Creating the Foundation for a New Home Assistant with Paulus Schoutsen

• Home Assistant website https://www.home-assistant.io/

Transcript

Paulus: This cannot go away, right? We have got something great. There's not many places in technology land where there's a provider that is like focused on privacy and community focus.

Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. My guest today is Paulus Schoutsen, who is the president of the Open Home Foundation. Many of you might be more acquainted with his work because he's the original creator of Home Assistant. Paulus, thank you for joining me. Yeah.

Paulus: Welcome Corey. Nice to be here. Thanks.

Sponsor: This episode is sponsored in part by my day job, the Duckbill Group. Do you have a horrifying AWS bill? That can mean a lot of things.

Predicting what it's going to be. Determining what it should be. Negotiating your next long term contract with AWS. Or just figuring out why it increasingly resembles a phone number, but nobody seems to quite know why that is. To learn more, visit duckbillgroup.com. Remember, you can't duck the duck bill, Bill.

And my CEO informs me that is absolutely not our slogan.

Corey: I ran into you almost by chance at GitHub universe a few weeks before this recording, and you gave a wonderful keynote. I got to talk to you about what you were doing, how you thought about these things.

And I sort of, Admitted that I've been using Home Assistant to run things at my house increasingly over the past year and a half. Uh, also known as the time that my wife started to notice that the house was increasingly haunted, because that's generally the way IoT projects work. And it's gone from Curiosity to something that's almost an integral part of how I live my life at home, which is either awesome or sad, depending upon perspective.

Where did it all come from?

Paulus: Yeah. I mean, the start is kind of basic. I got some lights, Philips Hue lights. They had a local API. This is like 11 years ago now. And I wrote some Python just to control them. Then I felt like I had to do something, right. I have a Python script. I need to put this in action. So.

I hooked it up, like I got some library to know when the sun was setting, had the lights being turned on when the sun was setting. Then I realized, okay, now I need presence detection because the lights are being turned on when I'm not at home. So I added presence detection and that's kind of got the ball rolling.

Right. Cause then I found another issue I wanted to iterate. I put it on GitHub. I was applying for jobs. So I was like, Oh, people should see some code that I've written. That is like. Modern and fresh, and, well, here we are.

Corey: For me, the thing that it really shone through for was that I have gone down the rabbit hole of internet of shit, for lack of a better term.

For me, the thing that really killed it was, because I'm used to the idea of, oh, you've gotten a lightbulb. Hey, that lightbulb has a new app you have to update if you want to change anything about it. But for me, the absolute killer was when I had a Wemo, then bought by Belkin, light switch, that, oh, we've completely ended support for this, and there are attack issues out in the wild.

So, I had to basically dive into the wiring to replace physical devices that had become part of my home, and I realized enough was enough. I can't be the only person complaining about these things. So I started complaining to other friends, including my friend Akaz over at AWS. He's been a guest on the show before.

He started me down this particular Home Assistant rabbit hole, and it went from curiosity to, okay, I'll run it on a Raspberry Pi, turned into, okay, I'll get a small form factor PC to run the thing, because I'm starting to do a lot with it. And It's some of the most consistently updated software that I see.

It, it just works. I can not touch it for months at a time. Come back and all of my routines still work. All of my automation still work. And in the IOT world where things just like to stop talking to the internet from time to time for funsies, that's kind of revelatory. It feels almost like you have solved problems better than the manufacturer.

Some of these devices have.

Paulus: Yeah, no, I think, you know, I think there's a lot of here, like just to impact just what you said. Yeah. The sustainability part, like stuff just needs to keep working. That's something that we hammer on all the times, like get stuff with open standards. Like Balkan wasn't the only one, right?

That happens all the time. Manufacturers, they, they have a product out there for five years. It costs them money because it's using a cloud and they are like, I don't want to pay for this and don't make money on this product anymore. I'm cutting it off. Let people upgrade and support because you know, that happens with consumer products, it's just that you put stuff in your house, you expect it to last 10 years, 15 years, right?

And that whole, basically when we got smart devices, we kind of accepted the technology life cycle for devices, right? Like your phone, two years, your laptop, five years, maybe your router, Wi Fi router, five years or something. You're like, no, you put something in your house, your thermostat, you expect it to work for 30 years, right?

