This is beautiful and just a perfect description. Even though this sucks day to day I will say very rarely but sometimes, this can spin to our benefit. I recently had an electrical contractor fuck up some work I needed done…well, that’s an understatement my entire home needed to be rewired, and I wanted wiring so I didn’t have to keep charging my doorbell camera.

Now my mind goes thought everything as it normally would, I pay large amounts of money and I’m told everything is done. Well my doorbell camera isn’t charging. Out of the entire house that’s all I can focus on. I have an endless list of stuff that needs to get done but I want my doorbell camera to have power. The guy adds the wire for the doorbell and I’m happy. Until I see it isn’t charging. Trace the wire and it isn’t connected to anything, talk to the guy and he gives me some excuse, it’ll be done soon. Wait when I followed the wire for the doorbell I didn’t see anything connected to my roof above my bathroom. Okay they also didn’t install the exhaust fan correctly.

Now my house still needs 80% of a total renovation but he didn’t fix the doorbell and I just don’t want to keep charging it. So I’m scared of messing with any electricity, which is why I paid someone to do my electrical work. But maybe I can just hook up a doorbell. Well a weekend of researching and I still am not sure how to do it, but I found a copy of the national electric code because I think the exhaust fan is supposed to be going up through my roof.

Long story short the guy didn’t do half the work I paid for. I now have a log of every wire that was run, every junction box that was placed, every switch, every outlet, everything, including if it is up the code of the exact code that it is violating. Along with a note about the expected electrical load, that should be on each circuit, how much is can candle and how much more I can add to still be within code for continuous load. I also have the manufacture date of every wire that was placed and found a bit of damage to an exterior and a door wall that wasn’t there and found it caused by the contractor that are both is areas I said do not touch.

So now, I have all this information and if I am successful in suing him I will have gotten a great deal on having the house rewired considering I now know how to rewire an entire house and have improved a few circuits in my house, but I’m not an electrician so I can’t actually do anything with this information. But here I am on lemmy writing about this instead of doing what I planned on doing today with no idea how to actually sue someone and an existential dread of trying to figure out how to or if I should hire an attorney.

It’s great. I mean awful… well actually both, but also neither.

Thanks for the affirmation that it wasn’t just me thinking the names sounded like a joke to those that aren’t familiar.

But the software I’m referring to this is free and open source, if you have any smart devices, it is worth looking into for convenience and the amount of customization and integrations available, in addition to running locally and respecting user privacy.

Not sure if you have an extra raspberry pi 4, but if you already have any smart home stuff there is no need to wait a few years, get it going now! (It can also be setup and run on a normal computer with windows/mac/Linux.

I keep mentioning the raspberry pi because they have so many uses that aren’t just limited to home assistant vs dedicated hardware for home assistant. Looking at costs tho it wouldn’t save you any money to get the Pi, a micro SD card, charger and a case vs the home assistant green coming with all that. But keep in mind you will need an adapter if you want to integrate devices that use Zwave or zigbee. They aren’t that expensive and the one I have is the Nortek HUSBZB-1, i think I paid about $30 for it and does both Zwave and zigbee, but the home assistant yellow has zigbee built in, if you choose to go that route.

But remember Home Assistant does need a little bit of knowledge with technology or some patience when you start. It’s selling point is that it can integrate almost anything, not that it is easy to integrate everything. I started years ago and had no knowledge so it was a huge learning curve, but they’ve made incredible progress with streamlining integrations and they have fantastic documentation so the learning curve isn’t nearly what it used to be. For reference, when I started automations had to be written in YAML, now it’s done through a UI. And contrary to how these comments may have seemed, the community is great, very friendly and very helpful.

My apologies, before now I haven’t heard of green. I legitimately run my instance on the limited edition blue that kinda lead to yellow being created and before that I used a raspberry pi. My original comment was a little bit of me finding the naming for this stuff funny, not trying to discourage anyone that is new to the platform.

Oh…well, I didn’t know green was a thing. Thanks for the info, I guess the serious description of each is Home Assistant blue was a limited edition with entry level hardware, essentially the same thing as home assistant green. Home assistant yellow is more of an enthusiast hardware that had zigbee built in and a raspberry pi is just a raspberry pi and runs home assistant just fine.

I personally run my instance on home assistant blue but have helped a few friends setup home assistant on a raspberry pi. So any of the options will work just fine.

Don’t know about green but I got a Home Assistant Blue and it’s good enough. Tho You can just use a raspberry pi.

Side note I think you were being sarcastic when you said Home Assistant Green, so I wanted to make reply that sounded sarcastic but Home Assistant Blue and Home Assistant Yellow are real things, tho rereading my comment if one isn’t familiar with technology or home assistant talking about Home Assistant, colors, and raspberry pi for controlling light bulbs just sounds like trolling.

Edit: Sorry, Home Assistant Green is also real. It’s every level hardware that is more than enough for running home assistant and Home Assistant Yellow is the next step up in hardware. Home Assistant Blue was a limited edition run of the hardware prior to Home Assistant Yellow being created. To be clear, I am not trying to troll but to one that isn’t familiar with this technology these names might sound like trolling.