#How open should HA-compatible hardware be?

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

chilly cradle
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Hi everyone, we’re exploring building hardware designed to work natively with HA, things like bridges, repeaters, and sensors with open APIs and native integrations. Our goal is to stay aligned with the open-source spirit of the community while still building something sustainable long-term.

For those of you who’ve built or worked with similar products:
Which parts of the design do you think need to be open (e.g., protocols, firmware hooks, APIs), and which areas can reasonably stay proprietary without hurting community trust or adoption?

warped tulip
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And that works locally, remember

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That saves you the infrastructure of servers, web, external apis, etc...

chilly cradle
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@warped tulip , thank you for your insight. Imagine we make a temperature sensor, what parts of the design should be open to make the product loved by the community? Does the firmware and schematics need to be open source?

prime snow
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my personal opinion is that it should be possible to replace the firmware with open-source firmware, with sufficient documentation available for someone to be able to figure out how to use whatever peripherals are attached to the hardware. A key thing about making long-term sustainable hardware is that the hardware should be usable and useful even after the company stops supporting it.

winter wadi
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If you make stuff like temperature sensors, it'd also be nice if they feature an easy (optional) installation that does not use battery power but a connection with plug to

  1. act as a router (for zigbee for example)
  2. as a permanent and maintenance free installation (which is useful for remote applications as well if it works over IP)

I shy away from buying temperature sensors because I dislike battery powered devices, and most of them are (in my case some special applications like monitoring the heating system more closely)

swift thistle
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I'm really looking for a purpose built home assistant AI appliance right now.. trying to replace Alexa and hate how "jank" all the solutions are right now. If there was a dedicated machine I could deploy for a reasonable price to have an LLM controlling my home / voice assistance that would be great.

rich prawn
# chilly cradle Hi everyone, we’re exploring building hardware designed to work natively with HA...

The ideal for me would be something like the air gradient air quality monitor, where the entire project is open source and very customizable - the stock firmware iirc uses esphome, so it's possible to flash your own firmware if you don't trust the guy that makes it, or replace the sensors with different ones, etc.

I do also use Z-Wave devices, where the firmware on the end devices isn't open source, but I have hard guarantees that they can't phone home because all traffic is going through a USB stick that talks serial to my zwavejs instance that in turn plugs into home assistant

warped tulip
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To be sure there's no home call better ZigBee, IMHO

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I think a cheap temperature and humidity sensor, with AAA batteries (for rechargeable ones) and a simple lcd screen would be a huge success. I have that Xiaomi with custom open firmware, but only works with some versions of the hardware. I have one in every room. Everybody would buy a bunch of something similar if it would be easy to integrate with HA. That custom firmware works with Bluetooth or ZigBee and it's marvelous. I'll leave you the Gihub repo for further info

chilly cradle
swift thistle
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The GPU and Mac Mini setups require tons of setup installing docker containers, configuring the host etc

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Closest project I could find was https://futureproofhomes.net/products/nexus

FutureProofHomes
Nexus1 - AI Base Station

The Nexus1 is a compact AI computer that powers our advanced LLM voice agent. It connects wirelessly to your Satellite1 speakers, enabling full voice control of your home — all privately, with no internet required. Launch date, pricing & detailed hardware specs are coming soon.

chilly cradle
# warped tulip I think a cheap temperature and humidity sensor, with AAA batteries (for recharg...

I searched on Amazon and I see this SONOFF product. I think it I uses a CR2450 battery. Other than the battery is there anything else about this product that you don’t like?

https://a.co/d/1Jt7q9J

SONOFF Humidity Sensor

SONOFF SNZB-02D Zigbee LCD Smart Temperature Humidity Sensor SONOFF Room Thermometer Indoor Hygrometer, Humidity Gauge, Humidity Meter, Digital Temperature and Humidity Monitors SONOFF zigbee Hygrometer Thermometer

chilly cradle
swift thistle
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The current satellites out there are very limited and not super appealing due to high prices. Not to mention you always have to sacrifice something it seems like. Whether that's good audio quality, a screen etc

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If there was a lineup like the Echo devices but for HA Voice I could see many purchasing.

chilly cradle
# swift thistle I feel like Home Assistant Voice itself still needs some work, but yes the hardw...

In my opinion putting an LLM on a dedicated hardware for each device doesn’t scale well. There are a lot of places in your home that AI could be useful, and if we want to use a dedicated hardware for each one of them, we’ll end up with a bunch of little AI boxes. A better architecture is probably a stronger, central machine, but the onboarding and setup should be simple. This can win in cost and maintainability.

swift thistle
chilly cradle