register in a browser) and you tap the letter i on the keyboard and a little i pops up on the screen, quite clever really, then you press the f and the text hole has iif in it. Hmm. Alright well the next letter in "ifixcoinops" is another i, let's press the i on my keyboard, the text hole now says iififi.
Which is slightly unconventional, but okay, let's see where this is going, iifiifiiififiifix. So I introduce myself as mister iififiifixifixcifixcoifixcoiifixcoinifixcoinoifixcoinopifixcoinops, and it tells me there's not enough digits in my phone number
lynfox
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Now I'm vaguely aware on some level that an awful lot of android apps are just a web browser with no clothes on, and that's certainly what this feels like, and buddy lemme tell you, HTML wants to work. It takes concerted, dedicated effort to make something fail this hard. Like, you've gotta code up some truly trollish javascript to make that kinda thing happen. So I guess hats off to Rheem.
Did I mention there wasn't even a place to put my phone number
emily, blinkenlight witch
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •I see this on actual websites all the time, usually in the form of my keystrokes coming out in the wrong order when I *know* I typed the right thing
the good news is such fuckery is so common now that there are frameworks for such fuckery these days. you don't have to implement the fuckery yourself anymore. you just make a text box and say `React.useFuckMyShitUp()` and you're done
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •I'm scratching my head over this and wondering if maybe something in my autocomplete settings are screwing with the input, I eventually figure out that they've somehow managed to make a form field that only works with specific software keyboards.
This is the first time I've ever seen anything like this. There's something new in the world. It's oddly beautiful, but haunting, a little melancholy. Luckily I have a few different keyboards installed on this thing so I change around a bunch until one of them works and lets me input normal words instead of this whimsy.
But there's still nowhere to put this phone number it's been asking me for, and no way to proceed, so I cast the app out of my mind for several more months
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Eventually one night listening to it go BRRRRRR I get big mad and want all the functions that I paid the better part of two grand (!) for, and I search around for other people having the same problem.
(note: I want to schedule the water heater's heaty times. There's a big dotmatrix screen and a bunch of buttons on the water heater itself. Someone at some point should have said "Wait.")
Turns out everyone's having this problem! Everyone's been having this problem for over four months! But in the meantime, instead of using the Rheem app, try the Rheem Econet app, or the Econet app.
These are real apps made by Rheem. They all do the same job but fail in different ways at different points
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Eventually - and I mean the sort of eventually that's measured in seasons - one of these apps lets me register for a Rheem account (why they couldn't just give me a link to those webpages I could access in a browser, I do not know) and then crashes, but another one lets me get the water heater connected to the wifi (there's no ethernet hole on this 300kg tank of water plumbed and wired into the house, it uses wifi only like your phone or handheld game console) and holy shit it works
It actually works
About 50% of the time
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Tip: if Rheem doesn't work try EcoNet, if EcoNet doesn't work try Rheem EcoNet, if Rheem EcoNet doesn't work you can also try Ruud
If one of them works, DO NOT ALLOW IT TO UPDATE
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Anyway at some point one of Rheem's other customers got pissed off enough with this tragicomedy to just completely write their own software from scratch, and of COURSE it works way better than the dogshit that Rheem put out
So yeah, the solution is to install Home Assistant on and old Raspberry Pi, get an ESP32 module and some phone wire, plug into the diagnostic port on the front and bypass everything to do with the official app and wifi interface entirely in favour of one that works.
Unfortunately this means you now have Home Assistant in your home, which means you now have a new hobby whether you want it or not
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •PJ Coffey
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •You don't expect to have emotions about a water heater
It's supposed to be the most boring machine in the house
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •I actually rang Rheem today, dude picked straight up on the first ring, his proposed solution was to try another phone
Mate every other app works on my phone
I was like, alright where does this thing spit out its logs, I'll email them to you, he's like I Don't Know
Didn't occur to him to go and find someone who does know
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Should never have to get on the phone to talk about a water heater
Yes hello I would like to have a lengthy conversation about a tube that makes water hot, this is a good use of two peoples' time
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Let's make the grey cylinder exciting, let's make it part of a hobby
The world isn't complex enough yet
The times are not interesting enough yet
Let's confuse a fridge into heating water and put it on the internet and give it anxiety
Waylon Jeggings
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Grey
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Sensitive content
🦝 BUT I FUCKING KNEW THAT HOME ASSISTANT WAS GOING TO BE REALLY NEAT AND INTERESTING
I KNEW IT WAS GOING TO SUCK ME IN WITH HOW AWESOME IT IS
THAT'S WHY I'VE SPENT YEARS IGNORING THE HELL OUT OF IT AND TRYING MY BLOODY HARDEST NEVER TO LEARN ANYTHING ABOUT IT
I'VE GOT
OTHER
SHIT
TO DO 🦝
Mark Shane Hayden
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •xinit ☕
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Sensitive content
I played with it for a bit, but honestly it felt like an unreasonable time suck. Moving widgets around, making the best dashboard, etc so that I could change my lights in one high maintenance place.
Until an update mysteriously makes it stop working. Ain't got time for that. I'll just use light apps, heating apps, and physical switches.
Justin Myers
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Sensitive content
Yep, I finally got sucked in roughly a year ago. It's quite something.
(In my case it was to set up some alarms for when my kid opened their bedroom door, after we'd gotten rid of the crib.)
