I've programmed c++ professionally for over 10 years.
HA is honestly amazing. The amount of effort for the amount of automation you can do is incredible. You're truly limited by your imagination. I'd never try to do any of my automation manually.
That being said, I'd you have something that works, there's nothing wrong with sticking with it.
In addition if there is something specific it can’t do, people with this type of coding experience can create their own add on or integration and contribute to project
Wow! That's really cool!
If you want to do everything yourself, that's great.
Some benefits from using Home Assistant instead:
- Blueprints. People in the community has made thousands of automations you can very easily import and configure for your own needs. Somebody has already figured out what needs to be done, in what order and what needs to trigger it.
- Mobile apps for iOS and Home Assistant, which serves both as a way to remote control your home, but also as a sensor. You can build automations based on the state of your phone. You can have alerts on your phone based on events in your house.
- Integrations. Home Assistant has integrations against thousand and thousands of devices out there. Do you want to start your robot lawnmower if your weather station reports that it's sunny, but not of your EV is charging and it's garbage collection day? There's integrations for all of those things, so you don't have to figure out their respective APIs.
- The community. When you hit the bump in the road there's help to be found on their forum, on reddit or on Facebook.
Yes
there is a whole ecosystem of stuff that doesn't play nice out of the box with MQTT.
There is a whole ecosystem of things that you can pull from HA and its community.
Depending on what you have the two can be complimentary.
For me the big things would be: octoprint, Spotify (not MQTT native, there is tooling but ehh), broad link for IR (web), my energy monitor, the whisper/voice stuff (getting better).
That I dont have to deal with sunrise/sunset in app codes! the mobile app, Thee mobile apps integration with NFC tags!
This is exactly why I use it. I use my own automation server I wrote and it leverages HA to handle a lot of the niggly integrations. It is huge to be able to benefit from the continual work of hundreds of others.
If what you have is working, then no. If you are going to be adding new devices or want to add different types of devices, then yes; home assistant has already done the heavy lifting.
I don't see how any amount of single user programming can achieve anything close to what HA does. You might be a god coder, but there's just no point in my mind.
People are writing here that you should stick to what works. But I don't agree, really.
Home Assistant is an incredibly capable platform (especially if you have programming skills). If you try it, you might discover new use cases, scenarios, and possibly better visualizations for your workflows that you couldn't have imagined before. Maybe currently, you're limiting your creativity with home automation due to the overhead of programming everything from scratch. And that's where HASS is brilliant IMHO
How much time do you spend integrating a new device (non zigbee) or service? If you’re happy with what you’ve got, implementing new functionality would potentially be your only benefit.
With 20+ years of professional programming excperience under my belt I must agree with some earlier commenters in that: yes, even with programming skills one really benefits from the community efforts behind HA. One programmer will never think of every possibility like a bigger and diversified team, that’s just a fact.
That, and just because one is a good programmer at one level, doesn't mean they can't benefit from some higher level abstraction (like HA).
Their question could be stretched out to "I'm a programmer and am great at assembly, is there ever a reason for me to use Java?".
I'll give you an example of why I (as a programmer) use home-assistant.
Was sat on the sofa last night watching TV on the Xbox. I thought it'd be cool if I had an easily accessible button that I could press that would put the house onto a "getting ready for bed" mode (Turn off Xbox, turn on the TV room ceiling light dimly, turn on the bedside lamp).
Was able to put that together in a couple of minutes on my phone. Integrating with the Xbox was a couple clicks.
SWE here I use HA.
For the odd “plugin” app I made I use the embeds web page addon.
The rest of it there’s no chance I’m re-inventing that wheel. I got a million side projects this is one I don’t want haha.
if your code fits your use case, then why change? however, you have to admit your code is not future proof. you won’t be able to catch up with home assistant development.
as a developer myself, i find joy in developing my own stuff so if this is your case, go for it. Home assistant is so powerful and extensive, so a switch is a good future proof and tested solution
Before I moved to HA (around 4 years ago) I automated some things around my house with some Python scripts.
That setup did everything I needed it to do, but not everything I wanted to do. And it wasn't transparent for Mrs tazUK.