Like, You come into houses, you see these old, discolored thermostats. They just still work. Nobody has touched them, rewired them. It's, and that, that's kind of stuff that we want to get back to. This is something that with home assistant, we keep like hammering on. We want to have our products itself needs to be stable, but all the other, like You know, it's just the brains, right?

We need to talk to all the products. And so, yeah, we keep working on this all the time. We are this year now, uh, the number one most active open source project in the world. So we had 21,000 people work on it in the last year and they're all working on Either integrating more devices, making it faster, making it more stable, fixing bugs.

We, we get all these people because, you know, people are programmers at work. They come home, they want to do something with that skill with that, you know, they, they know how to program. And so, you know, open source is a good way to practice your skills, to do something, but there's not many things where you can work on open source and actually improve your own life.

Right? Like you actually write code and it's improving your garage door, your automation here, reminder there. And it's like, Hey, that's very satisfying. And then with Home Assistant, we have this central hub where all these people come together and we share with the whole world. And I, you mentioned the updates and this is, we used to do this every two weeks, which almost burned us out.

Now we do it every month. Right. But like every month there is an update. This means that if you work on Home Assistant, And you're contributing, you know, if stuff gets merged within a month, everyone can use it. You get feedback, you know, 12 releases a year is a lot and people love it. I

Corey: have yet to see any of these updates break anything that I'm doing.

It's kind of what drove me nuts about the entire approach that so many of these manufacturers have taken. It's you are a light bulb or you are a switch or you are a door lock. The Minimum viable product that you have to ship versus, and now it is feature complete. The Venn diagram of those things is basically a circle.

I want the lights on and off at certain times of day when a certain stimulus happens, like I hit a switch or something hits an API call. And that's basically it. And that is just one of those things. Things that I don't understand why, what a lot of these iterations do. To your credit, although you're obviously expanding to covering a lot more stuff and making it work faster, I have never had a, an update break any of the stuff that I've built.

It's kind of amazing.

Paulus: Well, this has been a long journey to get here. Like initially when I started Home Assistant, just text files. I'm a programmer. And building this for programmers. It was a Python application. You had to set up a virtual environment. Raspberry Pi operating system was behind. You had to compile your own Python.

Very technical to get started. But then like five years in, we got our own operating system. Just a random person. Like he was a contributor, Pascal. And like he built his own operating system with a supervisor that automatically updated home assistant with automatic rollback. Two partitions, all the stuff you expect from a commercial product, but now you put it on a Raspberry Pi, boom, it works.

So that was like the first step. And the second step, I always told people, unless I get paid for it, I'm not going to build a UI because UI is like, it's hard. There's so many variations, these kinds of stuff.

Corey: Oh, and no one's happy with whatever you build.

Paulus: Exactly. Exactly. And so, yeah, we also, we started a company to fund the development, Nabucasa.

And so we started working on a full time. And so we started to build a user interface for configuration and. We have these requirements, like everything has to be able to migratable. Like you have to, your configuration needs to migrate. And we don't always control everything, right? Like vendors will turn off APIs, turn off devices, these kinds of things.

But whatever is in Home Assistant, it should work. It should be able to recover. It should be able to mark authentication as failed. Ask for new credentials, all these stuff. We have a whole checklist and you know, programmers love checklists, right? So we have a really, really, like if, if somebody is responsible for like, say the Nest integration, like there's just a checklist and say, Does it do this?

Does it do that? Does it do this? And so that just works really well. And just people love building for it. So what I do is I build this framework in which people can succeed in integrating a device. All these people around the world are building these integrations. And then there's a lot more people, 1. 6 million, actually, that are just using Home Assistant in their homes and just have the benefits.

Corey: I will say the first time getting started with it, it was a little, a bit of a learning curve, because, oh, you have all these different components, like the easy way, just buy an appliance with the thing on. Awesome, great, I've gotten burned doing that before. We're gonna install it ourselves, because I value my time at nothing.

Let's do that. And it was, there were several different ways to do the install. It was unclear initially which part talked to what, but the end result, once I wrap my head around it, is remarkably stable. It is, I don't think I've ever seen a crash on the thing.

Paulus: Yeah, I mean, this is, like, That's what we do now that we're like, you know, working on it full time.

