8mo ago

Why is replacement for home device controls so complicated?

I recently learned about Home Assistant here on Lemmy. It looks like a replacement for Google Home, etc. However, it requires an entire hardware installation. Proprietary products just use a simple app to manage and control devices, so can someone explain why a pretty robust dedicated device is necessary as a replacement? The base model has a quad core processor, 4 gigs of ram, and a 32 gig hard drive. Admittedly it's no gaming PC, but it's no arduino either.

What actually happens when I turn on a smart switch in my home? Does that command have to be sent to a server somewhere to be processed? What really has to be processed, and why can't a smartphone app do it?

Edit: I am still getting new replies to this (which are appreciated!), but I wanted to share what I've learned from those who have posted already. I fundamentally misunderstood how smart switches work. I had very wrongly assumed that when my phone is connected to the WiFi, it sends a signal over the local network to toggle the switch, which is connected to the same network, and it turns on/off. While there are technologies that work like this (zigbee, kinda?), most smart home devices rely on a cloud server to communicate the signal. This enables features like using the switches from outside the home network, automation, voice controls, etc. The remote server is what's being replaced.

65 comments

I think others have generally caught this, but I wanted to simplify the point: the apps on your phone are not controlling your home, a computer is. If you don't use Google's, then you'll need to provide one.
- That's helpful. It seems like a system an insane person would come up with, but I understand it.
  
  A dedicated server is needed because something needs to keep a catalog of the smart devices available on your network and ideally be accessible to many people in one household. You could make a system that went phone -> device but you would need to set up each device on each phone you wanted to use, which isn't a great user experience. You could also run into issues where devices would need to handle multiple conflicting commands from different users coming in at once. Since smart devices are usually trying to use as little power as possible, that extra complexity would hurt you in that department. The third reason is that having a separate server enables automated workflows that would depend on an always online server that orchestrates multiple devices. For example, let's say you have some automatic insulating blinds, a smart thermostat. You want to raise and lower the blinds to maximize your energy efficiency. Since you have the dedicated server, that server can check the temperature set point of your thermostat, current weather, and sunrise\sunset times. If it's sunny out, and your set point is higher than the outdoor temperature, the server can raise the blinds to let warm sunlight in, and vice versa. If only your phone could control the devices a workflow like this couldn't work when you were out of the house.

so can someone explain why a pretty robust dedicated device is necessary as a replacement?
The cloud is just someone else's computer, so when you cut the cord from the cloud, you gotta run your own server.
And you don't need to buy a (robust) device to run HA, just install it on a spare system and start playing with it. I started building mine about 1.5yrs ago when I bought a house and I think I only gave mine like 2 CPU and 8gb ram.
What actually happens when I turn on a smart switch in my home? Does that command have to be sent to a server somewhere to be processed?
Yes, you have to have something that accepts your commands and sends the action to the end device. Just like your Google home did.
What really has to be processed, and why can't a smartphone app do it?
Because that's not how things work. Your app has to talk to a server to send the commands, Google home has cloud servers and a local bridge. HA has an app that you can use to control your stuff, same as Google Home.
Smart Home apps are worthless without hardware required to connect the app to your home.

Proprietary products just use a simple app to manage and control devices
They have a dedicated set of servers your devices and app are connecting to, that's what home assistant is essentially replacing.
It's not just app > device, it's app > server > device.

My homeassistant is running on a pi2 with 2GB RAM. it doesn't need much.
But yes, it is a central place for processing and recording data, either from phone, imstalled electrical hardware or other devices.
- The issue with the combination of rabbit holes I'm going down is all the damn pis Im gonna end up being lol
  
  Get any old enterprise workstation (they practically give Dells away for free) and get to know Docker.
  Using multiple Pis for single applications is a fool's errand - my Optiplex was free and it is running ~30 containers with plenty of room to breathe.
  
