I finally configured a smart knob so my daughter could adjust the light colour in her room.

🦝 Alright, here we go, it's simple. Well, it's not simple, and I'm sorry, but here we go anyway.
🐇 o...kay?
🦝 So right now it's in colour temperature mode. Turn the knob for brightness. If you PRESS and turn it, it'll change the colour temperature.
🐇 What's colour temperature
🦝 Turn it this way for more like daylight, turn it this way for more like cosy. Press and turn it I mean.
🐇 Alright. But how do we make it colourful.
🦝 Well. You'd press and hold in, without turning, for four seconds. Like this.
*awkward four-second pause*
🐇 It's green!
🦝 Yeah! Now to change hue, you press in and turn clockwise, and it goes all the way through the rainbow and cycles back round. If you miss the colour just keep turning until it comes back round again. And to change saturation,
🐇 What's saturation
🦝 Controls whether it's colourful, or light. To change the saturation, press and hold and turn anticlockwise. It gets lighter and lighter and then cycles back round to bold colour.
🐇 Coooooool
🐇 Dad... can we make this go on a timer

I put a remote pack in her ceiling fan / light 'cause she couldn't reach the pull cord for the fan, so between the SMART KNOB and the remote control and the lightswitch itself she's got as many competing lightswitches as my dad's Frankenstein Land Rover has gear levers

The ONLY sensible thing involved in this is that if the bulb loses and then regains power, it defaults to being an unremarkable warm white bulb turned on at full brightness.

So we've had the conversation about how the knob works and how the remote pack works and how the light switch works and how if any of these things fails and she needs the light on she's gotta just flip the switch off and on again

This kid's doomed

So you decide to mess with Home Assistant and find out that this means you've gotta program your own dimmer switches.

(at this point, you've already had your Naked Lunch moment and you know the sensible thing is to run screaming but you're ploughing on regardless knowing whatever happens next, it's on you, bought and paid for)

So you write your dimmerSwitch.yaml in yaml which simultaneously stands for "Yet Another Markup Language" and "YAML Ain't a Markup Language" and is a cursed way to try and program, and you've filled your little yammal up with comments so when it breaks you can remind yourself what any of this crap means:

# dan it's 2am and this is the bit that registers the knob turning anticlockwise

# dear future dan, hi from tired past dan, this next part is a sin and I'm sorry

And you can do all this in an editor in the browser that's surprisingly capable, and hit Save.

You'll find out the next time you open the file that your comments were automatically and silently deleted, and you'll go "Huh, yeah, that tracks"

Note for normal people who actually work for a living: code is the part of the program that makes it work and paradoxically isn't all that important, comments are the part that make it keep working a couple of months later and Very Much Are Important.

Like, there's practically infinite ways to write a bit of code that does a thing, but the important part is the comment above your mess saying that the following bit of code does this thing, and the comment underneath apologising

Part of the problem here is the whole YAML thing is an abstraction on top of whatever programming language home assistant is actually written in

And all of computer programming is like this. When I was a very tiny boy you just had to know "A chip is a thing that sends a little bit of electricity out of some combination of its legs in reaction to electricity going into some other combination" and then make a cup of tea and read a thick book and bollock around a while and end up with Manic Miner, but that was too hard for most folk so we invented programming languages that took a best guess at what electricity to send where, and then it turned out those languages were also too hard for almost everyone so we gave those languages little hats, interpreters that went "If this crying man types GOTO 240 then we tell the body wearing us to tell the electricity to go the way," and we made more and different hats and some were good and some were bad and then we started stacking the hats on top of each other and forty years go by and suddenly we find ourselves fiddling with the top of a stack of fifteen hats that are making suggestions to the hats beneath while arguing and trying to topple off each other and shouting DON'T LOOK AT THE HAT UNDERNEATH ME while the aforementioned crying man shouts back GET OUT OF THE WAY AND LET ME SEE WHAT YOU'RE HIDING

It's not even that hats are bad, everybody likes a good hat, but wearing so many stacked on top of each other is asking for a mess every time you walk through a door

So I did some digging and apparently this mess is because Home Assistant itself does not speak YAML but JSON, no YAML files exist, and if you click the button labelled "Edit as YAML" then Home Assistant looks at its JSON files and conjures up a YAML for you to look at. When you hit Save, HA converts the YAML to JSON (which doesn't support comments (which makes it useless by default)) and discards the YAML, poof gone

WHY DOESN'T THE BUTTON SAY EDIT AS JSON AND JUST LET YOU EDIT THE JSON THEN FFS

I found someone else having a problem with the whole YAML thing and they mentioned that it does occasionally swallow or rearrange chunks of code and HOLY SHIT I THOUGHT THAT WAS ME.

