anybody using homeassistant and having success? i feel like everything i try with it is extra complicated, but i'd love to hear others' success stories.

i had a pretty effective google home setup but have tried to transition away from Google devices, and good lord. it's so much more complicated doing it myself!

Its amazing and addictive lol especially once you start taking back control of your local devices. Rtl433 would be the followup ;)

Stay way, it is way too addictive. If you are not careful you will end automating from window blinds to toilets.

It's not super user friendly and the UI really sucks.
I broke my HA by trying to remove an esp32 Bluetooth proxy. Now it refuses to allow me to add it, so all my Bluetooth devices can't connect.

I appreciate that it's free, but fuck I hate it, it's a convoluted POS.

I got into it last year. It's been less intuitive to configure - especially the dashboard section -without getting into manual configuration. It desperately needs some improvement to make it so that a "lightweight" tech person like me can configure it as much as I want without learning the gritty shit under the hood. That said, I'm happy with it overall and am slowly learning more in spite of that complaint.

Google home, apple home, etc are pretty sad once you want to do anything more than very basic automation or very basic controls. Considering that you are giving them complete access to your home and devices that's a nonstarter for me. I'd go back to having all "dumb" stuff without something like HA. Plus there are things those corpo tools won't let you do. I couldn't control the fan on my oven hood manually with google home, but in HA I have total control right out of the box.

Yep, been running it for a couple years at least? Mostly ZigBee and Zwave devices. For lights, some other powered devices, temperature control, and in-house location tracking.

It's not always intuitive, but always figure it out eventually. There's a homeassistant community at !homeassistant@lemmy.world which might be helpful if you have questions.

Pretty sure my house wouldn't work anymore without it. My girlfriends growlights, the blinds, the vacuum, the lawn mower, hell even the kettle to some extent.

I feel like they over engineered the heck out of 'simplifying' automations, to the point I stayed on Core v2025.8.3 for about 7 months. I disliked their menu changes and hate the big ol card that comes up on mobile when editing - much prefer the older style.

Can confirm. Started with replacing my Tuya lightbulbs. Last thing I automated was hydrometers for my house plants to tell me they're thirsty.

No problems here. Pretty basic use, outside light scheduling, tying inside lights together (if a on, turn b&c on), bathroom fan timers, and sensor notifications. I haven't really messed with the dashboard.

Automations can get pretty clunky, but I manage with my simple needs. Some people swear by using NodeRed on top of home assistant, but I've never tried it.

Yeah I like it a lot. Didn't use anything else so I don't have a comparison, but I found most things very straightforward.

It's getting messy when you have to do non-standard tasks like removing some entries from the database

It really is a pain in the ass if you're not the type of person who likes to tinker with everything all the time. And, if you want something that isn't the most common thing, you have to SSH into the server that runs it.

How so? Most things should be detected automatically. Dashboards can also be populated automatically, same as with google home. If you want better dashboards, it will take more work.

Which points give you pain?

Yes, love it. Hint, AI really helps with some of the stuff though HA has changed over time so sometimes AI is talking about another version. I just set it up a month ago. I used their Z-Wave adaptor but installed HA on my Ubuntu Media Center instead using the Ubuntu Snaps.

Oh yeah, I use it for everything from automated lights to server monitoring notifications to Web scraping for when Publix chicken tender subs are on sale. Most everything you can think of is pretty well documented, and someone's done it before. They have made some UI changes recently that make creating automations easier, but if you are ok with copying and editing YAML files, you can steal what other people have created pretty easily.

I have one for a long-ish time, started really using it now. It is daunting at first (still is) but I can feel the potential. You just have to invest some time in getting to know it and how to set it up.

Proprietary apps might be more user friendly, but I guess that's how they get you. Also, I imagine HA is easier if you want to set up something overly specific.

I'm still in the daunting phase though.

The kettle?!

Yes. It's not a kettle as in the pot you put on the stove, but an electric water ... heater ... thingy. I honestly have no idea how to call it in english. The german word would be "Heißwasserspender", literally translating to "hot water dispenser". I disassembled it, soldered a tiny raspberry pi board to it that could control the device as you could with the buttons and wrote a rudimentary API that I now control via home assistant.

Within HA, I can control the kettle via calling the API of the pi. For example, I got a script that triggers if my girlfriends phone is entering my WLAN-network.

The call to the API looks like this:

rest_command:  
  kettle_set_params:  
    url: "http://kettle.local"  
    method: POST  
    content_type: "application/json"  
    payload: '{"amount": {{ amount }}, "temp": {{ temp }}}'  

It's dynamic, so for the "default black tea" she likes, these are the arguments

set_kettle_default_black_tea:  
  alias: "Set Kettle"  
  sequence:  
    - service: rest_command.kettle_set_params  
      data:  
        amount: 500  
        temp: 100  

And this is the trigger:

- alias: "Start kettle when Ana home"  
  trigger:  
    - platform: state  
      entity_id: device_tracker.pixel6_ana  
      from: "not_home"  
      to: "home"  
      for: "00:00:10"  
  condition:  
    - condition: time  
      after: "18:00:00"  
      before: "20:00:00"  
  action:  
    - service: script.set_kettle_default_black_tea  

That call is received by the pi, who then triggers the kettle. So every time my girlfriends phone is entering the wifi, it's between 18:00 and 20:00 and there's a cup present (done via a simple proximity sensor that I glued to the side of the kettle. That's also not known to the home assistant, I didn't really know how to feedback that information to it so I just had it handled by the pi itself), the kettle triggers and dispenses hot water. She can also do it manually via the home assistant app, I made a widget for that where you can just select temperature, amount and that's it.

I just hope the thing never breaks because I reassembled it using superglue, but then I noticed I forgot to install SSH on the pi, making it kinda an isolated piece of software that I just hope keeps running indefinitely lol.

good on you for moving away from Google!

Used it for a couple of years. Moved away from it being in docker to HAOS and took the opportunity to start fresh.
I was really blown away how much more user friendly it has gotten.
Adding devices and setting up basic automation I find pretty easy, but some blueprints can be a hassle to setup

do you have tips for someone who hasn’t gotten there yet but would want to and has 20+ plants that would be nice to monitor? I already build an indoor HA automated lamp house for tomatoes (ESPhome)

My success is that my wife loves it and complains when I take it down for maintenance. I've successfully moved her and the kids away from Google Assistants and internet connected everything.

That's what a win looks like, 100% WAF.

*edit: spelling.

Is HAOS free of containers? #iso27002

I guess I wish I had switched to zigbee earlier. I have been slowly replacing all my tuya wifi devices. Zigbee Home-assistant App and Zigbee2MQTT are both local-only.
For Hygrometers, buy in bulk and expect 1 in 4 to be useless garbage. I get them on Ali for cheap.

I have no interest myself, but if I wanted a home assistent I would take an Amazon Echo (either from a dumpster, or 2nd-hand), and put lineageOS on it to liberate it. The more Amazon hardware that gets converted to a liberated platform, the better. People have done this successfully with the Echoes that have a screen, but the headless Echoes need the same motivation and effort so we can liberate those too. Otherwise they are going to waste.

Thanks. I would buy like 4pcs only and be disappointed, would not expect for 1 out of 4 to not work, thats good advice