Right. Sometimes we see crashes. Like some people do very exotic installations, like they have virtual machines, um, that's okay. When people run it in Kubernetes, we're like, that's not okay. Like, we don't want to support that. We have a group of people in our community that are trying to bring their knowledge of enterprise networking home.

And they want to have like a Kubernetes cluster, a virtual lands and all that stuff. And then your IOT just like, you know, it's already hard, right? Like they put it in hardcore mode and then it's like USB pass through for your Zigbee dongle or forget about it. Right? Like,

Corey: I just want to get to a point where I can have an IOT VLAN and a VLAN that humans live on.

And that, that's where I want to draw the line, but things still need to cross. The matter, matter support across VLANs is still janky at absolute best. And I understand why it's just frustrating.

Paulus: Yeah. I think. Every time we think we're getting there, for example, you don't want IOT devices to talk to other IOT devices.

That idea worked great until we created a cast app for the Nest Hubs with display that you could cast a home assistant dashboard. So now the Nest Hub makes a request to the home assistant server. Well, there breaks your IOT VLAN because now that device needs to have access. And there's always something in a way, right?

Like. In a perfect world with ZigBee or Z Wave, you want these devices actually to talk directly to each other, not even go through Home Assistant. You can set it up. It's very deeply hidden because it's very complicated. But that would mean if, even if Home Assistant would go down, everything would keep working, right?

This is the holy grail that the installers use, right? That's the, but yeah, the, the VLANs trying to lock everything in jails is just too hard.

Corey: I will say that I look at what people have to say in the forum before I wind up making any purchase around smart home stuff anymore. When I post for a lightbulb and no one else has used it, it's okay, that's terrifying, let's move on.

When I see people complaining about it actively, that's good, provided the complaints aren't all the same thing. Like, it's great except I can't get the light to turn on consistently. No, we're gonna pass on that. And it's really become almost my version of what the wire cutter used to be. When people recommend that this works super well for me, that's good signal.

The challenge, of course, is that once something starts working, how often do you really think about a light switch?

Paulus: Right? Well, this is actually the big problem we have when manufacturers don't want to open up, right? Because if you think about it, you're a light switch manufacturer. If you don't open their app to control the light switch, then you never see their brand.

So the next time you buy a light switch, you don't think of that brand, but maybe you just saw an ad and you're going to buy that. So they're like, no, our audience, we have to keep our audience. We don't want to give this away to, I mean, home assistants, like we're the good guys, right? But like the big tech are the other smart home platforms.

So they definitely don't want people to just go through Apple home, Google home, or maybe even the Amazon app. It's like, no, you don't, you know, Philips Hue, for example, they want their app to be used. But like, that's not a smart home app. That's just my light switch app, right? Nobody wants to use that stuff.

Sponsor: Here at the Duckbill Group, one of the things we do with, you know, my day job, is we help negotiate AWS contracts. We just recently crossed five billion dollars of contract value negotiated. It solves for fun problems such as how do you know that your contract that you have with AWS is the best deal you can get?

How do you know you're not leaving money on the table? How do you know that you're not doing what I do on this podcast and on Twitter constantly and sticking your foot in your mouth? To learn more, come chat at duckbillgroup.com. Optionally, I will also do podcast voice when we talk about it. Again, that's duckbillgroup.com.

Corey: I have an entire folder on my phone of apps I need to just to do the initial setup and configuration of these things. And I still have it around so I can remember what the hell brands I've got on this stuff. But once it's there, it's all run through Home Assistant just because I don't want to go into 15 different balkanized little places to configure the things that surround me.

Paulus: And neither should you, right? Like, this is the ultimate future, I feel like. And, you know, you talk about like the forums, finding, discovering devices. I'm working on this next big project where we want to start categorizing every IoT device on earth. So like Home Assistant sees them all, right?

Corey: Which is terrifying.

It pops up sometimes, Hey, I found a new device on the network. It's okay. That's interesting. What is it? And sometimes it's something new that's been plugged in. This is genius. Other times, Hey, we found your printer. No, no, no, no, no. Don't look at that thing twice because that thing is a nightmare and it's cursed.

If anything, you want us to update the firmware. Absolutely not. So we can start rejecting third party cartridges. No, that thing does not talk to the internet for excellent reasons. But it's surprisingly adept at identifying basically everything that I plug into this thing.

Paulus: Oh yeah. We have this whole database of like all these different identifiers.