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Francis 🏴☠️ Gulotta
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •digitalfox
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •You've broken free from the deflection shield/excuse of waiting for the Matter (and Thread) standards to, well, matter…
May you survive without critical damage to your wallet or your free time. I might need to look away unless I succumb to the pull of Home Assistant as well.
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Actual quote from the Home Assistant Community Store:
"To download HACS
"How you download HACS depends on your Home Assistant installation type. In the instructions below, select the tab that matches your installation type (OS/Supervised, Container, or Core).
Warning
If you don't know what type of Home Assistant installation you are running, you should not use HACS (or any other custom integration)."
Is there a link to find that out? Is there any further explanation of what these terms mean? Is there so much as a crumb of information available to help answer this question?
Did the operator of this website install a sense of smug FOSSbro elitism where they should have wired in, say, competence?
This is the most useless documentation I've seen in years. And that includes the monitor schematic that had the middle third replaced with a lewd limerick.
"If you installed Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi using the Raspberry Pi imaging tool, choose OS/Supervised" there, fixed, wasn't hard. Jesus.
Nothing winds me up harder than people w
... show moreActual quote from the Home Assistant Community Store:
"To download HACS
"How you download HACS depends on your Home Assistant installation type. In the instructions below, select the tab that matches your installation type (OS/Supervised, Container, or Core).
Warning
If you don't know what type of Home Assistant installation you are running, you should not use HACS (or any other custom integration)."
Is there a link to find that out? Is there any further explanation of what these terms mean? Is there so much as a crumb of information available to help answer this question?
Did the operator of this website install a sense of smug FOSSbro elitism where they should have wired in, say, competence?
This is the most useless documentation I've seen in years. And that includes the monitor schematic that had the middle third replaced with a lewd limerick.
"If you installed Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi using the Raspberry Pi imaging tool, choose OS/Supervised" there, fixed, wasn't hard. Jesus.
Nothing winds me up harder than people who chat like they're clever while being aggressively, stubbornly incompetent.
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •zeno
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •You know how when you go to the house of an absolute colossal nerd and you ask them
🐇 Hey, how do I watch Netflix?
🦝 Yeah no problem, well first you've gotta turn on the amp. That's the power button on this remote here. The right-hand power button that is, the left-hand one isn't programmed to anything yet
🐇 OK
🦝 Sometimes that makes the TV come on automatically, but if it doesn't then you've gotta turn on the TV. That's this button here on this other remote.
🐇 So we're on two remotes now
🦝 Nearly finished. Oh by the way, if you want to adjust the volume, use the first remote, the volume on the second remote doesn't do anything. Well it does, but it sounds terrible because that's the TV speakers, so leave that at zero
🐇 But I'm *watching* tv
🦝 Yes but you're *listening* to the amp. Oh, sorry, forgot, set the amp input to 2.
🐇 on the amp remote?
🦝 Yeah, the video goes through the amp too.
🐇 In my house we set the TV to a different
... show moreYou know how when you go to the house of an absolute colossal nerd and you ask them
🐇 Hey, how do I watch Netflix?
🦝 Yeah no problem, well first you've gotta turn on the amp. That's the power button on this remote here. The right-hand power button that is, the left-hand one isn't programmed to anything yet
🐇 OK
🦝 Sometimes that makes the TV come on automatically, but if it doesn't then you've gotta turn on the TV. That's this button here on this other remote.
🐇 So we're on two remotes now
🦝 Nearly finished. Oh by the way, if you want to adjust the volume, use the first remote, the volume on the second remote doesn't do anything. Well it does, but it sounds terrible because that's the TV speakers, so leave that at zero
🐇 But I'm *watching* tv
🦝 Yes but you're *listening* to the amp. Oh, sorry, forgot, set the amp input to 2.
🐇 on the amp remote?
🦝 Yeah, the video goes through the amp too.
🐇 In my house we set the TV to a different input, should -
🦝 Don't do that here. Don't. The TV stays on input 1 with its sound muted. Next you've just gotta use this third remote, for the -
🐇 for Netflix?
🦝 Well, technically for Kodi, but that's nothing to worry about yet
🐇 yet?
🦝 We'll come to that,
🐇 I'm being *so* patient right now, I'm really proud of myself
Anyway, imagine that, but your your lightbulbs. This is what Home Assistant promises
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Bill, organizer of stuff
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •eggs benny
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eggs benny
in reply to eggs benny • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to eggs benny • • •13 barn owls in a trenchcoat
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •This is literally why no one in my household ever uses the home cinema system except me.
(Fine, my mum plays Switch on it. But for watching movies and stuff.)
My takeaway is that AV receivers, although cool and useful, are surprisingly user-hostile for devices that have big labelled buttons on the front.
13 barn owls in a trenchcoat
in reply to 13 barn owls in a trenchcoat • • •Another household member is currently proposing building a DIY, LAN-only control system for smart lightbulbs.
We don't even own any smart lightbulbs.
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to 13 barn owls in a trenchcoat • • •@HauntedOwlbear That's what Home Assistant is, basically; it's cloud-connected smart bulbs and home automation, but without the cloud, it just goes on a raspberry pi in your basement.
