I decided to spin up Home Assistant on a VM on my server yesterday, and so far I’m not having much luck getting to to much that is actually useful.

I’m wondering if it’s me doing something wrong, but I can’t see what that would be.

I’ve signed up for the free trial of the cloud services which all seems to have gone fine, and I have a couple of integrations working (Roomba, printer ink levels, Sonos and a couple of others) but mostly everything else I’ve tried just doesn’t want to play ball

  • Apple TV - won’t pair - I press the pair button in HA but the ATV doesn’t respond with a pairing code

  • Ring doorbell / cameras - these are found but won’t display a live feed

  • Ring alarm - not recognised at all

  • Netatmo thermostat - widget displays but doesn’t sync correctly with thermostat and if I try to adjust temp it sets the target temp to 137 degrees C

  • Hue lights - having issues but this one might be my hub not HA

I was really hoping I could set up automations to, say, turn off my TV, turn off the lights, arm my house alarm - all with one press of a button but it looks like currently this isn’t going to happen.

Is it just me? Am I doing something wrong perhaps? Maybe I’m missing something obvious but it just seems like the integrations with these devices just isn’t quite there? I’d really be interested in other people’s experiences and whether they were able to solve these issues (if indeed they had them at all).

Kushan
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91Y

Yeah to echo other comments in here, it sounds like there’s some kind of config issue somewhere. The hue integration should “just work” and it’s where I get most of my own utility from.

I will say though, HA isn’t as user friendly as it could be. It has come a long way and it’s getting better (and there is definitely nothing better at the moment), but there are still some gremlins in there that require you to hand edit config files or understand obscure device names and things like that.

@rarkgrames@lemmy.world
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31Y

I got Hue working, as I suspected it was a me issue (well a Hue Hub issue) rather than an HA issue :)

@markr@lemmy.world
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11Y

Yeah, as soon as you need to customize anything you are inside a very odd scripting system. On the other hand, in my experience, most stuff just works.

Kushan
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11Y

Yeah, it’s very powerful, it just needs a bit of a UX refresh.

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