  You just need one Pi. get a pi5 for future proofing. Docker addition , so you can host more than just home assiatant

in a nutshell
This is how the control and information exchange of smart devices work:
Phone App -> [Server] ... [Server] -> Smart Device and vice versa
There's no way around this concept.
Now, Google gives you the phone app and the (public) server part. but these only work with their servers and apps, keeping you locked in.
HA gives you the same, a server and an app, but allows you to keep the server private (access via vpn for public)
Also who guarantees that Google Home will be there in the next few years? HA will still keep running even if it ever gets abandoned.
- Technically there is. If the device uses BLE or the phone has some built in hardware shenanigans. There is also a local gateway via ble. I'd argue a simple gateway is not a "server". Scheduling can be done by the device via internal non-volatile storage and RTC
  
  Gateway is a more specific name for a server.
  Like web host is a more specific name for a server.
  A server isn't anything fancy, it just serves a service.
  If that is just a relay between your phone and local devices, that's what it's serving
  
  Sure, but I was talking about the basic concept of how things work in general to keep it simple for OP.

Depending. But yes. A lot of the time they go the long way around, and head out to some server and back to your local network.
If the internet is down, or the vendor shits off the server, the device stops working.
Home assistant is attempting to localise everything, and get different vendors devices to work together.
Note, for your hass install, it can be installed on any server. Though I am using the green device
- vendor shits off the server
  Lol
- vendor shits off the server
  Oh, autocorrect, sometimes you really say things better than intended
- This is really amazing to me. I had no idea that it was using the internet to send the on/off signal from my phone, up to a server (multiple servers), just to send the command back to my home network, and to the device. That seems like an absolutely bonkers system to turn on a switch. I would be better off to repurpose an old RC toy to control the switch!
  
  What is bad is when the supplying company goes out of business, you are left with junk. Self Hosting is the way.
  Also if you buy Kasa TPlink plgus and switches there is a git HS100 repo that has scripts to run to preprogram your switches to use a localhost instead of baked in proprietary IP server, and scripts to associate your switches and plugs to your wifi without an app. https://github.com/jkbenaim/hs100
  With this CLI tool you can also manipulate the plugs and switches direct by IP address rather than via homeassistant server.

A service needs a server, not just a phone. Do you want to self host, or use the entire hardware installation in someone’s cloud data center?
You can run HA on lighter hardware, or use a VM or docker, but it needs something to host.
When I say “hey Siri open my garage door”, my phone does voice recognition, calls the Apple Home app, which calls my local Home Assistant server, which calls the RATGDO which opens the door.
- Plus the benefit of running HA on this hardware is that you can often eliminate the proprietary hubs and sometimes cloud-based communication.

Yes, Google runs their servers in the cloud. If you host it yourself, it runs off a device in your house.
But you don't need to use their own hardware. You can run on whatever you like, and it probably doesn't actually need all four vCPUs.
- Even then, those requirements are easily satisfied by a Raspberry Pi and most other SBCs out there. Seems rather reasonable to dedicate one to HA. It's not too crazy when you take into consideration how powerful cheapo hardware can be these days.
  
  I actually run mine in a 12 year old castoff Thinkpad. 4 GB ram total. More than enough to run it because I run a DNS server, a dashboard and a speedtest server on the same machine.

The idea of Home Assistant is not to be a replacement for anything. It rather connects all things. It is a smart home control center, or hub.
Compare it to a Homematic, or maybe Aquara hub, etc. but still more feature rich and expandable with many more protocols and device categories.
Proprietary single switches etc. use only their own protocol.
Google Home is limited to a few protocols.
- Thanks. That helps.

Bluetooth can do it locally, but yes, for things on ZigBee or Z-Wave, it's gotta have an antenna hub. WiFi switches and lights most likely do "phone-home" to the cloud in some way (usually for color or brightness control via app, Govee especially loves this). The down side, other than the obvious privacy implications, is that if your ISP has an outage, so do your switches.
Home Assistant attempts to mitigate both the privacy and offline issues, while putting all of the different brands and hubs into one place.

My words.
When you read "Cloud" change the word in your head to "Someone else's computer"
So when I was using Tuya lightbulbs I was connecting Tuya's Computer to Googles Computer to turn my lights on.
Now I use Home Assistant, I'm connecting MY computer to Googles Computer to turn the lights on, since I'm asking Google to turn MY lights on.
I can just not use the Google Cloud and have a voice assistant in Home Assistant do it, then I'm just using my own computer.
Now then, you don't think that all the photos you've ever taken reside in an app on your phone do you, because if you do I've got some news for you....
- Except Google likes to collect that data
- I don't really understand why a computer is necessary at all, is the thing. I know that it's possible to use wifi network to send a signal between two devices. I have a sound board that works this way, and manages to communicate precise multichannel instructions directly over the network without an internet connection.
  If I want to turn on a light switch, it seems like all I should need to send is the location of the light switch on the network and the on/off command. I know that there is not the computing power in the light switch itself to process much more than that.
  Do these devices all connect to a remote server to switch on and off??
  