The other thing that Home Assistant is, is a baited trap for the terminally curious
Lunar 🛸 ♾
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •@HauntedOwlbear I have the UK bin collections plugin on mine. No idea how to make any use of it, but I have designs on getting a couple of smart solar LEDs and mounting them above the bins, to signify which one is due to go out.
Chance of that ever seeing the light of day is... slim
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •🦝 Anyway I got some Tradfri lightbulbs and a ZigBee dongle plugged into a spare Pi on a long USB extension to avoid radio interference, and I went on aliexpress and ordered some cheap ZigBee knobs and buttons so I can set up cosier circadian-rhythm-respecting lights as a sidequest to schedule my water heater and monitor my eventual photovoltaic setup.
^ see that sentence? That's both a legit telling of what I've been up to lately, AND a self-parody shitpost. The only people who recognise it as a legit post are other doomed individuals.
jack
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •my partner brought some Philips Hue lightbulbs with her when we moved in together. she also passionately hates the use of the overhead light. upshot is I need to open the Hue app on my phone if I want the bedroom light on
it's been warning me for six months now I'll need to create a Hue account "soon". to operate the light next to my bed
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to jack • • •@jackeric See, on the one hand you could set up Home Assistant and buy a little battery-powered switch or knob that you can magnet or glue near the lamp so you don't have to use your phone. It'd also take over the whole Hue thing so you wouldn't have to involve Phillips anymore.
But on the other hand, if you did that then you'd be doomed.
I'm sorry for telling you this information, and please extend my sincerest apologies to your partner also
Stephen Early
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •@jackeric I had my business partner on the phone to me the other night, berating me because the pub staff were able to turn the lights in the back room of the pub to slightly too white a colour, when they turned them back from "purple" after their Halloween party a couple of weeks ago.
Apparently Home Assistant needs a feature that lets you lock down light colours now...
I have mollified him by making it email him the colour temperature of the lights each time they turn on. Ha!
Ongion 🥚🐞
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •I ended up getting a bunch of smart dimmer switches and room presence sensors (PIR + mmWave), so now I have automatic lights that turn on dimly when it's late at night.
Do not ask me how long I spent doing this, you don't want to know.
Samuel Smith ✅
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Tell me something I don't already know! LOL
Maybe not. I haven't had time to start down the Home Assistant rabbit hole.
I just started the Obsidian Notes rabbit hole to maybe organize my PowerShell rabbit hole and if that goes well I'll be transferring my SQL notes there, and maybe my other stuff.
Still need to see if I can remote host Obsidian and self-sync to local devices.(Sorry, I'll pay for a product, but not for a service I can do myself.)
greem
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •It me. The whole thing, it me.
ZigBee stuff everywhere, weather monitoring, ambient monitoring in the house, or even tells me which bin to put out when thanks to something that scrapes my local council website.
Maps, location tracking, lights, a Geiger counter in the shed, the doorbell even has an ESP8266 inside to tell me when the bell rings.
I'm not entirely sure if this is a call for help...
Andrew
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •I'm glad I'm in a long term committed relationship because yikes can you imagine trying to use this software while dating
🦌 *tugging at shirt* Hey, do you mind if we turn the light off?
🦝 Sure!
🦌 OK~ wait why is there tape on your lightswitch
🦝 Oh wait yeah. Sorry. *grabs phone* Hold on. *fiddles* Just a sec.
🦌 um... ok?
🦝 Sorry. Just gotta do an update. Sorry. Just a sec. It's not normally like this
🦌 Did you just pull out your phone and start doomscrolling? While I'm right here?
🦝 sorry sorry no it's a different kind of doom, just a second, nearly there, sorry this never happens
Craig P
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •digitalfox
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •I feel called out, even though I'm not (yet!) on Home Assistant.
My bedroom lights are controlled via a rickety combo of SSH, HTTP, or an ancient speech recognition Python script made by a Googler in 2014 that uses an API key registered for local Chromium browser development.
All three methods break in fun ways.
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •🦌 wait my purse is vibrating, someone must be calling me
🤖 HOME ASSISTANT HAS DETECTED. LOVENSE. LUSH. SET UP DEVICE NOW?
🦌 goodnight
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Better minds than mine have been warning about this shit since The Twilight Zone was new. What happens in every show that ever had an episode about The House Of The Future? Everyone's impressed for about five minutes and then it all goes wrong and there's usually at least one death.
But on the other hand, cosy lighting and RGB LED coolness so, y'know,
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Alexandra Lanes likes this.
Thomas Sturm
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Shark Attak
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •On the other end, I figure, there's a friend of mine who recently bought a ceiling fan (the cheapest one, of course), on the box there wasn't even if it had a remote or cords to operate.
Turns out it had a small box with a switch and a knob.. almost primitive, but 100 times better than this modern app/web/wifi appliances hell.
Eli the Bearded
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •You know the best thing about Home Assistant?
There are some things, if you shit all over them on the internet and say all the ways they messed up, their fanboys will come out and tell you hey no, you just don't understand it yet, it's not shit you are
Home Assistant, the fanboys come out and say haha yeah join the club, wait hold on I've got some even wilder stories, just you wait lol
reshared this
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Kay Ohtie
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •🦌 *hands curling around coffee cup, worried expression, leaning across table and talking softly* Does your husband know about Home Assistant?
🐩 I dunno, HEY HONEY
🦌 shh! Don't ask him!
