“Specifically, the plug-ins are using our services in an unauthorized manner, which is causing significant economic harm to our Company.”
Presumably, they don’t charge customers extra for hOn, so surely the only people using it via HA are the same people that would otherwise have used their (presumably) shitty app that isn’t meeting the customers’ needs in the first place?
Not clear on how this causes them “significant” economic harm. Dick move.
Yeah - in an ideal world, the dev would have the means (and legal standing) to challenge this, just to force the fuckers to admit it in court.
Not that it isn’t written into their ToS somewhere - just would love them to admit exactly how that harms them so much, financially speaking. Shine a light on the whole thing.
The only way I see a company like this having “significant economic harm” from you not using their free app is if 1) they eventually plan to charge a fee to use the app or 2) they profit from data their app collects about you (third party data sales, for example).
Not something I’m interested in either way, so they’ve lost a potential customer.
Looking at the brands they already own, it’s not hard to picture a future where they’ll own a brand I want to buy.
Although, I’m really interested (and haven’t done reading up on hOn yet) - just what level of automation are people looking for on their appliances? I used smart plugs with current measurements, so I can easily get HA to just tell me when my washing machine or dishwasher are finished.
One of the problems with the cloud-polling integrations is that they will frequently poll the back-end APIs to get the current status of that device. A normal user might only open up the app once or twice a day and call the APIs, but these integrations will go 24/7 every 10s-5m. That can add up to a non-trivial amount of traffic. If there’s 100 users opening it up once a day, that’s not a lot of traffic, but 10 users polling every 1 minute is equivalent to 15k people doing something once a day.
I actually saw one of my integrations I used defaulted to updating every 10 seconds. I decreased that because I didn’t want to draw attention to it.
A business will look at their usage and ask why there’s more than expected traffic. They could be running their server on a potato. They could go back and support Matter, that costs money, requires skilled engineers, and cuts into profit margins.
While it sucks, that is something they could point to in a court about “economic harm”.
I reckon it’s probably not that much. There has to be tens of thousands of customers worldwide that are using their shitty app.
Forks and stars on the original repo numbered only in the hundreds.
Cloud services and API gateways usually charge once you get into the millions of requests. Amazon API Gateway doesn’t even charge for having the APIs active - only for the requests that are received and the data transferred out.
I’m finding it very difficult to believe a few hundred HA users even came close to putting a dent in their cloud bill.
This is the great thing about FOSS. Someone else will just take the code and reupload it. If they want it removed from GitHub, they can deal with Microsoft. At which point it’ll just be re-uploaded again. There’s nothing illegal about it.
So Haier suffers the Streisand effect and the people who want to simply continue using it.
Right… they claim hosting it is a violation of their TOS, but I’m not one of their customers. How can I violate their TOS if I don’t even use their product.
An F&P induction range was on our short list for an upcoming replacement to our aging gas range. It is now off the short list. Not sure how many API calls a $8000 range would have paid for, but I’m sure they’ll be happy to know my HA server won’t be pinging them any time soon.
Not sure what temp and humidity levels a terrarium is expected to have, but Shelly makes a good device for monitoring both - www.shelly.com/en/…/shelly-h-and-t-white.
Or one with a screen (still smart) - www.shelly.com/en-us/…/shelly-h-and-t-gen3-1/
We use the latter in our bedroom which triggers the power outlet to a humidifier if it gets too dry when we’re sick.
I feel like your best bet is ESPHome and the ESP family of devices. Last time I checked you could get the parts for a project like this off Amazon (with spare parts) for under 20$.
You need an actuator that takes a proportional input signal. 0-10vdc is common. You’ll just need a 24vac to 10vdc power supply for the manual potentiometer.
Nice. I don’t know about the torque requirements or mounting dimensions of your existing (or new?) damper so double check those. Kinda sucks that they don’t make one that takes the pot signal directly. I know a lot of lighting dimmers are 0-10v but how they are powered and interact with that damper is uncharted territory.
A stepper would be the easiest thing because if you know it takes 10 steps to fully open from fully closed, you could keep track of how many steps you have sent each direction in Home Assistant and be able to display the current status. 
If you want a knob on the wall that controls this, I think somewhere behind it you are still going to need a control system that translates wall switch inputs into stepping logic. Home Assistant would be able to do that easily. 
Thanks for the assistance. I ended up restoring a backup onto a new SD-card and everything started working again. I think the SD-card died on me while I was away.
However, my system continued to stall once in a while, so I decided to get the Home Assistant Green in order to update my setup and go with something more official. It’s just too troublesome having constant issues when everything relies on this one box!
Ah, that’s what I was looking for. Thank you. I am not sure if an MQTT signal works well for dimming, but I guess I’ll give it a try, because otherwise I end up with two switches controlling the same set of lights in the same location… not idea.
The only way I can think of is to disable the built-in updates, and set up time based shortcuts and have them do an if on wifi then trigger home assistant app sensor updates.
The way I’d structure it is a normal shortcut that you run from as many time-based shortcuts as you want to create (so you can reuse it easily). You can check the network name you’re connected to and only run if it matches your home network.
Cannot really answer your questions but if you ever swap to z2m and you keep the exact same friendly name you are using in zha, automations won’t need to be updated. I know it would be still a pain to re-pair but z2m is better than zha, so you will gain in the long term.
I’ve swapped out at few of my Zigbee devices in the past, and even though I’ve deleted the original device, HA will add an “_2” to the entity ID, which breaks any automation that uses it, even if the friendly name remains the same. The only time I’ve seen this not happen is when a device drops off the network and I re-pair it. Is there a trick to making this work? Even if I don’t switch to Z2MQTT, this would be really useful to know. I have a few unreliable cheap door sensors that I’d like to replace, but they’re tied to so many automations that I’ve been dragging my feet on it.
No particular tricks, maybe it’s a one of the limitation of zha. As an exemple, I recently replace a bulb by a new one and old one was repurpose somewhere else in the house, the only thing I did was to rename old bulb and added the new one with old bulb name.
Couldn’t agree more. ZHA is supposed to be more simple to use, but if one is already using HA it’s not going to be long before they reach its limits. Zigbee2MQTT has better device support and more features. While the basic setup may be a little bit more complicated than ZHA you get the benefits mentioned earlier, and you don’t really need to understand all of its functionality from the start - you can learn as you go.
When you talk about the limits of ZHA, what are you referring to exactly? It would probably take an entire weekend for me to re-pair all the devices on my Zigbee network, but I’m not completely opposed to the idea of I gain some functionality that I didn’t have before.
Based on what I read when I first set up HA, it seems like ZHA was somewhat lacking for quite some time but is now essentially equivalent to Z2MQTT. I went with ZHA because it seemed like the “default” for Zigbee.
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