Going through my lamp thing the other night going "Huh, that's weird, this was working yesterday, what's the story with this... wow, I don't even remember putting that there, I must've been really tired... wait where'd the rest of it go..."

Gaslit!

So they provided a fake programming interface

It's an interface that seems to do one thing (letting you edit a file) while doing another (the file doesn't exist, it never existed, it was conjured into being when you clicked Edit and it is converted to something else and then destroyed when you click Save)

This is just trolling surely

People are boosting the part of this thread where I had only just installed Home Assistant and didn't know how bad it was yet, where I say "Home Assistant is really neat and interesting" and this now feels like libel

Friends, Home Assistant is troll software. It's a trap for dads who dared to dream of a dignified future

The Home Assistant Doom Pipeline:

🦝 Smart home? Pfft, sounds like an unreliable pain in the arse

🦝 *fur slightly disheveled* Huh, they make lightbulbs where you can set the colour temperature with a switch now. It'd be nice to have them go warmcosy in the evenings without having to reach into the fixture and flip the switch...

🦝 *scratching ears, something falls out* Yaknow, that whole Smart Home thing would actually be pretty neat if it didn't involve any big spyware companies, I don't want google selling my bedtime to advertisers or whatever, if it could all just be locally-controlled then that changes the deal somewhat,

🦝 *eyes bloodshot, chewing on a pizza crust found behind the dumpster* Like if it were all open source and community-maintained. That might actually be really neat and interesting, you know that?

🦝 *abandoned by society, living in a box, tongue lapping inside a broken whiskey bottle* Like, Linux for your Lightbulbs! That actually sounds AWESOME

Home Assistant is bad software, it's bad it's bad it's bad

BUT,

this is actually really cool and useful.

A bunch of $5 Zigbee temperature sensors spread out across the house so that I can see how the air moves, how the heat moves, throughout the day with charts and graphs.

Now I can see for instance, that my open-the-upstairs-window-and-point-a-fan-outwards trick only starts cooling the downstairs after the upstairs is coldened. See the big dip in the turquoise line around midnight, that's when I turned on the upstairs exhaust fan.

(the house has central air conditioning, which I tend to run for like ten minutes in the morning to get the humidity down)

Compared to fans, AC does an absolute shit job of cooling down people, but it's brilliant at removing humidity

There's humidity sensors in these little temp boxes too, they run for a year on a coin cell, Pretty Neat

Look back at that turquoise line, the study temp. The study is kinda sticking out of the attic, hottest and highest room in the house, and it's where I open a window at night to run an exhaust fan, after opening windows downstairs to suck in the cool night air. See how it goes down but then flattens out around 4am? That's 'cause I didn't hit the fan's "add 1 hour" button enough times :(

(I know this because I also have little clamp-on current sensors to tell me how much energy each circuit's using, and that circuit dropped 100w at around 4am)

It's wild how much the fan helps. Like, I figured just open up the whole house at night and it'll naturally act like a chimney, draw cool in from beneath and let it out the top, but mechanical assistance makes a HUGE difference.

This is a fancy fan with digital controls and a timer and such, I've got a more electromechanical one that I might plug into a smart outlet and tell home assistant to look at temperatures and turn it off when outside starts to rise

The graphs are really useful for, like, move the fan and see what difference it makes y'know

Sometimes something gets stuck in the freezer door and leaves it open a tiny crack and we don't notice until shit is fucked

Normal people: 🐇 Hmm better make sure to check the door when you walk past, or maybe get one of those alarm things that beep loud if the freezer gets too warm

Home Assistant havers: 🦝 If the freezer draws over 100w for longer than 60 minutes, turn all the lights in the house blue

🦝 Actually let's mess with the lights any time a circuit does something out of the ordinary