  Yes. That's why it's called the Internet of things. Every "smart", wifi connected, device you have uses that connection to communicate with a remote server. The app on your phone does the same to control the light.
  Check out Zigbee for an example local control.
  
  Many "smart" devices are sold with the idea that you can control your home from somewhere else. Maybe change the temperature on your way home or get notified when someone rings your doorbell. All this stuff requires servers to work.
  Controlling some lightbulbs via bluetooth/wifi would be possible of course, but probably not very interesting for many.
  
  https://github.com/jkbenaim/hs100 if you have tplink kasa hardware this cli tool lets you send direct commands via Wifi, no hub required. it is not that the tech actually needs a server, it is that the server handles IP address changes, records data, checks switch on/off status, scheduling, etc, to provide a better experience than hitting an on off command.
  
  Pretty much, yes.
  I think you're underestimating the computing power of these devices. If it has WiFi, it has an operating system.
  You're looking for something like ESPhome maybe. It's a project from the same people that do home assistant. There's a web server (and/or local API) available that allows you to toggle outputs locally, your browser directly to the microcontroller.
  
  It's crazy, given that all these devices have something powerful like an esp32, isn't it?
  I've done some of my home stuff this way, but I had to program it myself. Tasmota has some features which can be used without a server, but that's just for simple stuff like switches. For whatever reason (simplicity for non tech people?), out of the box products don't work this way.
  If you don't have days of spare time, you buy ready made products and set them up in minutes in Home Assistant
  
  The computing as to when they need switching on and off is done by the computer.
  I used to use Tasker and Smart Life connected through Google to control my lights. It worked but it was fucking shit. I wrote all the logic for it based off my phone, so it kinda worked for me, and everyone else in the house hated it.
  Now it's all controlled by a computer based in the home, based on sensors that are in the home from all kinds of manufacturers using different protocols (because that's what Home Assistant does, conglomerate protocols) it works much better for everyone involved.
  You can try to make iot devices work without a computer or cloud if you like but it will just be absolutely garbage.
  Good luck

It doesn't take much to run home assistant. I just have a raspberry pi going and it never fails. I plan to upgrade it to something more powerful in the future, but for now it is more than capable of running home assistant for me with no issues.
- Obligatory if you install HA on a raspberry Pi. Use the SSD option as you will wear out an SD card or usb key pretty quickly since those devices aren't intended for constant writes from things like logging and generally don't have any wear out leveling.
  
  I ran all my home assistants on Pis with the SD card + external database and never had issues.
- You might want to have some other storage than a cheap SD card though

HA doesn't require 4/4/32, that's just the hardware the HA people sell. (which, given that your phone may be 8/16/128, is hardly "robust"). Generally, the Home Assistant crowd kind of target an audience that's probably already running some kind of home server, NAS, or router, and HA can probably be installed on that device.
Theoretically, there's no reason the HA server couldn't be installed on your phone, except then your smart home functions would only work while your phone is in the house and not sleeping. Kind of defeats the point of a lot of it, unless you're just thinking of smart home like "remote control for everything." Regardless, much smaller niche for an already-small market, and apparently not a priority for the dev team.
- Also, the point of HA is usually to avoid 3rd party servers, so you don't just need something that runs HA, you need something that can receive data signals that may not be over wifi. Unless you can connect 3rd party receiver dongles to your phone, it'll end up limiting which devices you can use on your network.
  
  THIS.
  Home Assistant is the brain of the operation. Your smart phone is just an arm or hand in the operation. It’s the same for any of the services you perceive to be just using your smart phone. They actually call out to servers owned by the various companies, and then return requested operations to your devices at home. So with Home Assistant you have the opportunity to use devices and a server that all remain in your own network. Your data and information aren’t being sent to a third party. This, of course, depends on the devices you buy.
  But that’s the power behind Home Assistant.

