The Home Assistant team publishes the analytics they collect (for those that allow it). The integrations and add-ons pages might interest you if you haven't seen them.
this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
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Google calendar is a lot more popular than I assumed. I tried putting it on once but it looked like a pita so I just didn't bother. Maybe I should give it a real go
I currently have it watching my calendar and setting my alarms on my phone.
If I am on Early shift in my calendar it sets alarm for 5am, late shift, it checks if the kids are off school and if they aren't it sets my alarm for 7.30am.
If I'm on holiday and so are my kids, no alarms are set.
That sounds handy
Until it fucks up and I miss work lol
That's really helpful, thanks
Spotify is way higher than I expected.
I don't use Zigbee2MQTT, I just buy appropiate ZHA hardware to keep things simple.
Addons: qBitTorrent, VS Code, File Browser, Advanced Terminal
Integrations: Google Cloud (Text-to-Speech), Haier hOn, Samsung SmartThings, Tuya.
I found Tuya to be such a massive pain in the ass that I just ended up ripping out all devices.
The main integration would just randomly stop working when my developer account expired and required an evening of frustrating clicking through poorly translated slow as molasses Chinese websites to re-enable.
Localtuya was spectacularly half baked for my devices.
Has anything changed? Is there a special secret to getting Tuya stuff to work reliably?
I've flashes LibreTiny (fork of Esphome) on my Tuya devices, on a IR blaster and a relay. Took some time to understand how it worked, but then it worked like a charm. Now they are just esphome devices, no more Tuya stuff.
Unfortunately my devices have the firmware version that can’t be reflashed without physical access and they have shells I can’t easily open. So they are stuck being actual Tuya devices for the time being.
Which is why they are at the bottom of a drawer ;)
LocalTuya on HACS, it's a bit of a pain to setup and requires you to make a tuya dev account (free) but as far as I can tell you can delete it after, it's just to get the security keys to actually control the devices, and then issue them locally. My devices were much more responsive after doing so
So far so good. I honestly use it because I bought a couple of things before realising the world of ZHA existed.
I have a homeassistant approved zigbee dongle and it still wouldn't pair properly.
☝️ This guy home assists.
Can I ask what the qBitTorrent add-on does and why you send it through HA?
It's just qBitTorrent (except I think the Qt dependencies are gone and it's full webUI) + some easy OpenVPN configuration if you are into that.
Why I have it as an add-on? Well, I run HAOS in a Raspberry Pi, very low consumption device, so having qBitTorrent seeding 100% of the time with such low consumption makes me happy as I am making everyone happy too.
I use zigbee mqtt Which of course integrates with mosquito broker.
But I tied in my ecowitt weather station data via mqtt into the broker so I have it in HA. I did this with weewx . There's an mqtt add-on
I also integrated my blue-iris NVR in to mqtt for motion detection, notifications for cameras.
Life360 integration to help automate things based on who's home
I use esphome and have a bunch of sensors/devices. I track whole house power utilization, I have temp sensors on my HVAC to I can watch all its performance stats.
Here's my ugly drawing that tracks inside/outside/basement temps, geothermal water loop temps, in/out furnace air temps, water heater state along with both it and the furnace realtime watts usage.
This has been sitting in my inbox and I just wanted to say thank you for taking the time to draw the diagram. It made this a great comment to come back to now that I have my HA up and running.
Glad it was useful! My Ms paint skills are amazing aren't they :)
ESPHome, WLED, NodeRed.
I run ZHA because it’s the first thing I ran into and moving is a pain. But I’m really curious about the differences, and I’m already running an mqtt broker for other reasons.
Anyone care to sell me on z2mqtt?
Nah, I’ve used Z2MQTT for years but switched to ZHA since it’s really mature now, works perfectly fine and is a native “integration”
I moved ZHA -> Z2MQTT earlier this year., mostly due to reading comments in how much better it was. The web interface is better and gives you more control, and setting up Mosquito for an MQTT meant I could use it for Frigate, too.
Otherwise, device support is basically the same and I notice no difference between the two. For my devices, anyways.
I've been curious to try Z2MQTT. What's holding me back is the amount of work involved in switching over. I have 90-something devices paired with ZHA. As far as I am aware, this would require re-pairing all 90 of them individually with Z2MQTT and then re-configuring every automation that uses ZHA (basically all of them). Did you find a way to automate the process?
I did it manually (~50 devices at the time). If there is a way to automate it, I am not aware.
On the bright side, it was a good chance to update the names on all the devices so they follow the same naming convention.
Then of course, I needed to update all automations and Dashboards to use the new device names.
No zigbee, all zwave.
How are you finding ZWave?
It's more or less perfect if you have enough nodes to make a good mesh.
Nice. My NAS, which was majorly limited could do ZWave out of the box and I never looked into it until I decided Zigbee was what I wanted.
My home and work ones both have Zigbee and Zwave. The modern ZwaveJS integration is amazing compared the old effort. Also: ESPHome, NUT, Mossie (MQTT), nginx proxy manager, MariaDB, nodered, Piper and that, Remote Backup, Terminal and SSH, DSS VoIP Notifier, VLC.
HACS with a fair few custom cards etc.
I'm assuming you have a tonne of devices?
I’m assuming everyone has Zigbee2MQTT
I've managed to avoid Zigbee, except for some Ikea blinds which have their own Ikea integration. When I was deciding what sort of switches and stuff to get I ended up with Z-wave for all of my in-wall needs, and WiFi for everything else. I have 3 wifi AP's so the wifi stuff doesn't get too crowded -- plus a bonus of good wifi coverage in the house.
To name a few:
- Z-Wave JS UI
- Ambient Weather Local
- Fordpass
- Homekit Device (for local thermostat control)
- Ikea Tradfri
- IQVIA (allergy info)
- Logitech Harmony Hub
- Met.no
- MQTT
- Node-RED Companion
- Oncue by Kohler (generator monitoring)
- Redfin
- Tasmota
- TP-Link Kasa
- UniFi
Add-ons:
- AdGuard Home
- Grafana
- Home Assistant Google Drive Backup
- InfluxDB (for long term storage of certain sensors)
- MariaDB (for everything else, takes the place of home-assistant_v2.db)
- Mosquitto broker
- Node-RED (does all of my automation, I love it)
- Studio Code Server
- TasmoAdmin
Why did you want to avoid Zigbee?
Good question. I think it boiled down to reading lots of "will x-brand work with x-brand?" questions, and it seemed like a bit of a mess. If I bought a certain Zigbee hub, not all zigbee stuff was going to work.
It's my understanding that Z-wave "fixes" that by having a standard, and if a company wants to sell Z-wave stuff it has to be certified and licensed. This increases the cost which is passed on to the consumer, but the end result is that anything called Z-wave works with any Z-wave hub.
It's still not perfect, but my experience has been pretty good overall. I have quite a few Z-wave devices and most of them are extremely stable. I have one or two devices that are problem children, and I have to "ping" them to wake them up sometimes. Compare that to WiFi, which my house is also heavy on -- and I currently have two devices that simply won't connect to WiFi after updating the firmware. I'm going to have to take them apart and physically flash them again.
Every protocol has it's own problems, but overall I've been happy with Z-wave and WiFi.