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aconsult1HNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I've tried using HA a couple years ago and gave up

I've tried using HA a couple years ago and gave up. It was too complicated to run it in a Pi4 - I'm an experienced software engineer, familiar with containers and Linux. I was trying to get some of the IoT I have at home like pool equipment, lights, HVAC, blinds, etc. Some of the setup were an uphill battle looking for more information in forums and trying to figure out what was broken. Recently I decided over the weekend to use Claude and write a small app that controls my pool equipment and then deployed it using Cloudflare Zero Trust (kind of a reverse VPN). What a joy! Not only I had lots of fun reverse engineering my pool equipment API (I didn't want to depend on existing libraries - which I know exist) but I managed to create a fun and custom UI with React that my kids and wife love using. For example, whenever the pool heater is on, it adds an animated flame to the UI and change the background to a red-ish color. Plus it has a bar chart that shows the pool temp progression (takes hours to heat it up) with an animated volcano colors. The theme of the app is beach/pool vibe. …

Original discussionHome Assistant waters my plants142 source comments · at import
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davempHN

Fun project. Though it’s kind of unreal how complicated it is to set up HA and I literally do this for a living, both embedded sw and backend web dev. Docker compose with a zwave management server, reverse proxies for TLS, vlan isolation for the server, macvlan for HA container so it does see the host network, etc, etc. All to turn on and off a lightbulb with the sun. All the while AI is telling me to configure things insecurely. I think when I get some more spare time, I’d like to write a statically linked program that handles a zwave controller and basic automation scripting. No IP networking needed for my lightbulbs. Then it wouldn’t feel risky to just make a system user and udev rule to give it permissions to the controller, and run with systemd.

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amlutoHN

HA is an absurdly heavyweight pile of Python and Docker. Get it a real computer — a used “thin client” with 8 GB of RAM is probably less expensive than an RPi4 plus case and power supply.

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finnianandersonHN

> I've been thinking about writing a blog post with the details of my fun project I'd love to read more about this!

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turtlebitsHN

"pretty obscure to configure every equipment I have at home" HA actually makes configuring every piece of equipment and integrating them easy. If I have only 1 thing to control, then yeah, it's probably overkill.

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