I am in no way defending their behavior, but API calls will always incur some cost - either in backend resource consumption with “paying” customers, or legitimate costs if they’re relying on AWS infrastructure.
However, like the whole reddit debacle, API usage isn’t always well optimized at the client end, and it can become a negotiation rather than a C&D…unless you’re looking to make a competitor as well.
A few thoughts come to mind… 1) Some of their customers may only be customers because of HA compatibility. 2) HA does not require a cloud API to function - a LAN based solution is usually preferred anyway. 3) There are far more diplomatic ways to approach this issue.
To think, from a business perspective, that any notable portion of their userbase bought the devices with the explicit expectation that it would work with HA would be naive. We’re hobbyists, a niche market, the less-than-1% of their market evaluations. Losing those customers while reducing whatever burden or cost they’re incurring is probably worth it.
HA doesn’t - but while I don’t have any Haier equipment to say, the other smart devices in my house which aren’t either esphome or tasmota don’t connect locally to my devices, but to the vendor cloud API. Ecobee, Wyze, Traeger all do that instead.
Totally agreed. I think AWS API costs are a few cents to the thousand, so a discussion with the developer about the use would be the nice way instead of just kowtowing to the bean counters.
My argument to that would be if we are only a niche segment then where is the serious economic harm they are referring to? It sounds to me like API calls are happening either way but they don’t want to lose out on the ad and customer tracking revenue. Also, I as other have pointed out there is no reason it needs a remote cloud to change the thermostat.
It could be a case of disproportionate impact - consider that forecasting within Haier for their cloud API would probably be based upon X number of units in the field and Y number of average API calls per unit/user/premises. At 40,000 units in the field at 1000 calls per day (which they know because they designed the software, or at least had a hand in resourcing discussions), you have 40,000,000 calls per day.
If you have some third party app which is generating 4,000,000 calls by itself, and you see only 400 users doing this, then it’s a simple high usage target to hit.
Ad revenue, maybe. Tracking is still possible because it’s the same device, and if there’s any security at all, they’ll still have all the native API stuff they’d normally get, temperatures, weather, occupancy, etc.
I will say at a brief glance at the repo for the project that there’s some calls which imply it would get the local IP for the device, and may from there be able to issue calls direct to the device. That would make me think there’s only a few calls to their cloud to establish a relationship and product info, so the disproportionate load theory, barring bugs, doesn’t hold up. While it’s been a good brain exercise, we’ll be left guessing, and hoping Haier decides to be better.
I sent them a nasty gram from their contacts page. I don’t own anything from them right now but you can damn well bet I will avoid them if when/if it comes up.
I pointed them to Louis’ video also
I assume a zero chance of any purchases is a larger economic hit than allowing a small diy community to interact with their PURCHASED and OWNED product.
I didn’t go nasty, but did do my bit to point out how short sighted this move was:
I just wanted to say that your silly take down notice on the Home Assistant developer, who was enabling greater satisfaction for customers who bought your products, was a perfect example of the Streisand effect in action: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Thanks to you, I (who didn’t own - and now probably never will - any of your products), am not only aware of your silly, unethical, and pointless behaviour, but have now taken steps to preserve the developer’s code for future use.
You could’ve fostered this innovation, and gained yourselves the admiration of global, active and thriving community of like-minded people. And potentially gained more paying customers in the process.
Instead, you have achieved the opposite. Well done.
It won’t make a lick of difference, but hopefully they get the same sentiment enough times that they at least understand what a fuck-up this was, on their part.
Nasty was probably strong word. I mostly expressed my disappointment and that I would steer clear going forward. And that would have a stronger economic impact on their bottom dollar.
Yeah - they need to hear this a lot. They could absolutely have taken a little time to understand what need the dev was filling here. Ultimately, this could’ve been a free kick for them, had they handled it the right way.
I’ve just done the same thing, said I don’t own any of their products but I certainly won’t be buying them in the future and I will be actively discouraging people from buying their products, which will actually hurt their profits, and also put a snide little PS at the bottom saying "Good luck issuing cease and desist notices to the hundreds of forks of the software (803 so far according to another post) which will cost you real money instead of the made up MILLIONS OF DOLLARS that you claim this is open source software is costing you. It’s companies like you that make buying consumer electronics a quagmire
I’m using both IKEA and Hue bulbs without having used any of the original apps/hubs (though I do use the deCONZ/Phoscon hub addon, not the Home Assistant ZHA but if you’re device is listed as compatible the experience should be the same.