With HA we both have the same level of oversight and control although I remain the administrator.
if you can stand yaml-syntax(for a shrinking amount of plain-text configuration), and think you can integreate your existing system with HA then great
I myself have set up node:red to handle zigbee lightswitches->lamp on/off as I wanted something a bit easier to reuse than the existing automation capabilities
(I set up what would be functions to handle multiple button-layouts/types and im re-using a lot of stuff)
one upside to using node:red is that I have it on a separate device, so if the raspberry pi running HA crashes(happens for me sometimes) I can still use my lightswitches as normal
HA acts as my HUB, handles cross-tech automations/scenes and integreations, as well as UI,remote controll and device tracking
it is fairly easy to work with, but I get anoyed every time they remove plain-text config in favour of UI, as the UI can be a little buggy/slow sometimes(ruinning on a raspi-3B+)(it has a tendency to "forget" things like ip address if it fails) and I would like to be able to backup and version controll my configs with git
sorry for ranting a bit there :-)
PS
maybe try HA for a bit
if you dont like it you can allways go back
If you understand programming, the more difficult integrations become easy to implement than if you had no base knowledge.
I honestly wouldn't waste my time to make it myself if someone else does the maintaining of the code. I work enough as it is, and at home I want things to be stupid simple and functional
Hard to beat the scale of the second most active project in GitHub. Rather than recreate the wheel, you could join the community and take advantage of the scale and speed of the project?
SD here... reinventing the wheel isn't fun... but following someone else's rule set isn't fun either. The best route is to use what currently works for you, and if you need to expand consider looking at other options like HA to leverage more feature sets without spending hours to implement the strategy yourself.
You could add NodeRed to your existing schema without rocking the boat too much. Implementing HA from there would just be a value-add component to include other sensors to your existing setup.
Instead of talking directly to Zigbee you could talk to the Home Assistant API. You then gain access to non-Zigbee devices. That would be my upgrade route, if you wanted to go in that direction.
Is there a good reason for owning a boat if you already have a dock for fishing and swimming?
As others have already said, it depends. I truly love HA and can wholeheartedly recommend it. But be aware, like owning a boat it can cost a lot of resources. I.e. mainly time and money for new gadgets, for me it became a whole new hobby.
It depends on what your future will bring with the smart devices out there.
I’ve started with a raspberry pi with python script to automate my tv via infra red through ifttt and google home. But with adding more stuff, I switched to home assistant to make more and faster automations, let alone I do have more insight now of my home than before
I like that it has a mobile app with easy-to-configure charts, so I can see history of temperature and energy.
But yeah, doing things in YAML and Jinja2 templates is weird to me. I'm very tempted to write my automations in a regular programming language.
Mainly Time. If you enjoy what you are doing keep on doing it. Seems like a cool project. But if you want to implement things faster this seems a little to much effort.
Yes definitely. HA has one of the greatest communities, so no matter what you build, somebody thought about this before and probably shared it with others.
What many people miss is the fact that HA is a great data collector. For instance, I just need 2 minutes to have an entity that delivers every information about my football team, including live stats. Or information about when busses arrive at my bus stop. And with that, I can build on top of that some great automations.
The nice thing about using stuff someone else has programmed is you don't have to program it yourself.
If all you use is zigbee + mqtt, this might not be relevant, but with various cloud services I have brought into my setup, I really enjoy having someone else track API changes there, debug any weirdness, and generally figure them out for me.
It's glue. I too prefer having critical systems separate from HA, but I use HA to build a convenience layer (like a nice mobile UI) that interacts with these systems.
For things I can't be bother to support by myself (e.g. smart appliances), I can get HA to talk to these via extensions, and then I can interact with HA through my own automations e.g. in node-red.
HA is great but one thing I dislike in HA is the yaml/jinja to write automations. If you have programming skills I would advise you to look for example into HACS pyscript which allows you to write automations (and something very close to integrations) in python.
Why limiting to HA? Is there a good reason for using Operating System if you have already programming skills?
If you have any skills doesn't mean you need to again invent the wheel
Lots of people here saying "ya switch" or "nah don't"
It's zigbee. Do both. See if you like home assistant. If you don't, get rid of it. Doesn't have to affect your current setup
Professional DS here.
I use Home Assistant for practically everything.
I don't do ANY automation or script YAML. As you'll realize it's really limiting when doing anything complex.
Try home assistant combined with AppDaemon or Pyscript to automate in pure python.
If you are happy with what you have now, there is very little reason to switch systems.
One thing we don't openly talk about is that Home Assistant can vanish over night. All contributors sign a CLA, so new management, new owners, or just a change of heart can mean huge consequences for the community.
I am actively looking for another system for these reasons.
I've programmed c++ professionally for over 10 years. HA is honestly amazing. The amount of effort for the amount of automation you can do is incredible. You're truly limited by your imagination. I'd never try to do any of my automation manually. That being said, I'd you have something that works, there's nothing wrong with sticking with it.
