homegui VS iot_devices

FWIW, I had similar experiences twice:

First with IKEA when they changed the lights on-power-up behavior on upgrade. This resulted in a hub becoming a 25 euro cc2531 stick on raspberry pi + Zigbee2mqtt and HomeBridge for integration with HomeKit.

And the past February Apple decided my Apple TV 3 was not good enough for being a home hub, and botched the entire home in the process, while I was away.

So now the whole HomeKit nonsense is out and instead there is a lightweight Rust app with a simple text file config doing both the orchestration and providing the light html UI.

https://github.com/ayourtch/homegui - in case anybody finds it useful.

As a bonus the users in the household praise the new system being much more responsive..

I am missing “turn all the lights off when last person leaves”, and full editing the colors via GUI, but not enough to bother to implement it :-)

I started with a similar path a few years ago - IKEA smart home gear. The controller went away fairly quickly. I stayed for a long time on raspberry pi + Zigbee stick from DeConz + Apple home integration using homebridge.io.

Deconz felt a bit bloated/buggy, so I switched to using a cheap USB stick from aliexpress, and using zigbee2mqtt, which turned out to be a pretty good combination.

Unfortunately Apple decided (while I was on a business trip) that Apple TV 3 was no longer good enough as a home hub, so all of my soft switches stopped working...

As a result in a couple of days I wrote a quick MVP replacement in Rust, which has been working very nice for me, and the "user" (significant other) feedback was that it is now much more reliable and responsive.

Putting it here in case anyone finds it useful.

https://github.com/ayourtch/homegui

Wow, what a great idea for a thread!

I'm trying to pare down my personal projects to just the really exciting ones, so I don't have much, butni think the most appropriate to the thread is https://github.com/EternityForest/iot_devices

It's mean to be a cross-framework library for creating device integrations, so you can, say, write a handler for RTL SDR weather stations, and use it in a simple script up to a mega framework.

I kind of dislike the way HASS and others handle automations where they have special purpose primitives for everything that needs lots of hand written code.

I just have config entries, they must be strings, and data points, they can be strings, numbers, bytes, or objects. You can put metadata on them. There's also a few other utilities like the ability to make subdevices, and the ability to request things from the host.

There are no special subclasses, a light bulb is just a device with a brightness point.

It currently runs my security system with object detection recording, QR decoding if desired, multiple regions, motion detection without decoding every frame, and subsecond latency streaming to the browser, a nice recordings browser that can view a recording while it's being made, etc.

My HA platform project started in 2013. Every few months or so I check back to see if HA has progressed far enough that I can ditch one of the last custom apps in my life.

It's getting there. But it's not quite there yet. Last I checked the logging still saves every change, it's not easy to set up so that it will only save average/min/max over time to save SD wear.

Creating new integrations is easy but still not quite a five minute job like it is with my extension API(https://github.com/EternityForest/iot_devices)

But yet, having custom software in one's life is generally IMHO far more of a liability than an asset.

So what I actually do is just use YoLink and Google assistant for everything I possibly can, and use custom software for video recording and unusual stuff YoLink doesn't do.

I'd love to have a one size fits all "If it need automating, use this" platform, and HA seems like it's got the potential.... but just using the YoLink proprietary platform is the lazy, trouble free, super cheap way.

I'm working on a standard for easy drop-in home IoT drivers: https://github.com/EternityForest/iot_devices

Maybe you could go one level of meta up and instead of working on reusable components, work on reusable definitions for component interfaces.

Reuse is hard because you need a bunch of glue code. But if you had, like a standard for a toolbar, that knew how to find all the ToolbarAble objects, and the shopping cart icon just showed up, etc, things would get easier.

The shopping cart could know to look for all the payment requesting components declared in your Big Project File or whatever, and everything could stay modular ish?

GitHub is already the standard place to share generic projects.

Source code can be found here: https://github.com/EternityForest/iot_devices