🐧 YEAH HON
🐩 NOTHING NEVERMIND
🐩 Why's that?
🦌 It's a cognitohazard. If you ask him about it he'll want to know what it is, and then he'll be doomed.
🐩 Doomed, you say?
🦌 Doomed. It puts your house on the computer. He'll spend three hours a night programming the lights and you'll never see him again.
🐩 Oh my, that sounds awful. *pulling out phone* But you don't seem to be affected by it.
🦌 It seems to mostly affect dads.
🐩 Mostly... *smiles, turns phone around, it displays a big red button* but not exclusively. *press*
🦌 My god
🐩 *presses again*
🐩 Sorry, this is supposed to play the Dramatic Chipmunk sound on the kitchen radio
🐩 sorry
🐩 one sec
... show more🦌 *hands curling around coffee cup, worried expression, leaning across table and talking softly* Does your husband know about Home Assistant?
🐩 I dunno, HEY HONEY
🦌 shh! Don't ask him!
🐧 YEAH HON
🐩 NOTHING NEVERMIND
🐩 Why's that?
🦌 It's a cognitohazard. If you ask him about it he'll want to know what it is, and then he'll be doomed.
🐩 Doomed, you say?
🦌 Doomed. It puts your house on the computer. He'll spend three hours a night programming the lights and you'll never see him again.
🐩 Oh my, that sounds awful. *pulling out phone* But you don't seem to be affected by it.
🦌 It seems to mostly affect dads.
🐩 Mostly... *smiles, turns phone around, it displays a big red button* but not exclusively. *press*
🦌 My god
🐩 *presses again*
🐩 Sorry, this is supposed to play the Dramatic Chipmunk sound on the kitchen radio
🐩 sorry
🐩 one sec
DJ Sundog
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •jordan
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •jordan
in reply to jordan • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to jordan • • •jordan
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Jesse
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •On the off chance you haven't seen this amazing Adult Swim sketch, it's very much related:
youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgB…
Smart Pipe | Infomercials | Adult Swim
YouTubeaeva
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •PsySal
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •🐴 "I use Home Assistant so I ripped all the lightswitches out, wired all my light sockets to be live all the time, and replaced the switches with Smart Switches that radio the computer and tell it to radio the bulb to turn off" ~ actual things that people do with Home Assistant
As someone who works with electricity, my absolute favourite thing in the world is components that are energized while giving the appearance that they are not
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Jen
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Eli the Bearded
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •An actual forum thread I witnessed:
🐴 Hey my bulbs turn on after a power outage, even though I've got them set to turn on at zero brightness, what gives?
🐑 Yeah turns out there's a safety override so you don't think the socket's safe when it's actually live
🐴 Ugh, that's such bullshit, what are the manufacturers thinking? Has anyone figured out custom firmware for these things?
#DieMaskeBleibtAuf reshared this.
brennen
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Post views: 1,992,835 all by insurance adjusters
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •I finally configured a smart knob so my daughter could adjust the light colour in her room.
🦝 Alright, here we go, it's simple. Well, it's not simple, and I'm sorry, but here we go anyway.
... show more🐇 o...kay?
🦝 So right now it's in colour temperature mode. Turn the knob for brightness. If you PRESS and turn it, it'll change the colour temperature.
🐇 What's colour temperature
🦝 Turn it this way for more like daylight, turn it this way for more like cosy. Press and turn it I mean.
🐇 Alright. But how do we make it colourful.
🦝 Well. You'd press and hold in, without turning, for four seconds. Like this.
*awkward four-second pause*
🐇 It's green!
🦝 Yeah! Now to change hue, you press in and turn clockwise, and it goes all the way through the rainbow and cycles back round. If you miss the colour just keep turning until it comes back round again. And to change saturation,
🐇 What's saturation
🦝 Controls whether it's colourful, or light. To change the saturation, press and ho
I finally configured a smart knob so my daughter could adjust the light colour in her room.
🦝 Alright, here we go, it's simple. Well, it's not simple, and I'm sorry, but here we go anyway.
🐇 o...kay?
🦝 So right now it's in colour temperature mode. Turn the knob for brightness. If you PRESS and turn it, it'll change the colour temperature.
🐇 What's colour temperature
🦝 Turn it this way for more like daylight, turn it this way for more like cosy. Press and turn it I mean.
🐇 Alright. But how do we make it colourful.
🦝 Well. You'd press and hold in, without turning, for four seconds. Like this.
*awkward four-second pause*
🐇 It's green!
🦝 Yeah! Now to change hue, you press in and turn clockwise, and it goes all the way through the rainbow and cycles back round. If you miss the colour just keep turning until it comes back round again. And to change saturation,
🐇 What's saturation
🦝 Controls whether it's colourful, or light. To change the saturation, press and hold and turn anticlockwise. It gets lighter and lighter and then cycles back round to bold colour.
🐇 Coooooool
🐇 Dad... can we make this go on a timer
Alexandra Lanes likes this.
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Alexandra Lanes likes this.
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •I put a remote pack in her ceiling fan / light 'cause she couldn't reach the pull cord for the fan, so between the SMART KNOB and the remote control and the lightswitch itself she's got as many competing lightswitches as my dad's Frankenstein Land Rover has gear levers
The ONLY sensible thing involved in this is that if the bulb loses and then regains power, it defaults to being an unremarkable warm white bulb turned on at full brightness.
