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

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

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

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

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

  • Ring alarm - not recognised at all

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

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

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

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

  • lemming007@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    HA is geared towards selfhosted, locally controlled stuff (zwave, ZigBee, mqqt, local WiFi, etc). Because the cloud and privacy invasion is the mainstream, HA may require a bit more tweaking and technical knowledge to get up and running.

    With that said, once you get it to how you want it, it’s been working rock solid for me for a few years now. I’ve built my house around HA automations and can’t imagine living without it.

    • cwagner@lemmy.cwagner.meEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, most connections to proprietary stuff work, but it’s not the happy path. This often involves workarounds and cludges compared to proper fully local devices.