Edit: apparently you can re-pair without a remote, see below comment: One thing to note about the Hue bulbs (without a Hue hub) is that you need one of the remotes to reset bulbs after already being paired so they can be re-paired to a hub, where as the IKEA only need the power turned off and on a number of times to enter pairing mode.
I actually ran into this just the other day on some refurbished Hue bulbs. I was able to reset then without any remote or app using this method. Just make sure to do it 2-3 times in a row or until the bulbs start flashing.
I use bulbs I’ve bought from IKEA and Lidl. Because they’re ZigBee they’re local. The "Hub’ is HA because I have a ZigaZiga electrolama.com/projects/zig-a-zig-ah/ usb stick.
I use ZigBee2MQTT in HA to route commands to my bulbs (and sensors and plugs) which routes ZigBee commands through my MQTT broker which is also in HA.
I love the automation screen updates. Makes it all a bit less “techie”. I’ve been assisting my non-technical sister with setting up her own instance on a Pi. This is going to make things much easier for to understand.
Less of an automation and more of a scene control, but I have all my light switches set up so that double tapping them up or down turns on or off all the lights on that floor of the house. It’s simple but we use it all the time.
Ah nice. I just have the switches by the front and garage doors turn off everything instead of just downstairs, so we can hit them on the way out the door. I think triple taps are reserved for inclusion/exclusion mode on my switches, sadly. The delayed lock is a good idea though, might just have to add that.
Correct, OPs needs is describing what kubernetes was made for. Fault tolerant container orchestration. Or any other orchestration framework.
However it’s a best to learn and get set up. Migrating all of my containers over took a couple of months of learning and trial and error. Each person has to decide is that level of effort worth it in a home application
You’ll need to learn a lot more about kubernetes to decide fully if you want to do it. I’m more or less telling you that yes there are ways to keep it highly available, but they’re going to be literally 10x if not more the amount of effort to spin up and probably maintain.
Proxmox has their own flavor of HA that is a lower level of virtualization. They’ll be able to failover a specific VM/CT to another node if one fails, but again pros and cons. The major annoyance for both is where do you put your data so 2 separate nodes can access it? Both k8s and proxmox have different approaches.
K8s and Proxmox operate at different levels. You can run k8s on Proxmox, and that’s what I’ve been (very slowly) building up to at home.
With Proxmox you can failover VMs between nodes as long as storage (including VM boot disk) is external to the nodes. This can be NFS on a NAS, iSCSI, Ceph or many other options.
It’s even possible to failover a USB device (e.g. a Zigbee controller or similar) by attaching one on each node and mapping them using Resource Mappings (search on the announcement post: proxmox.com/…/proxmox-virtual-environment-8-0).
This can also be used if you’re deploying k8s on top of Proxmox just as well.
Can patch but it’ll be 1-2 days of work for a good painted finish. Would have to do multiple patching/sanding coats, masking, priming then a couple of rolls of paint of the wall. It’s not trivial amount of work. For a slap-dash finish I could skip some of the steps but then again for a slap-dash look I can keep the wall plates. 😅
As a side note, I really wish folders were implemented for devices and automations and such. Especially since I have a scene controller (and another on the way) with several buttons, each of which can have 6 different triggers (pressing 1-5 times or holding the button down). Oh, and more for the LEDs.
Yes! Especially automations! I would rather have tags than folders, so an automation could fit into more than one category (eg. Location, action) but I’d take anything over alphabetical!!
I thought this was implemented on the dashboard. I don’t recall what exactly it’s called (context cards?) but I recall you could click a button to show a separate card or click and have it open a second ‘tab’ on the dashboard to control more things like with your scene controller.
When it actually backfires. Right now, no company was actually hurt by doing stuff like this - quite the opposite, they get a boost since they close down their ecosystem further forcing people to buy their stuff.
There will be “boycotts” but in reality it will blow over in two to four weeks, with people forgetting “an outrage” that didn’t reach 99% of their target users at all.
This has been my favorite thermostat. I don’t have a C wire nor an easy to add one in, but it’s AA batteries last for several months and has been very reliable.
It’s what I use as well — my home was built with a Honeywell Lyric T5 (non-smart), so the wiring harness between the two is identical (including colour), so I just unplugged the T5 and plugged in the T6, did some setup, and it was done.
Any idea what the consequence is if the author instead transferred ownership entirely to an owner based in a country that would give no fucks about a lawsuit? Sure, the OG owner loses the project but would he avoid culpability?
Anyone that wants to take the legal heat can just fork the projects and continue hosting it. I don’t blame the original developer for not wanting to deal with it, even if the legal threat sounds very ridiculous (a project like this would be the opposite of financial harm, how many of us check if something works with home assistant before buying a device?).
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$.
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