Hi there - feeling very frustrated so sorry for the ranting.
Am I missing something? I have just come from home assistant because all you get is a web page with broken components everywhere. come here and all I get is broken “things” everywhere. What is with this trend?
for here - z wave binding just doesn’t work out of the box (on raspberry pi 3 - jessie), it was literally the first thing I tried. on home assistant I had the same issue but with more products - how is home automation supposed to take off, if nobody can release an actual stable product?
and when I say product, I understand that bindings include third party developers - but the general public don’t care about that - they see a product trying to give a service and the service just doesn’t work.
Can there not be some sort of review, or check list to show what binding works for what platform? I’m sure zwave works out of the box for many platforms, however for my setup - I’m getting a error message that was reported 10 months ago, which only infuriates me even more because a fresh install of a “stable” branch, shouldn’t have errors dating so far for something as critical as z wave.
Not sure if I have the will to carry on with openhab / home assistant / home automation in general because I’ve just had trouble from install.
sorry to hear that you are frustrated about the homeautomation “products”. But if you look into the communnity most are very satisfied with openhab, including me.
Hopefully you will give it a try with the help from the community. Give us a view on the things you have already and things you try to achieve and the points you are struggling about.
From the outside homeautomation looks very easy, but if you take a deeper look at it you will see that especially openhab has the ability to combine many systems to one very powerful system, but this is not an out of the box solution. I is customized to your needs and based on your work.
Basically alle the examples are working within the most environment without any problem. Just an example:
@ThomDietrich just released a MiFlora Deamon combined from various articles here in the community. I tried it. Took a raspberry, brought it into the WLAN, installed the bluetooth dongle and tried Thom’s excellent step by step description. and it worked instantly.
So give it a try and start small one step after the other and ask questions.
Home automation is hard. It is hard to matter what product you use for the hub.
OH is an open source project. There is no corporate backing. None of us gets paid. Despite this OH is remarkably capable and stable.
Given you are having the same problem with both systems, perhaps there is something else wrong…
Perhaps if you gave us a hint as to what the problem is we might be able to help you. We are generally a friendly and helpful community.
And again, we are all volunteers and vast majority of bindings are stable and capable, including ZWave. Often problems with the ZWave binding are either caused by the user not reading the readme or understanding how it works or caused by new devices that are not yet in the database.
If you tell us what doesn’t work or what this error is we can almost certainly walk you through the problem to get it to work.
I’m referring to home automation in general rather than openHab2, (which I still consider more stable than home assistant).
Even smartthings (proprietary) has bugs / isn’t stable. Just to reel off my issues I’ve had:
Devices:
Z wave module - broken on delivery
Yale Keyfree Z wave module - broken on delivery
Yale Keyfree door - Trying to get the module working, resulted in me factory resetting door - now the door says “door locked” when open and “door open” when locked!
HDMI CEC - got new hdmi cable, libcec library broken for home assistant (this made me move to openhab2)
System:
Home assistant - no end of woes with broken symlinks, broken libraries, different packages (headless, raspberry all in one, standalone) all with different levels of progress all from fresh install.
So my problem is not with openhab, it’s the instability of the products on the market itself.
I’m sure ONCE they work, they will work great - but so far everything I have had has been DOA.
It sounds like you have had a string of particularly bad luck. While almost everyone runs into some problem like this at some point in their home automation journey, it is rare to have so many hardware problems from the start.
I’m not sure what else I can say. You either must buy something commercial and hope it works or you need to build it yourself and hope it works. That is the state of the industry right now.
Ya, very bad luck it seems - I have fixed the front door and replaced both the z wave controller and the yale module - looks like I have some digging around to get the bindings working however.
