[rj45jackattack]

Lots of negativity in here. So this is nice. I use HA at home and it's nothing short of amazing. I primarily use Zigbee devices and they all just work. I pay Nabu Casa for the external access and Google integration. I look forward to replacing my Google Homes with HA as well.

[asylteltine]

I don’t understand the negativity at all. HA rivals or exceeds commercial automation systems like crestron, RTI, etc. clearly those people don’t have any industry experience. I’ve generally never had an issue with HA beyond my own fault, like a buggy integration.

[MPSimmons]

Home Assistant is an amazing project. I use it a ton, and I deeply appreciate what they've done.

HOWEVER, Lovelace specifically is pretty terrible. Having used Grafana extensively, trying to use Lovelace to arrange a UI is so far backwards that it's constantly grating to try to create or modify dashboards. I really wish there was a way to use Grafana as the UI and embed cards as panels. The ability to drag and drop, resize, and move UI elements would be a godsend, but instead it feels like I'm writing Tk-style UI arrangement in yaml, and it's awful, so I do it as infrequently as possible.

[ender341341]

Lovelace is pretty terrible, 1 hint I can give is to use vertical stacks, they're much easier to deal with for organizing where you want components in a given stack, then if you wanna move a component between vertical stacks go to the yaml view and cut it from source and paste it in the destination.

It's annoying to have to do a workaround like that but it makes it bearable at least.

[darkwater]

On that I agree, giving what's possible with opensource UIs like Grafana's, it could be probably borrowed (I mean, the whole JS code) in Lovelace as well. But I guess there is some debt from early versions that makes that more complicated.

[smarterhome]

I agree the UI can be improved a lot but in my experience a truly well done smart home does not need a lot of UI. I have automated pretty much everything and only use Grafana to show some data. If you actually want to include Grafana panels in Loveloce... that actually works. I described how to do that on my blog here if you are interested: https://thesmarthomejourney.com/2021/05/30/add-grafana-to-ho...

[asylteltine]

That’s true. Lovelace needs js and css to look pretty. Most dashboards are terrible. I hope they dump it

[quickthrowman]

I’ve never seen Crestron or RTI used for commercial building automation, aside from Crestron lighting controls on a rare occasion. Crestron is mostly an A/V company with a lighting controls line as far as I’m aware.

Building automation is owned by Johnson Controls, Carrier, Siemens, and Honeywell. There are some smaller manufacturers around, but those four plus Trane sell the vast majority of commercial building automation systems.

I manage electricians that wire up building automation systems, for what it’s worth.

And to be honest, knowing what I do about commercial building automation, I don’t see why you’d want to automate your home. If I was going to upgrade the lightning controls in my home, it would all be local non-networked controls from Lutron. I’m not sure what you’d monitor on your HVAC system.. do you really need to know what speed your furnace fan is spinning at? Most home HVAC systems aren’t large central boilers/chillers that send chilled/hot water to terminal units that can call for more heat/cold, a furnace can be controlled with its factory controls and an external thermostat.

[asylteltine]

Nope incorrect. Crestron and rti offer end to end solutions for whole home automation including the commercial space. Clearly you don’t care and/or get home automation, no skin off my back. It’s not for everyone

[MikusR]

The negativity is because it's a free project that competes with the thousands of home automation startups.