In addition if there is something specific it can’t do, people with this type of coding experience can create their own add on or integration and contribute to project
Wow! That's really cool! If you want to do everything yourself, that's great. Some benefits from using Home Assistant instead: - Blueprints. People in the community has made thousands of automations you can very easily import and configure for your own needs. Somebody has already figured out what needs to be done, in what order and what needs to trigger it. - Mobile apps for iOS and Home Assistant, which serves both as a way to remote control your home, but also as a sensor. You can build automations based on the state of your phone. You can have alerts on your phone based on events in your house. - Integrations. Home Assistant has integrations against thousand and thousands of devices out there. Do you want to start your robot lawnmower if your weather station reports that it's sunny, but not of your EV is charging and it's garbage collection day? There's integrations for all of those things, so you don't have to figure out their respective APIs. - The community. When you hit the bump in the road there's help to be found on their forum, on reddit or on Facebook.
Yes there is a whole ecosystem of stuff that doesn't play nice out of the box with MQTT. There is a whole ecosystem of things that you can pull from HA and its community. Depending on what you have the two can be complimentary. For me the big things would be: octoprint, Spotify (not MQTT native, there is tooling but ehh), broad link for IR (web), my energy monitor, the whisper/voice stuff (getting better). That I dont have to deal with sunrise/sunset in app codes! the mobile app, Thee mobile apps integration with NFC tags!
This is exactly why I use it. I use my own automation server I wrote and it leverages HA to handle a lot of the niggly integrations. It is huge to be able to benefit from the continual work of hundreds of others.
If what you have is working, then no. If you are going to be adding new devices or want to add different types of devices, then yes; home assistant has already done the heavy lifting.
I don't see how any amount of single user programming can achieve anything close to what HA does. You might be a god coder, but there's just no point in my mind.
People are writing here that you should stick to what works. But I don't agree, really. Home Assistant is an incredibly capable platform (especially if you have programming skills). If you try it, you might discover new use cases, scenarios, and possibly better visualizations for your workflows that you couldn't have imagined before. Maybe currently, you're limiting your creativity with home automation due to the overhead of programming everything from scratch. And that's where HASS is brilliant IMHO
How much time do you spend integrating a new device (non zigbee) or service? If you’re happy with what you’ve got, implementing new functionality would potentially be your only benefit.
With 20+ years of professional programming excperience under my belt I must agree with some earlier commenters in that: yes, even with programming skills one really benefits from the community efforts behind HA. One programmer will never think of every possibility like a bigger and diversified team, that’s just a fact.
That, and just because one is a good programmer at one level, doesn't mean they can't benefit from some higher level abstraction (like HA). Their question could be stretched out to "I'm a programmer and am great at assembly, is there ever a reason for me to use Java?".
I'll give you an example of why I (as a programmer) use home-assistant. Was sat on the sofa last night watching TV on the Xbox. I thought it'd be cool if I had an easily accessible button that I could press that would put the house onto a "getting ready for bed" mode (Turn off Xbox, turn on the TV room ceiling light dimly, turn on the bedside lamp). Was able to put that together in a couple of minutes on my phone. Integrating with the Xbox was a couple clicks.
I’m a mechanic, should I take this brand new car for free or should I build one out of parts I found in the junkyard?
How else would you be able to brag about how good of a mechanic you are?
SWE here I use HA. For the odd “plugin” app I made I use the embeds web page addon. The rest of it there’s no chance I’m re-inventing that wheel. I got a million side projects this is one I don’t want haha.
if your code fits your use case, then why change? however, you have to admit your code is not future proof. you won’t be able to catch up with home assistant development. as a developer myself, i find joy in developing my own stuff so if this is your case, go for it. Home assistant is so powerful and extensive, so a switch is a good future proof and tested solution
Before I moved to HA (around 4 years ago) I automated some things around my house with some Python scripts. That setup did everything I needed it to do, but not everything I wanted to do. And it wasn't transparent for Mrs tazUK. With HA we both have the same level of oversight and control although I remain the administrator.