So we look at Mac addresses. So some devices are not discoverable through MDNS, but we just listen for DHCP requests. So. For example, a device connects to the network, it requests an IP address from your router. We see that request and we're like, Oh, now you have that device. And then we know here's the integration and maybe we have to go through the cloud to set it up.

But yeah, we can get you there.

Corey: Yeah, I have one of the Thinx Canaries sitting in the spare room as well, right next to the thing, which is designed to detect things like port scans or whatnot, and then shriek for help. It's the idea of if you get compromised, it'll let you know. You've never set it off.

Good work. So whatever you're doing is not intrusive, which is appreciated.

Paulus: Well, we don't scan the network, right? We just listen for things that come our way, and that's how we act upon.

Corey: It's definitely a, a wonderful approach to doing things. Especially, this is top of mind, earlier this week, I finally had enough and unplugged and stored my Echo Show.

I was able to turn it off through the, no joke, 50 different context, uh, toggles you can put for content that you want to have, and now it's showing ads again, and when I reached out to Amazon, their response is, oh yeah, there's now no way to disable ads. I didn't spend 250 to turn this device into a billboard for Amazon products sitting in my kitchen.

Now, so I fell back at the moment to just an older voice only echo, but I'm really hoping that there's a better solution in the somewhat near future that'll do the things that I and my kids want it to be able to do, which is not that long of a list to be very direct with you. And then we'll finally be free from their nonsense.

Paulus: Well, I mean, that's if you talk about screens, we have some opinions on this, right? Like we actually, we don't like LCD screens. They're too bright. I think that like Amazon and Google just want to use LCD screens because that's the best for ads. It's not the best for your home, right? I, I'm a big believer of E Ink screens.

I would love to just have an E Ink screen on my, on my fridge that shows like the chores for the day or the calendar for today. It doesn't even have to be touchscreen, right? Like I can get my phone or voice if I have to, but just glanceable information, like that will be for, that's the kind of.

Corey: Oh, I would love that.

Because it's not intrusive. It's not trying to drive you to do anything. It's, it's kind of wonderful just being able now to even store all the video stuff locally for the baby monitor and whatnot. I'm not worried about this being mined for ads or whatnot. It just works.

Paulus: Well, I mean, the reason we're like this is because we don't have investors, right?

So we don't. We've never raised any money. I started this 11 years ago. I started a company that was next to it that has offered like hardware and like a cloud subscription for remote access. But these are all optional extras. And then we have, uh, early this year, I started the Open Home Foundation, which is a nonprofit based in Switzerland.

I donated home assistant to it. So just like you have the Mozilla Foundation, it manages Firefox. We have the Open Home Foundation, which is managing home assistant. Now, Bukasa, my company is still around. We are a commercial partner and that's how we collaborate. Now Bukasa makes money, but most of the money has to go to the Open Home Foundation.

The Open Home Foundation will continue to build home assistant. But nowadays the reason why it's called Open Home and not like Home Assistant Foundation is because. I got better at naming. That's one. Um, homocystin is too generic, which is a, both a blessing and a curse. But the other thing is that we realized the homocystin, the brains of your smart home, that's not enough.

We need to care about your whole smart home, right? Like we need to care about your devices. We need to basically fight for everything in your home, because if you have still your baby monitor, still cloud connected, and then homocystin will talk to the cloud to get that data local. It's still somewhere in the cloud, right?

And it can still,

Corey: If I'm in a store looking at IoT devices and one of them has an Open Home Foundation certification on the side of it, well that makes my decision reasonably clear, provided that the certification process is not, you know, purchasable. I have to admit, I'm a little leery given what recently happened in the WordPress ecosystem.

20 years is not going to go by, Home Assistant and its ilk have dominated the world, and then you rip off the mask and it turns out the foundation is just you and no one else. You have absolute control over there too, and now you're going to start throwing lawsuits at people and disparaging them because they aren't giving you money.

Paulus: No, no. So for us, it's really the commercial partnership contract that is signed. Nabucasa can use the Home Assistant. Trademarks. The trademarks are owned by the foundation. Now, because I can use those trademarks for the home assistant green or home assistant cloud, this is our hardware and our cloud product, as long as they're a commercial partner and as long as it has a long list of requirements, like.