So we've had the conversation about how the knob works and how the remote pack works and how the light switch works and how if any of these things fails and she needs the light on she's gotta just flip the switch off and on again
This kid's doomed
Bill, organizer of stuff
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Fabian Schlenz
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •So you decide to mess with Home Assistant and find out that this means you've gotta program your own dimmer switches.
(at this point, you've already had your Naked Lunch moment and you know the sensible thing is to run screaming but you're ploughing on regardless knowing whatever happens next, it's on you, bought and paid for)
So you write your dimmerSwitch.yaml in yaml which simultaneously stands for "Yet Another Markup Language" and "YAML Ain't a Markup Language" and is a cursed way to try and program, and you've filled your little yammal up with comments so when it breaks you can remind yourself what any of this crap means:
# dan it's 2am and this is the bit that registers the knob turning anticlockwise
# dear future dan, hi from tired past dan, this next part is a sin and I'm sorry
And you can do all this in an editor in the browser that's surprisingly capable, and hit Save.
You'll find out the next time you open the file that your comments were automatically and silently deleted, and you'll go "Huh, yeah, that tracks"
Daniel Durrans
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Note for normal people who actually work for a living: code is the part of the program that makes it work and paradoxically isn't all that important, comments are the part that make it keep working a couple of months later and Very Much Are Important.
Like, there's practically infinite ways to write a bit of code that does a thing, but the important part is the comment above your mess saying that the following bit of code does this thing, and the comment underneath apologising
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Part of the problem here is the whole YAML thing is an abstraction on top of whatever programming language home assistant is actually written in
And all of computer programming is like this. When I was a very tiny boy you just had to know "A chip is a thing that sends a little bit of electricity out of some combination of its legs in reaction to electricity going into some other combination" and then make a cup of tea and read a thick book and bollock around a while and end up with Manic Miner, but that was too hard for most folk so we invented programming languages that took a best guess at what electricity to send where, and then it turned out those languages were also too hard for almost everyone so we gave those languages little hats, interpreters that went "If this crying man types GOTO 240 then we tell the body wearing us to tell the electricity to go the way," and we made more and different hats and some were good and some were bad and then we started stacking the hats on top of each other and forty years go by and suddenly we find ourselves fiddling with the top of a
... show morePart of the problem here is the whole YAML thing is an abstraction on top of whatever programming language home assistant is actually written in
And all of computer programming is like this. When I was a very tiny boy you just had to know "A chip is a thing that sends a little bit of electricity out of some combination of its legs in reaction to electricity going into some other combination" and then make a cup of tea and read a thick book and bollock around a while and end up with Manic Miner, but that was too hard for most folk so we invented programming languages that took a best guess at what electricity to send where, and then it turned out those languages were also too hard for almost everyone so we gave those languages little hats, interpreters that went "If this crying man types GOTO 240 then we tell the body wearing us to tell the electricity to go the way," and we made more and different hats and some were good and some were bad and then we started stacking the hats on top of each other and forty years go by and suddenly we find ourselves fiddling with the top of a stack of fifteen hats that are making suggestions to the hats beneath while arguing and trying to topple off each other and shouting DON'T LOOK AT THE HAT UNDERNEATH ME while the aforementioned crying man shouts back GET OUT OF THE WAY AND LET ME SEE WHAT YOU'RE HIDING
It's not even that hats are bad, everybody likes a good hat, but wearing so many stacked on top of each other is asking for a mess every time you walk through a door
robotreader
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Bill, organizer of stuff
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Targea Caramar 🇨🇴
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Targea Caramar 🇨🇴 • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •So I did some digging and apparently this mess is because Home Assistant itself does not speak YAML but JSON, no YAML files exist, and if you click the button labelled "Edit as YAML" then Home Assistant looks at its JSON files and conjures up a YAML for you to look at. When you hit Save, HA converts the YAML to JSON (which doesn't support comments (which makes it useless by default)) and discards the YAML, poof gone
WHY DOESN'T THE BUTTON SAY EDIT AS JSON AND JUST LET YOU EDIT THE JSON THEN FFS
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •How to keep # comments in frontend YAML files?
Home Assistant CommunityAaron Sawdey, Ph.D.
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Max
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •JSON5 – JSON for Humans
JSON5Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •I found someone else having a problem with the whole YAML thing and they mentioned that it does occasionally swallow or rearrange chunks of code and HOLY SHIT I THOUGHT THAT WAS ME.
Going through my lamp thing the other night going "Huh, that's weird, this was working yesterday, what's the story with this... wow, I don't even remember putting that there, I must've been really tired... wait where'd the rest of it go..."
Gaslit!
mhoye
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •So they provided a fake programming interface
It's an interface that seems to do one thing (letting you edit a file) while doing another (the file doesn't exist, it never existed, it was conjured into being when you clicked Edit and it is converted to something else and then destroyed when you click Save)
This is just trolling surely
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George Savva
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dafo
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Nicole J. LeBoeuf (she/her)
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Aurynn Shaw
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •samenome
in reply to Aurynn Shaw • • •Aurynn Shaw
in reply to samenome • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Aurynn Shaw • • •Toxy 🔬🇪🇺🇸🇪🇬🇧🇺🇦
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Attractive Nuisance reshared this.