While there are technologies that work like this (zigbee, kinda?),
Yes, there are many. You probably know them as "remote control". Your TV, your garage door...
Home Assistant can also control them via gateway devices, turn them into "smart" devices and include them in larger automation scenarios.

Home Assistant can be installed as a Docker container instead of going with the whole dedicated machine route.

I never understood the want or desire for such things honestly
Also you don't want proprietary cloud based products because of things like this:
https://www.newsweek.com/amazon-smart-home-brandon-jackson-echo-racial-slur-allegation-1806947
- In my case it was a specific use case in that I have a number of outdoor lights that I want to control without needing to go back in the house every time. Folks here have given a few options that would work well for this without relying on the internet, but I already have the setup installed at this point

Wifi smart devices can have that sort of completely local control, not just zigbee. LIFX devices use local control if you don't connect them to the cloud. However, you're then limited in lots of ways, such as you can't then use a smart switch from a different manufacturer to control the lights. Home Assistant takes over the job of Google/Apple Home, which allows different manufacturer's devices to all work together harmoniously. Those services also provide things like automations, turning the lights on when your smartphone arrives within a geofence for example. HA can do even better because those automations will work across Android as well as iOS. It also maintains the advantage of just one app to control your entire home.
As well, as far hardware, I think you're misunderstanding a bit. Nabu Casa, the org that controls the open-source HA project, sells a couple of pre-built devices that run home assistant already. They're designed as turn-key solutions for people with less technical know-how, and provide a bunch of expansibility so people don't waste money needing to upgrade. The proceeds from those go back into supporting the projects costs. But you can go out and buy a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W (512mb RAM) for $15 and it'll happily run the kind of basic setup you're after. But you will almost immediately run into it's limitations if you try to do anything more complicated.
My HA server is running on an x86 VM with 2c/4t and 8gb of RAM to itself. Have a full music server running on it serving ~6 devices around the house though. Edit: 6 fixed devices. It can also be cast to a bunch of places from mobile devices. My music collection is in FLAC so it's transcoding to lossy on the fly where needed.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
DNS	Domain Name Service/System
Git	Popular version control system, primarily for code
HA	Home Assistant automation software
~	High Availability
IP	Internet Protocol
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
SBC	Single-Board Computer
SSD	Solid State Drive mass storage
Zigbee	Wireless mesh network for low-power devices

8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.

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I have a proxmox hassio VM with 2gb ram and it runs everything smart in my house. The main purpose would be for automations IMO. Like when my phone chargers at night the house lights, TVs locks all shut down and the cameras go into alerting mode. Home assistant is amazing since you don't have to have 5 apps to control stuff and your data is completely private unlike when using Google home etc. When buying IOT devices I would say stick with zigbee, zwave and only buy WiFi stuff if it works locally without having to have internet wccess.

Okay — can anyone — and I mean anyone, please explain to me that allure of the so called home assistant. Our home was built in 1965. Its housed many families very comfortably. It houses our family very comfortably. Our kids are heading off to college. Tra la la. We have holidays, happiness, and we contribute to the community at a variety of events. We sleep well. Eat well. We host parties of up to fifty people sometimes… we have a yard.We have a dog, two cats, fish etc. All the things that happen in a home.
We are happy.
We have no so called smart products. We use a terrestrial radio in the kitchen on the daily. We stream from the rip-off services when we desire. We are up on the shows etc. So we have internet — each of us has a phone and a device for working. I just don’t get it.
What is the allure of the so called smart home etc?
- Can anyone, I mean anyone, please explain to me that allure of so called cats. We are happy and have no cats. I just don’t get it
  
  I’m sure they have an app to help you understand.
- It’s just a minor convenience, not sure why that’s confusing.
  I can set the temperature from anywhere, that’s nice.
  
  Imagine… setting it while at home.
- For many, just a hobby. If it doesn't strike you as something you need or want, then maybe it isn't
  
  That’s true. It doesn’t.
  I like the idea that some folks have entirely private systems run by raspberry-pi. That sounds fun.
  But what can it do more easily than an mid 20th century home can do?

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