The revenue going to the Open Home Foundation. And it's built in such a way that, you know, this, these companies can only exist to build out the Open Home Foundation and nothing else. Like this is to be the sole reason. And if I were to sell Nabucasa, because it's a commercial company, it's registered in Delaware, of course,

Corey: as are they all,

Paulus: as we all, it doesn't matter for Home Assistant.

The either Nabucasa continues doing its thing, supporting the Open Home Foundation, Or it loses commercial partnership status and it's out. Right. So home assistant is secured, which was very important for me, important for our community to make sure that this cannot go away. Right. We have got something great.

There's not many places in technology land where there's a provider that is like focused on privacy and community focus. Like, you know, you have signal for messaging, you have Firefox for browsers, you have home assistant for the smart home, but try buying a laptop. I mean. Framework laptops, I guess, are out there now.

It's happening a little bit, but phones, you're stuck, right?

Corey: We've been chasing that for 20 some odd years.

Paulus: Yeah. So it's coming slowly for some parts, but it's very hard to build it up if you haven't there. So I've, if home assistant would ever fall away, it might not ever, a replacement would ever come up.

So it was too important. So the foundation, yeah, we just did it.

Corey: Why did you launch your own freestanding foundation instead of doing what so many other folks have done and putting it under the auspices of the Linux Foundation, which increasingly seems like our generation's foundation industrial complex?

Paulus: Well, for me, it's that like, all these other foundations, they have other focuses, they have other Things that they're working with. They have a lot of commercial interests as well. We have zero commercial interest. Our sole interest is the smart home, the people that live in it, the users and all these other things, it just didn't, didn't feel right.

Like it didn't, I mean, I never also talked to them to be honest. Right. But like, it's, yeah, I felt like we doing our own thing from the ground up. We've always been completely bootstrapped by our community. And this like encapsulates that completely, right? We're fully isolated doing our own thing.

Corey: I think it's the right way to go personally.

I mean, it used a lot of extra work up front, but at the same time, I'm, I think I've had enough of monocultures, even, even the well intentioned ones. It just, they seem to all turn in strange directions as. Dark forces and big money starts pouring into them. It's at some point, I don't want how I turn my lights on and off to necessarily be someone else's business opportunity.

That's not the direction I want to go in here.

Paulus: And that's, I mean, that's how we actually build up Home Assistant. So every piece is open source, every, we have split out all the communication with protocols and different libraries that can be reused by other projects. We, it's, we don't own the whole stack.

There are just projects that we fund with the Open Home Foundation. For example, Z Wave JS, it was started by Dominique, he's German. He was like doing his PhD. He finished his PhD. We started, we hired him full time and he's just working on his own project. And it powers all of Z Wave and Home Assistant and it's amazing technology.

And he's now able to do it full time. And it's, it's the best Z Wave driver out there.

Corey: I've no fewer than five distinct communications protocols here. You've got Wi Fi, Z Wave, Zigbee, which I believe is something different. Lutron has its own thing. And I'm sure I'm forgetting one or two out there, but Home Assistant acts as a single unifying place.

It doesn't matter how it's communicating, it just works. I mean, I was able to spend an afternoon and a soldering iron or two just building a sensor that tells me when someone left the freezer door open downstairs, because some jackhole, I'm not gonna name, might have done that. At that point, never again, how do we make sure this doesn't happen?

I integrate it with freaking pager duty so it wakes me up with a Wake up, asshole, the freezer's melting is the actual message it sends. Because yeah, jump on that. Everything else, like someone's at your door, I don't care nearly as strongly about. But yeah, I would rather call a neighbor to come in. I can unlock the door thanks to this and shut the freezer door if the thing is popped open again.

But the fact that I was able to build all that myself from popsicle sticks in the course of an afternoon without having to build a whole logic engine behind it. Absolute win.

Paulus: This is where I feel when we build consumer software nowadays, because we want to like every department wants to limit their responsibilities and we prevent people from treating or products treating their users as adults.

Like we, you know, with Home Assistant, we give you all the tools, all the knobs, all the rough edges in a way. But it allows you to build whatever you want. There have been smart home hubs before that are like smaller companies. The reason they often fail is because people call customer support because everything breaks all the time and all these things, and then they start to like, okay, then we just allow you to do nothing and then nothing can break.