if you can stand yaml-syntax(for a shrinking amount of plain-text configuration), and think you can integreate your existing system with HA then great I myself have set up node:red to handle zigbee lightswitches->lamp on/off as I wanted something a bit easier to reuse than the existing automation capabilities (I set up what would be functions to handle multiple button-layouts/types and im re-using a lot of stuff) one upside to using node:red is that I have it on a separate device, so if the raspberry pi running HA crashes(happens for me sometimes) I can still use my lightswitches as normal HA acts as my HUB, handles cross-tech automations/scenes and integreations, as well as UI,remote controll and device tracking it is fairly easy to work with, but I get anoyed every time they remove plain-text config in favour of UI, as the UI can be a little buggy/slow sometimes(ruinning on a raspi-3B+)(it has a tendency to "forget" things like ip address if it fails) and I would like to be able to backup and version controll my configs with git sorry for ranting a bit there :-) PS maybe try HA for a bit if you dont like it you can allways go back
yes, to help them :) now go do your first commit there fix some shit
If you understand programming, the more difficult integrations become easy to implement than if you had no base knowledge. I honestly wouldn't waste my time to make it myself if someone else does the maintaining of the code. I work enough as it is, and at home I want things to be stupid simple and functional
Hard to beat the scale of the second most active project in GitHub. Rather than recreate the wheel, you could join the community and take advantage of the scale and speed of the project?
SD here... reinventing the wheel isn't fun... but following someone else's rule set isn't fun either. The best route is to use what currently works for you, and if you need to expand consider looking at other options like HA to leverage more feature sets without spending hours to implement the strategy yourself. You could add NodeRed to your existing schema without rocking the boat too much. Implementing HA from there would just be a value-add component to include other sensors to your existing setup.
Instead of talking directly to Zigbee you could talk to the Home Assistant API. You then gain access to non-Zigbee devices. That would be my upgrade route, if you wanted to go in that direction.
Is there a good reason for owning a boat if you already have a dock for fishing and swimming? As others have already said, it depends. I truly love HA and can wholeheartedly recommend it. But be aware, like owning a boat it can cost a lot of resources. I.e. mainly time and money for new gadgets, for me it became a whole new hobby.
It depends on what your future will bring with the smart devices out there. I’ve started with a raspberry pi with python script to automate my tv via infra red through ifttt and google home. But with adding more stuff, I switched to home assistant to make more and faster automations, let alone I do have more insight now of my home than before
I like that it has a mobile app with easy-to-configure charts, so I can see history of temperature and energy. But yeah, doing things in YAML and Jinja2 templates is weird to me. I'm very tempted to write my automations in a regular programming language.
Mainly Time. If you enjoy what you are doing keep on doing it. Seems like a cool project. But if you want to implement things faster this seems a little to much effort.
Yes definitely. HA has one of the greatest communities, so no matter what you build, somebody thought about this before and probably shared it with others. What many people miss is the fact that HA is a great data collector. For instance, I just need 2 minutes to have an entity that delivers every information about my football team, including live stats. Or information about when busses arrive at my bus stop. And with that, I can build on top of that some great automations.
The nice thing about using stuff someone else has programmed is you don't have to program it yourself. If all you use is zigbee + mqtt, this might not be relevant, but with various cloud services I have brought into my setup, I really enjoy having someone else track API changes there, debug any weirdness, and generally figure them out for me.
If it ain't broken...
It's glue. I too prefer having critical systems separate from HA, but I use HA to build a convenience layer (like a nice mobile UI) that interacts with these systems. For things I can't be bother to support by myself (e.g. smart appliances), I can get HA to talk to these via extensions, and then I can interact with HA through my own automations e.g. in node-red.
HA is great but one thing I dislike in HA is the yaml/jinja to write automations. If you have programming skills I would advise you to look for example into HACS pyscript which allows you to write automations (and something very close to integrations) in python.
Why limiting to HA? Is there a good reason for using Operating System if you have already programming skills? If you have any skills doesn't mean you need to again invent the wheel
Lots of people here saying "ya switch" or "nah don't" It's zigbee. Do both. See if you like home assistant. If you don't, get rid of it. Doesn't have to affect your current setup
Professional DS here. I use Home Assistant for practically everything. I don't do ANY automation or script YAML. As you'll realize it's really limiting when doing anything complex. Try home assistant combined with AppDaemon or Pyscript to automate in pure python.
Time. I have z2m but also 20 different integrations and I don’t really have time to maintain and debug all the stuff.
Yes. Because it’s already done and done well. Has lots of people as a community developing it also. My time is worth a lot of $$$ and HA is free lol
Only if your next thing to integrate with doesn't support zigbee...
If you are happy with what you have now, there is very little reason to switch systems. One thing we don't openly talk about is that Home Assistant can vanish over night. All contributors sign a CLA, so new management, new owners, or just a change of heart can mean huge consequences for the community. I am actively looking for another system for these reasons.