What is the Indigo community using Home-Assistant for?

Posted on
Fri Jul 03, 2020 10:13 am
vtmikel offline
Posts: 628
Joined: Aug 31, 2012
Location: Boston, MA

What is the Indigo community using Home-Assistant for?

I'm curious...

What is the benefit that Indigo users have found with home-assistant? This plugin brought me to finally give home-assistant a try, but I didn't find any obvious features or benefits that stood out to me.

It looks like WonderSlug's plugin is a great addition for those using both.

Mike

Posted on
Sun Jul 05, 2020 11:59 am
WonderSlug offline
Posts: 82
Joined: Sep 08, 2017

Re: What is the Indigo community using Home-Assistant for?

Im happy to explain my reasons and why I wrote the plugin.

For me there are several key aspects why I want to use Home Assistant.

First there is range of integrations with third party system that I can integrate with. Some of them have plugins for Indigo but a lot don't. And for the integrations that have an Indigo plugin the Home Assistant ones usually have a lot more features and support a larger range of devices. The Alexa and Home Assistant integrations are some of the primary ones that come to mind. The ability to automate across all of the third party systems is very handy. As well the amount of DIY system tie-ins really help with Arduino and Raspberry PI based integration and development. For example I was able to make NodeMCU based "In Meeting" lights (so my 6 year old knows when my wife or I are working) using ESPHome control it from Home Assistant in an afternoon.

As well for me the ability to tie into other ecosystems with HassIO and the docker container support is very nice. Being able to use Node Red to drive automations directly is very nice.

Indigo has a lot better Insteon support and I want to continue using it for that. Home Assistant reboot with Insteon takes a long time to re-poll all of the devices. Home Assistant is moving to externally controlled ZWave in form of the OpenZWave container and system that runs external to Home Assistant and I see Insteon going that direction as well.

Posted on
Tue Jul 07, 2020 8:31 am
vtmikel offline
Posts: 628
Joined: Aug 31, 2012
Location: Boston, MA

Re: What is the Indigo community using Home-Assistant for?

Thanks for taking the time to write that up. I wasn't aware of Node Red and will check that out.

When you say the docker container support, you mean for the integrations, right? I made the "mistake" of starting my experience with home-assistant by using the docker version and was wondering why the integrations were missing. Took some digging to find out that they use docker for the integrations and you must use the VM to make use of the integrations.

Is use of home-assistant for a custom home dashboard a frequent use case? the interface looked slick and I thought the use of chromecast was creative.

Posted on
Wed Jul 08, 2020 8:32 am
WonderSlug offline
Posts: 82
Joined: Sep 08, 2017

Re: What is the Indigo community using Home-Assistant for?

There are several ways to install Home Assistant: They just did a good blog post on it because it can be a bit confusing.

https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020 ... ides-wiki/

As well I wanted to clear up some of my comments. In home assistant speak and integration is embedded support for something inside the Home Assistant Core python application. This can be run in multiple ways, standalone or as a docker container. You can add in integrations but they become part of the Core single process.

The docker container additions for things like Node-Red or MQTT are called Add-ons to Home Assistant which is now what used to be called Hass.io. This is the bundled easy to install and maintain all in one solution including OS. The Add-Ons are generally external processes that are designed to setup to interact with Home Assistant Core

I current run what they are terming Home Assistant Supervised which is kinda a hybrid mode. Running Home Assistant in container mode without the OS level integration.

As for custom-dashboard.... oh yeah. This is one of the main draws to Home Assistant for a lot of people. The design uses a lot of modern web techniques and libraries to allow for an almost customizable experience. The mobile apps mirror the web interface and can be tweaked to allow for touch control and feedback.

The chromecast thing is really nice. I use it for my our info dashboard while we both work from home, so we can also help keep an eye on the kid :)

dashboard-tv.jpg
dashboard-tv.jpg (1.78 MiB) Viewed 2180 times

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