🍋 Superball ☀️
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to 🍋 Superball ☀️ • • •🍋 Superball ☀️
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Stephen Collins
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •“why don't I get alerts from the driveway camera anymore?”
(I have not yet moved alerts to HA).
Tyler Griffin
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Javadog
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Games That I Missed
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •A friend sent me this article about the new trend in "Dumb Homes"
hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyl…
All I can say is, if anyone took basic technology such as *light switches* out of my home, I would be seeking vengeance.
Tech-Free Homes: The New Luxury Trend
Alexandria Abramian (The Hollywood Reporter)ShnizmuffiN
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dearest wife,
You must now speak aloud to turn on any light in this house.
I am deeply sorry,
Yours.
EduCoder
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •greem
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •I've started writing a set of documentation on how to "unsmart" the house as and when I shuffle off or become significantly less capable of doing that myself.
Funny how being told you have a terminal prognosis (albeit several years away) makes you do stuff you never thought of previously.
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •People are boosting the part of this thread where I had only just installed Home Assistant and didn't know how bad it was yet, where I say "Home Assistant is really neat and interesting" and this now feels like libel
Friends, Home Assistant is troll software. It's a trap for dads who dared to dream of a dignified future
Sten the Sten
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •The Home Assistant Doom Pipeline:
🦝 Smart home? Pfft, sounds like an unreliable pain in the arse
🦝 *fur slightly disheveled* Huh, they make lightbulbs where you can set the colour temperature with a switch now. It'd be nice to have them go warmcosy in the evenings without having to reach into the fixture and flip the switch...
🦝 *scratching ears, something falls out* Yaknow, that whole Smart Home thing would actually be pretty neat if it didn't involve any big spyware companies, I don't want google selling my bedtime to advertisers or whatever, if it could all just be locally-controlled then that changes the deal somewhat,
🦝 *eyes bloodshot, chewing on a pizza crust found behind the dumpster* Like if it were all open source and community-maintained. That might actually be really neat and interesting, you know that?
🦝 *abandoned by society, living in a box, tongue lapping inside a broken whiskey bottle* Like, Linux for your Lightbulbs! That actually sounds AWESOME
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Jonly
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •RichBartlett
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •just_one_bear
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •phi1997
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Cassidy 🦌
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •🍋 Superball ☀️
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Time to go back and make some edits?
“EDIT: I was wrong.”
“EDIT: I was so very wrong.”
tjhowse
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •John T
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Maxi? 🌺
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •the yaml editor for the dashboards and the one for automations likes to swallow parts right while I'm editing my "yaml"
Change an indent -> the thing I'm working on doesn't match some mysterious schema -> poof it's gone
Especially fun when I'm trying to use a template in an automation:
text: hi {{ username }}will save just fine, because the "value" starts as text, so the whole thing is treated as text and subsequently runs through the template processor.
This however:
text: {{ greeting }} {{ username }}Is actually an object, because it starts with a curly bracket, and because it's not a valid object, the next time you hit save you'll end up with
text: null.Especially great when you run into the "this input doesn't support templates" issue, and it switches to the yaml editor while you're typing - including the lovely
nullconversion.samenome
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •I have fun with computers. When they get not-fun, it is called work.
Related: I have light switches in the door frames that dis/reconnect the active power line, an electric car I plug in when the sun shines, and sold the 'smart wi-fi enabled' washing machine when it sent data back to LG. [A washing machine FFS. Making digital chaff, FFSsquared]
kepstin
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •yeah, JSON is purely a serialization format for computers to talk to other computers. The fact that it looks like text is an artifact of its creation, and also sometimes helpful for debugging.
But if you intentionally have a human reading or writing JSON I'd consider that to be a design issue :/
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to kepstin • • •ASalazar
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •That’s actually a feature. JSON, for all the horrible things it is (who the fuck thought exchanging JavaScript code was awesome?), has never included JavaScript comments in the specification.
If it had, we hacks, when facing a frustrating parsing problem, would add meta-directives as comments, inventing another flavor of JSON; and the world doesn’t deserve such suffering.
"To properly edit JSON in HomeAssistant, include in the first line a comment in the form of:”
// HOME_ASSISTANT_VAR: JSON_PARSER_VERSION = <TYPE_OF_INSTALLATION>
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to ASalazar • • •samir, devoid of naps
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •This is some enterprise software.
“George, we have a customer yelling at us about using YAML instead of JSON! Can you get it working today?”
“Um, sure…” <frantically Googles “convert JSON to YAML and back”>
Dan Cassidy 🦌
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •fraggLe!
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Oh Dan there's a super easy solution to this, you see you just put your YAML files in a directory that HA can see and then don't edit them through the interface, but with a real text editor.
You then use git to push them into the HA directory (and it also gives you a history to roll back) and all you've gotta do is click the reload button and you're away!
This started out as a shitpost reply but then I realized this is actually how I do it and now I'm deeply ashamed of myself.
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops reshared this.
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to fraggLe! • • •fraggLe!
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •I'm so very sorry.
You're also in for a treat that if you run HA's OS thing that makes it easy to put it on an rPi, I think they make it difficult to do this?
But seriously I run HA in Kubernetes, don't listen to me, I don't touch computers I let them touch me, I'm beyond help.