Great. Now you have a useless product, right? Like, or it's an entry level product. And once you grow up, you want to do more advanced things like freezers to pager duty. That is, there's no dedicated market for that, right? That's, you need a tool that can do it all.

Corey: No one is going to pay 50 a user a month for that subscription.

It just, it just isn't going to happen.

Paulus: Yeah, so you need a tool that treats people with respect.

Corey: I appreciate the position you come from, and I don't find myself disagreeing with you, but down the road I can see a scenario where the different hats that you personally wear come into conflict. You are the project lead for Home Assistant, you are the CEO of Nabucasa, and you are, I believe, the chairperson of the board, I don't, it's president, my apologies, president of the Open Home Foundation.

I can see scenarios where all three of those are aligned until one day they're not. How do you, I guess, keep your soul?

Paulus: That's a good question. I think in the long run, I will not be there. President of the Open Arm Foundation. Like the idea is that this really becomes like its own thing, right? I'll be involved forever.

I mean, like, you know, this is the, the status within the open source community, like BDFL, they call it, right? Like I have, you know, the implicit power in a way, but I think that, you know, we are, the Swiss laws are very strict around foundations, right? There's a reason why Switzerland has the highest foundations per capita in the world, like these are very strict.

They have a very. Stable government doesn't like swing left or right crazy. Like it's pretty predictable. And so the foundation is very secure there. And for me, I mean, I live a good life, so, you know, there's no reason for me to go crazy, but also I cannot go crazy right now. Something like that. It's like.

Locked off.

Corey: Does it help as well that, at least from where I sit, this is probably hopelessly naive, but it seems to me that there aren't a whole lot of giant tech levels of interest in this space. Because I look at my spend, for example, yeah, I'll spend a thousand dollars or so getting a bunch of equipment and then hooking it up, and then I don't do anything else with it in any meaningful sense for years on end.

And this is a personal project. This is not something that I'm doing at work and attempting to scale. And I don't know too many folks who can say differently, so it almost feels like this is almost a hobbyist type of environment with just enough commercial interest among device manufacturers to keep it interesting.

Am I missing something big there?

Speaker 3: Yeah, it's called AI. Ah, of course it's 2024. How could I have forgotten to lead with an AI question? You know,

Paulus: if you look at device manufacturers, there is no interest in big tech because the margins are very low, right? Like look at how cheap Android TVs are, right? The software is freely available.

They just, it just becomes a race of logistics. Who can put in an existing LCD panel? Put Android TV on it and get it to the consumer as cheap as possible. And I think that the big tech that is involved in smart home, they only care about being the platform. They only care about the data point, the data aspect where they get everything and then are able to serve you the UI either through like their voice assistants, their phone, um, your TV that you're already using.

And of course. AI is going to be that agent, right? Like that's the whole dream that we all have to believe. And well, you know, you want to have, when you unlock the door, it should say, hello, how are you? And you pop up, you see your mismatch. I don't know, whatever they want to do, right? The Jarvis dream from, uh, from the TV show.

Corey: I'd love to live in a future like that. I just, I don't necessarily know that I want to pay the cost it takes to get there in terms of trade offs. I have a bunch of Echoes around the house and a few of the Apple HomePods. Echo is always sold to a break even because they're going to make it up with services and Apple does Apple's thing and charges a massive premium.

Counterpoint, only one of those things tries to interrupt me to sell me things when I'm not intentionally engaging with the device. That counts for a lot in the sanctity of my own home. I do not, I sell ad space in my newsletter. I do not sell it on my bedroom wall.

Paulus: Yeah, no, agree. That's, uh, this is where I think.

I mean, the Apple approach is better, right? Like you just tell people what it's worth, that they have to pay for it. And then it works. The downside of Apple is of course, that they decide how their technology is to be used and building an ecosystem where everybody integrates, that it's just not Apple's strongest suit.

No, make, let them make your phone, your tablet. Your watch, your AirPods, it work all greatly together. Now have it like third party lights, locks and everything go into Apple and then have the user empowered. That's not their approach. And I, I think when we look at houses, right? Like homeowners that are like.

Leak detection. You want to have all this kind of stuff. Like there's constantly things wrong in our houses, but there are different things wrong in every house, right? So every house is different. So being, you know, living in Silicon Valley and thinking, how can we create a single experience that works for everyone?