🦝 A credit dot for my house

Moving into a new house, well new-to-you, big old place out in the country, lotsa dark wood paneling, bare trees and leaves and the occasional feeling that something is watching you, locals clearly know something that they won't tell you because they don't want you to worry, things turn on and off by themselves at random, your neighbour says "Yeah it's an old house, weird wiring, don't pay any attention to those superstitious lot down the pub,"

is it ghosts, or did the last owner set up Home Assistant

Someone fucking faved a post in my Home Assistant thread (how dare they, that's not a place of honour) and that reminded me to post this:

In August I put a box fan in the window of my attic facing in, hooked into a smart plug, and programmed Home Assistant to compare the temperature in the attic and the temperature outside and once every ten minutes run the fan for one minute per degree of difference. My AC use immediately dropped to under 20% of what it was before.

None of that outside air was getting blown in over people, so it wasn't cooling us directly. Hot house air had somewhere to rise and expand into I guess, and less of it was leaking out the attic into the living space. Fan draws about 100w for six to about 15 minutes per hour, AC draws 2,500 watts, it made a WAY bigger difference than I thought it would, the experiment was such a massive success I ended up making a permanent fan-holding wooden frame rather than duct tape

Just telling you now so you forget before June. Home Assistant is still very bad cursed software

🐇 Huh that does sound very useful, maybe I should look into this Home Assistant thing

🦝 No. This was one good post in an absolute farce of a thread. I saved some energy but I had to scoop out part of my brain to do so. My lightbulbs cost thirty dollars and my light switches need new batteries. To make them work I have to program a computer that forgets how I programmed it and tries to program itself instead. The basement hall light turns on and shines on the projector screen every time a cat comes down the stairs. I have to turn my reading light on with my phone. I'm doomed. My house is on the computer and it's a fucking ZOO in here. It's donkeys slobbering on keyboards. I have dimmer switches called bedroom-overhead-final-v2-absolutefinal-colourversion-usethisone. Leave it. Stay away. It's too late for me, but you don't have to do this.

😾 Hon the light knobs aren't working
🦝 Unplug the cat smell thing and plug it back in again

^ Actual thing that happens in houses with Home Assistant.

There's also thread and wifi and bluetooth and they have their own burning toilet guys

You can say you're using ZigBee and a guy will say you should be using ZigBee instead because there's two ZigBee programs and they both have burning toilet guys

The greatest tragedy of Home Assistant, or really any home automation, is when it works

Example: my Going Out button. It's a cheapo AliExpress set of three buttons on the wall by my back door, it was like a fiver and it's just held to the wall with sticky tape, got a coin cell battery, no wires, no drilling, nothing. I press the left hand button when I'm leaving the house and all the lights fade out. When I come back there's a magnet sensor on the door, I open the door and the kitchen and stairwell lights come on, no walking round in the dark tripping over the cat on the way to the lightswitch, it's great. And now instead of turning off lights when I leave the room I just leave them blazing like a dickhead going "Ohoho, the computer will turn those off for me"

It's like having a roomba, you're wiping the counters or sweeping crumbs off your shirt or get an unpopped popcorn kernel in your mouth or something, you just merrily cast it upon the floor while going "Ohohoho, the ROBOT will get that," and you get used to that, and then you do that round your mate's house and they're like, what you doing. Pig

🦊 Dan you're being silly, it's a simple mode switch, in or out, that's like the easiest thing ever, how can that take nine hundred thousand million hours, you're just a bad programmer

🦝 You think that because you haven't thought it through. It's a simple computer program sure, but one of its inputs is YOU. You're an alive animal and you don't move predictably. You hesitate in the doorway. You forget your glasses and go back for them. To get predictable and sensible outputs you need predictable inputs. Garbage in, garbage out, and you're garbage, you're a pile of edge cases in a T-shirt. And so, every program will be stuffed full of Dan Unpredictability Compensation Code. It's that or conduct yourself predictably, meaning that YOU, change, yourself, to make the computer do less work, which is a perversion of the very point and purpose of computers. They're here to help us be ourselves, by giving us back the time that we'd otherwise spend on drudgery.

🦊 is that why you tickled one for nine hundred thousand million hours