Possibly reading my mind which is scary. I’m taking a step away from Hubitat at the moment and have Home Assistant running on a Rpi. Seems like your dashboard should work as well with that system as HE. If so what are the simple steps to create an instance of HV with HA devices?
I, too, am slowly backing away from Hubitat and tinkering with Home Assistant. Thus welcome the opportunity to tinker with alternative host arrangements.
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I’ve made some minor steps in that direction, but not really looked all that hard. If they have the concept of MakerAPI on that platform then it would work immediately, but if not, then I can’t really help much more at this point.
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I know they must because Reactor interacts with Home Assistant just fine by adding one line in its YAML file.
Would appreciate if you can dig into how they do that and report back - ie is the one line just enabling a complex custom integration (with lines of code behind it), or is it doing something way simpler that I could also leverage.
Just to clarrify - as MSR is closed source and has a proprietary license, I won’t be looking at this solution at all. I’d also ask that anyone who does, keep it to yourself as I don’t wish to cross any border where concepts and/or ideas have been taken from someone else’s work that hasn’t had permission to do so.
There’s no question in my mind that all the I/O info you need for interoperating with HA resides on this page of the Home Assistant docs.
I’ve setup a small HA instance on a Pi4,. and run a single automation. It has been flawless for almost a year, outside of the Argon One addon crashing it monthly. In any event I’ve had to tinker with it 1000x less than HE.
I also have a Zigbee2MQTT instance and man is that thing reliable. Even purposefully trying to cause devices to drop(pull batteries, unplug) they all just recover. It’s the most solid mesh I’ve ever had. I’m using the Sonoff dongle P, the one without the horrible Silabs screwup#2, aka EFR32MG. #1 was the z-wave 700 fiasco. What the hell is going on with Sh!tlabs? Err I mean Silabs
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Also looks like remote access to these HA REST APIs are possible for free too…
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X-10 > Wink > Iris > Smartthings > Hubitat > just sayin
Getting all of this without much effort feels like iot cheating
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So is there any interest in making an integration for HomeAssistant ?
It would be a bit of an effort to write the integration, but seems like it would offer that community a polished way to have dashboards across a lot of platforms. I’m not familar with the alternative options, but would be surprised that they’d have somethign like hubiVue already. Seems like web dashboards are all the rage, but personally I hate them. Web is so not the best thing to run on a phone or natively on a device when you want to have a smooth touch experience - web isn’t it for remote / cloud access either (ie its slow to respond due to the latency between front/back end - which is why we still have native apps for almost everything)
HA has an app and that app does provide a dashboard. I’m guessing their app is available on all platforms.
I doubt many home automation enthusiast want the support job of keeping something like the full HA app working on their spouse’s or kid’s device.
That’s where you have a place to pop in with value add. I’d suspect there are far more users of HA than HE but that’s a guess.
While there are a few really top notch community folks doing good work on the HE platform, there are far more on the HA side of things when it comes to needing help for writing the integration for HV. They seem to be an organized group based on the end user result I’m seeing.
Seems like you gain a much larger potential market of paying customers if you can work with HA as well as you do with HE. And then there also the old “don’t put all of your eggs in one basket” notion to consider.
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I think the massive hurdle you’d be up against, even after you suss out all the Websocket API details, is the mere fact that many HA users already have their dashboards built using HA’s native utilities.
In some ways, HA practically is a dashboard. Putting one together within its own framework is a fairly trivial exercise, so it’s unclear to me whether that crowd will perceive the need for an external solution.
Something I would very much feel out (in the various forums) before proceeding, lest your efforts risk going unrewarded.
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@g.slender - Agree with this. While I’m no expert, through my own research and observations, it seems like the HA community seems to really like the dashboard framework built into the software. The other thing you’re up against is well…it’s free. If you think it’s worth pursuing, I would suggest asking that community directly through their forum.
As I’ve said before, there is a huge GAP with Hubitat you’ve filled with hubiVue (IMHO) - especially for the iOS user base. I think you’ll continue to crush it and good things will come of it.
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In a similar way to hubiVue, most of Home Assistant is free but there is a paid for subscription that is fairly popular - Nabu Casa
Not sure if that adjusts the landscape or not…
I think you have to have the $65.00 annual Nabu Casa subscription for mobile devices to connect when away from the location where hub is located.
Assuming you build the same type local\cloud connector that Hubitat has, one could then use HV and not have as much of the need for Nabu Casa. You do still do need that subscription for working with cloud services like Google Home.
During the week this week I’ve connected my HE and HA hub devices in both directions. There are great community pieces for doing this.
As crazy as it is, I can take devices connected to HA, pipe them into HE, and then put those devices on my HV dashboard. For items like lights you can’t tell that little hoop jump is going on in the background. Lights come on and go off just as fast as if they were paired directly to the HE hub.
Local hardware connected via local api is a wonderful thing. Even better is having the same quality cloud service to go with the local hardware.
Maybe if we poke around more one of us will find that someone has already written the entire Maker api like thing for HA that is just a plug and play piece. It seems like that is something that would just exist for other use cases other that dashboard communications.
For grins and giggles, I spent a good chunk of yesterday setting up a tunnel back to my home network using CloudFlare + a cheap web domain I purchased for this exercise. Other than that $1.98 I spent, this is entirely free to implement, is double-secure, allows HTTP/HTTPS connections (and more) and does not involve a VPN of any kind.
It works perfectly, and I can now access my NAS, Hubitat, Reactor (running in Docker on said NAS) but not Home Assistant because it ostensibly needs one extra component (a CloudFlare add-on) and HA in Docker doesn’t permit add-ons. I’m sure there’s a work-around…
But it drives home the point that HA behaves differently in some way, and who knows whether the Nabu Casa contingent likes it that way. It also underscores that HE is being kind of generous w.r.t. allowing users full use of cloud links when other controller vendors have been known to pull back on stuff like that for the sheer cost of maintaining servers.
If you wanna give this tunneling thing a try, get step-by-step guidance from this video. Pretty awesome!!
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