Around the whole world, it just doesn't work.

Corey: I am curious as far as, have you seen any interesting use cases or stories? I almost got in trouble once early on when I showed this to my wife, because one thing I have on one of my dashboards is, is my wife home and my home and is the nanny home? And she's like, you put air tags on us?

That, that is an incredible violation. And she started getting up, had a steam worked up before I point out. No, it just asks a simple question. Is there cell phone on the Wi-Fi network? Because it turns out none of us tend to go anywhere without the thing. She's like, oh, that's less concerning. Well, thank you.

I appreciate that. I didn't tell her for my case. It's linked specifically to the Home Assistant app, which has a bunch of permissions and can show some pretty terrifyingly, uh, in detail stuff. But that's okay. That's a choice that I consciously made.

Paulus: I think one of the things that when people are asked about, like, can I track you?

They will say no, right? Like the Apple track app, what's called the app tracking?

Corey: Yeah. The cross app tracking thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Paulus: Yeah. So like, you know, apps are, have to ask you, do I want tracking? Surprise, 93% says no. Right? I think a lot of the times we don't know how much data we give away, and Home Assistant makes it insightful, which sometimes people don't like.

Corey: One thing I also wanna call out with respect to mobile devices, I can configure things from my phone in the home assistant app web and the home assistant app, or in the web app on my computer. There is not. A meaningful difference that I've been able to detect between the workflows for either of them.

Whoever is doing the mobile design has absolutely nailed it.

Paulus: I think the power that we have within our community is that everyone that works on the software uses the software. Everybody cares deeply, right? And I see this within Nabucasa where even our HR guy is like a diehard Home Assistant user, right?

Like literally everyone uses Home Assistant and that's how they got To work on it full time. That's how they'll get to volunteer it. Right. And so we, when something is annoying, we notice it, right. Then we just fix it.

Corey: It's incredibly nice. The only time I've had to go back to a computer is, okay, you have modified the YAML configuration of this thing, because of course it's YAML.

Beyond our ability to comprehend. And it's like, yeah, I kind of, I don't understand it either anymore. That was, this was me three months ago. And that guy was an idiot.

Paulus: YAML is both a blessing and a curse. We used conf files before it was Python and integrated parser, which was even worse. YAML at least allows you to write like integers data.

We use YAML 1 got out like nine years ago or something. It was too late. Like my users, their configuration will break. So today they write, yes, it will be turned into true. Because that's YAML 1.0. It's like, ah, yeah, work. All authentication, uh, stuff has been moved to the UI. So YAML is really for us nowadays, only automation scripts, the things you want to share with others, right?

So Something we actually haven't really discussed here, but like we have a huge community, everything that is like, it is on GitHub. A lot of people join GitHub because they are putting their automations online. So they have like all their automations of their smart home are online. People get inspired, people copy paste it to each other.

They're like, just sharing is very easy and sharing being built in is important because, well, it's difficult, right? Like automation, smart home, it's difficult. So the easier we can make it for everyone, the better.

Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more, and I argue they very much should, where's the best place for them to go?

Paulus: So the best place is, uh, www.homeassistant.io. There you can learn what the project is. You can find an easy way to install it. If you have a virtual machine host, you can just spin up the virtual machine or get a Raspberry Pi. Or of course you can buy the hardware that we sell Home Assistant Green. It's under 20 on Amazon.

Uh, we've got prime shipping now that took forever. And the cool thing is whatever way you install it in either virtual machine, Raspberry Pi or the Home Assistant Green, you get the exact same installation, right? People that pay us money. I'm not getting treated better when they buy our hardware. You just get the exact same experience.

And yeah, just try it out.

Corey: I migrated my installation directly from a Raspberry Pi to a small form factor PC. And every time it updates, I'd remind it. Oh yeah, I should really uninstall the Raspberry Pi GPIO module. Cause it doesn't really need that anymore, but it's, it still works. It doesn't complain and I can keep rolling with it.

I will of course, put links to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I deeply appreciate it. Awesome. You're welcome. Paulus Schoutsen, president of the Open Home Foundation. I'm cloud economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five star review on your podcast platform of choice.

Whereas if you hated this podcast, please leave a five star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment. And in that comment, be sure to drop a link to your employer's line of IoT toilet cameras.