Ben Tasker
in reply to fraggLe! • • •@fwaggle There's a SSH addon you can install which makes it easier to push YAML/whatever into the config.
Not the default SSH addon, though, you need this one - community.home-assistant.io/t/…
Personally, though, I'd avoid HAOS and supervisord installs - I had quite a few issues with them - I just run the docker image and pass my zigbee dongle through.
But also, yeah, there's a bunch of YAML that I manage outside of the UI 🙁
Home Assistant Community Add-on: SSH & Web Terminal
Home Assistant CommunityDan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Ben Tasker • • •yelling jackal
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dave Holland
in reply to yelling jackal • • •Bill, organizer of stuff
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •At least Joe Beda apologized for using YAML in Kubernetes 😄
youtu.be/8PpgqEqkQWA?si=hjGQzf…
Nightmares On Cloud Street 29/10/20 - Joe Beda
YouTubeDan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Bill, organizer of stuff • • •Stewart Russell
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •I still remember that YAML was invented because someone in the late 1990s had a Big Mad about how slow XML parsers were, and wrote their own "Yet Another Markup Language".
Our computers are many, many times faster now, but we've still got to deal with stupid YAML because someone decades ago had a hissy-fit.
Efi (nap pet) 🦊💤
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •some of them allow you to write better code, some just add shortcuts for lazy people
and some do both and also help democratize programming, which is not a bad thing
it's not just wearing hats, it's a whole set of clothes, even tho some people do want to wear only a stack of hats
mostly enterprise heads
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Efi (nap pet) 🦊💤 • • •Efi (nap pet) 🦊💤
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Efi (nap pet) 🦊💤 • • •Leaded Solder
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Giselle
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Hope you get it sorted out to your satisfaction.
I don't suppose a longer cord would have worked that she can reach?
Kristin (vis.social Admin)
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •This summer, I was speaking at an astrophysics summer camp for kids. They had great questions.
One of them was 'how do I go about writing clever code?'
I replied 'I try to avoid being clever in my code. The most important parts of my code are the well written comments'
Adding that 'I try to write my comments as if I myself have to use them to figure out what the code is supposed to do, 3 months or 10-20 years, later.'
And yes, I've thanked my past self for good code comments.
🦉 Yannick Loiseau
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •SignalEleven
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •in December the @homeassistant project collects stories like this in the "month of WTF" (maybe WTH but I said what I said). In case you want another outlet for this annoyance that has a chance to make a difference 😅
I'm moving in 10 days and I'm currently taking my apartment apart piece by piece. As I settle in the new house, I'll be a WTF machinegun, but mostly towards me. (I plan on starting the config from scratch so I'll dredge up old wtfs)
Mark Gjøl
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Ongion 🥚🐞
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •greem
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •you did that thing again.
You wrote stuff that was inside my brain and not yours.
aeva
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Aitor
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Chris Wagner
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •wizardry variants lori
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to wizardry variants lori • • •@kib the Escalator Model of redundancy
"Escalator temporarily stairs, we apologise for the convenience"
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Marcos Dione
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Emil "AngryAnt" Johansen
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Ouch! I did replace our wall switches, but with ones with integrated relays rather than the described hard-wired fire trap.
Only decided on that direction once I had found switches which you can locally go "no, fuck the smartness - right now you're just directly toggling your relays fully locally".
They also feature discrete LEDs on the front indicating when the relays are switched on - no guesswork on whether a wire is live.
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Emil "AngryAnt" Johansen • • •Emil "AngryAnt" Johansen
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •This is the specific model we ended up with: aqara.com/en/product/smart-wal…
I'm assuming there are probably lots of alternatives.
For this one, key was getting the variant with neutral so it works as a button and network backbone regardless of whether the relays are engaged.
I turned them all 90 degrees, mapping the top button to "on" and the bottom one to "off". Presses will turn on/off progressively more lights while double-pressing controls blinds or full floors from the stairwell.
Smart Wall Switch H1 EU (With Neutral) - Aqara
Bomel (Aqara)Carsten
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •💬
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Pseudo Nym
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •AlisonW ♿🏳️🌈♾️
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Khleedril
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Kee Hinckley
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Mark T. Tomczak
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •I, uh...
I actually started to get out of home automation because I was dating.😳
Future Misses at-mark insisted on a house that fucking worked reliably because she'd be living in it, and I could not promise that.
Dan W
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •I’m the one who set up all our Smart Home stuff and are getting fed-up with most of it.
I now have everything connected by Ethernet or Matter and am in the process of purging anything that only functions by WiFi or Bluetooth.
hansenerd
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Now I am browsing Ali at 1am to check their doodads. Maybe I need some?
JeffG
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Marten
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •at least you bypassed the fun IKEA app where you're allowed to change which room a lightbulb is in.
But for some reason *not* which room a switch is in. For that you have to remove, reset and then readd them
Sara Joy
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Sara Joy
in reply to Sara Joy • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Sara Joy • • •Sara Joy
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •lolol. Yes.
My dad is 82 and has been a technophile and a DJ (parties back in the 80s, and a local radio station since, playing golden oldies) for years. He loves it.
alcinnz
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •How do you watch Netflix in my house? You don't!
Instead I'll ask if you've heard, say, Wooden Overcoats... Or Wolf359... Or...
