Home Assistant Developers Blog

I think they're talking about you making Cactus Needle be an engine to respond to user queries in Home Assistant by making a custom add-on. https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/best_practices/ https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/core/llm/ https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/core/entity/conversation/ Something like the Ollama integration: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/ollama/

1) You can basically do this today with Blueprints. There's also things like Pyscript [0]. 2) The Node-RED implementation in HA is phenomenal and kids can very easily use with a short introduction. 3) Again, already there. ESPHome is a first class citizen in HA. I feel like you've not read the HA docs [1,] or took the time to understand the architecture [2]. And, for someone who has more than enough self-proclaimed skills, this should be a very understandable system. [0] https://github.com/custom-components/pyscript [1] https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/ [2] https://developers.home-assistant.io/

> For another thing: it’s straightforward to modify JavaScript dependencies locally. I’ve often tweaked something in my local node_modules folder when I’m trying to track down a bug or work on a feature in a library I depend on. Whereas if it’s written in a native language, I’d need to check out the source code and compile it myself – a big barrier to entry. Yeah, JavaScript is sloppy, but you can always monkey-patch it by modifying tool-controlled files. Great idea. Not. JS is just not a good language. The JIT and the web of packages made it slightly more usable, but it's still Not Good. There's no real way to do real parallel processing, async/await are hellish to debug, etc. It's unavoidable in browsers, but we _can_ avoid using it for tools. Look at Python, a native PIP replacement improved build times for HomeAssistant by an order of magnitude: https://developers.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/04/03/build-images-with…

There's a CLI [1], LLM API [2], and REST API [3]. [1]: https://github.com/home-assistant-ecosystem/home-assistant-cli [2]: https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/core/llm/ [3]: https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/api/rest/

There's a push and a poll model for home assistant sensors: https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/integration_fetching_data Probably easy for us techy folks to just setup a webhook as well.

> Yeah that's my goal -- basically I want to be able to control the devices from anything web connected (and ideally, the same program running in multiple places). HomeAssistant provides a REST API for all devices connected to it. I don't even use its automation features, I just use it for the API to control my ZWave devices from other stuff. https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/api/rest/ (POST to /api/services/ to control remotely) (Granted it's pretty heavy if that's the only feature you want, but hey, what you want does exist)

For those interested in uv (instead of pip), uv massively sped up the release process for Home Assistant. The time needed to make a release went down from ~2.5 hours to ~20 minutes. See https://developers.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/04/03/build-images-with… for details. I'm just a HA user btw.

Very nice! Would you be interesting in integrating with my project Willow[0]? Willow supports Home Assistant, OpenHAB, and generic REST+MQTT endpoints today. With Home Assistant and OpenHAB we benefit from their specific API support for providing speech to text output and processing through things like the HA Assist Pipelines[1]. From our standpoint we handle wake word, VAD+AEC+BSS, STT, TTS, user feedback, etc. All we really do is send the speech transcript to the Willow command endpoint (like HA) and speak+display the execution result. Other than all of the wild speech stuff and our obsession with speed and accuracy Willow is really quite "dumb" - think of it as a voice terminal. OpenHAB has something similar but it's significantly more limited. [0] - https://heywillow.io [1] - https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/voice/pipelines/

I hadn't seen SoundSync before. It looks neat. Like a lot of other people doing (or trying to do) Whole Home Audio, I'm using the Home Assistant open source platform as the central automation controller. You may want to look at creating a Home Assistant integration for SoundSync as it will expose it to the massive HA community (https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/development_index/).

> Is there hope for people looking to break into software engineering if they don't like web development? The technology has many aspect. > From the outside at least it looks like all the jobs are full-stack roles. Try to change your lenses. Not really at all. https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.17/process/submitting-patches.html https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/development_submitting/ https://www.indiehackers.com/ Godspeed and all

Multi-user auth is another exciting development, and it just hit RC status https://developers.home-assistant.io/blog/2018/07/02/trying-new-auth.h…

> 1. Integrations vs add-ons vs HACS - why is this so complicated. Add-ons only work when you run HAOS, but HACS works on any installation method. Integrations are running under control of Home Assistant, while addons are separate applications, running under control of the OS. With HAOS they have that control as they are delivering the OS. They are simply lacking the manpower and experience to deliver a smooth control of external applications for every OS. > 2. Root - I've succumbed to running HAOS and now I have no idea how to get root remote root access. Yes, that is a pretty big flaw. They are trying to make it a simple as possible, they are probably flooded with complaints and issues from too many people with barely enough knowledge. But this whole setup they maintain with HAOS is really annoying. Though, there is documentation[1] for this. > 5. Disorienting UI - whenever I wanna reboot something I'm pissed off. Whenever I wanna find integration or add-on - I'm pissed off. Why there's media and to-do list? Why do I have to enable professional mode to unlock some menu's? They are doing too much, want to serve everything to anyone. Really annoying, but I guess the loud voices kinda demand this one-fits-all-solution. They should really rethink they focus and architecture. Maybe making clear, distinctive apps for specific jobs might be better. > 6. Bizarre way of doing things - wanna add derivative sensor? Install file editor, find some file, then fight fucking YAML…

Some feedback to make your project easier to install and integrate better with Home Assistant (I'm the founder): Home Assistant is building a voice assistant as part of our Year of the Voice theme. https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/04/27/year-of-the-voice-chapte… As part of our recent chapter 2 milestone, we introduced new Assist Pipelines. This allows users to configure multiple voice assistants. Your project is using the old "conversation" API. Instead it should use our new assist pipelines API. Docs: https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/voice/pipelines/ You can even off-load the STT and TTS fully to Home Assistant and only focus on wake words. You will see a lot higher adoption rate if users can just buy the ESP BOX and install the software on it without installing/compiling stuff. That's exactly why we created ESP Web Tools. It offers projects to offer browser-based installation directly from their website. https://esphome.github.io/esp-web-tools/ If you're going the ESP Web Tools route (and you should!), we've also created Improv Wi-Fi, a small protocol to configure Wi-Fi on the ESP device. This will allow ESP Web Tools to offer an onboarding wizard in the browser once the software has been installed. More info at https://www.improv-wifi.com/ Good luck!