Yes, I consider myself quite nerdy...
Alaric Snell-Pym
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Fish Id Wardrobe
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •mictter
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Cassidy 🦌
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •LJ
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •It's almost worse in our house. Spouse has this belief in the one remote to rule them all.
We're on try number four, I think. Each time, he's sure he's found the perfect one that will autoswitch all the settings seamlessly.
And no, they don't.
Anton Piatek
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Just get more physical buttons that do dedicated jobs?
Lea de Groot 🇦🇺
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •@mike you know how this was a metaphor for home assistant? Yeah, no, Thats pretty close to the actual situation with our tv here 🙁 depending on what you want to watch, there are 3 remotes and a control panel in play. Bloody geeks! 🙁
(And there is a scribbled piece of paper somewhere that i had to make him write that badly explains what when 🙁 )
caskfan
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Lisa
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Gus
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Something I find interesting about this kind of self-inflicted nerd pain is how it can prefigure a trend of consumer tech that comes later, transformed into a mass market version:
i.e. 2000s nerds build fiddly media PCs for their TVs, by late 2010s every TV is a PC.
1990s home automation was domain of rich nerds, by 2020 most stores that sell light bulbs also sell "smart" ones.
(Admittedly HA isn't a good fit here due to being newer and partly a response to too many crappy consumer light bulb platforms.)
Also, goes without saying the mass market versions may be simplified for usability but are also Torment Nexus Terrible in some way, because capitalism.
Mauve 👁💜
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Amro has been
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Olga Lovick (she/her)
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •noodle
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to noodle • • •noodle
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to noodle • • •noodle
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Carsten
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Carsten • • •Carsten
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •DJGummikuh
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •cibyr
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to cibyr • • •@cibyr but it has community right there in the name
why wasn't this shit written down where I could see it
cibyr
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to cibyr • • •@cibyr the hell is a nabu casa
I can tell you're right into home assistant because you speak in riddles like in a Grimm's Fairy Tale
cibyr
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to cibyr • • •cibyr
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •cibyr
in reply to cibyr • • •my single favorite home assistant integration is community.home-assistant.io/t/…
Hit me up if you want a pcb for it
ESP Somfy RTS Integration
Home Assistant CommunityDan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to cibyr • • •Wes George
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •And I supposedly computer for a living.
Sean
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •I just want to rotate the image coming from my camera
How is that hard
I can't physically install said camera in the right orientation, I need to rotate the image
Six hours of conflicting documentation later I still don't have it, including after installing HACS (while muttering "I don't care if it breaks, it's already not doing what I want")
How is the documentation this bad? HOW
Marcos Dione
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Donald Ball
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Trammell Hudson
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Ikea
Trammell Hudson's ProjectsMarcos Dione
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Marcos Dione • • •Marcos Dione
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Joel Michael
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Andrew (Television Executive)
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •dbrand666
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Without reading any further, I know how this ends. I must share this thread with my kids.
(Who still refer to whatever it is that's controlled our house since 1993 "Mr House".)
ideaPDish
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Low milage... but they kind of need a wee bit of a trim.
But first...
ideaPDish
in reply to ideaPDish • • •So, Dan, do you know of any good buttons that I can program for home asistant to script it to do lot of things at once?
Like turn on netflix?
before it turns on me?
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to ideaPDish • • •ideaPDish
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Andrew
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Greg Stolze
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Fuck, dude.
Dude.
...fuck.
Gavin Campbell
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •OH DAMN!!! I didn't know this was possible. Thank you for the new project.
When I first got my water heater the original plan was to connect it to HA but saw so many people complaining that I bailed on that idea.
Now this is going to happen.
Alien
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Aaravchen
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Aaravchen • • •Keira (She/Her)
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Just Another Amy
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •<thinking about all the wasted heat blown outdoors by aircon and getting mad>
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Just Another Amy • • •cibyr
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
Unknown parent • • •Loman-Feusagach
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •as Paul Hibbert from Hibbert Home Tech says, "Home Assistant is a Tamagochi."
It absolutely is and I love it.
Wes George
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Wes George
in reply to Wes George • • •Rheem integration home-assistant.io/integrations…
Scheduler card (also requires HACS):
github.com/nielsfaber/schedule…
Gives you something like this.
Rheem EcoNet Products
Home AssistantDan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Wes George • • •Wes George
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
in reply to Wes George • • •Craig Askings
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •testy terrapin 🐢
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
Unknown parent • • •Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
Unknown parent • • •echarlie
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •I am trying to avoid this rabbit hole. But my partner bought philips hue lights because she was mad at the lights in the kitchen not being dimmable, and not being in the right place. So now I can't turn on half the lights in the house.
The real solution is doing more electrical, but that's probably not going to be what happens (soon)
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops
Unknown parent • • •deliverator
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Ms.Goober (Jes)
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Will Dillon
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •As someone who used to be an executive at a home automation company, this thread is pure catharsis. Home automation is such a trip. I have light switches that I have to use the "air gap" switch on at night, otherwise they reboot in the middle of the night and wake me up!
In this case, it appears to be a long-term hardware degradation issue that should be addressed when I physically replace it, but still...
RealGene ☣️
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •Zillion
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •The Story of Mel
www.catb.orgMedea Vanamonde🏳️⚧️ ♀
in reply to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops • • •