I can write a control system easy enough to do this. I'm kind of an expert at that, for oddball reasons, and that's a trivial amount of work for me. The "smart enough" part, I'm more than smart enough for.
What's not a trivial amount of work is figuring out how to integrate that into HA.
I can guarantee that there is an uncountably infinite number of people like me, and very few people like you. You don't need to do my work for me; you just need to enable me to do it easily. What's really needed are decent APIs. If I go into Settings->Automation, I get a frustrating trigger/condition/action system.
This should instead be:
1) Allow me to write (maximally declarative) Python / JavaScript, in-line, to script HA. To define "maximally declarative," see React / Redux, and how they trigger code with triggers
2) Allow my kid(s) to do the same with Blockly
3) Ideally, start to extend this to edge computing, where I can push some of the code into devices (e.g. integrating with ESPHome and standard tools like CircuitPython and MakeCode).
This would have the upside of also turning HA into an educational tool for families with kids, much like Logo, Microsoft BASIC, HyperCard, HTML 2.0, and other technologies of yesteryear.
Specifically controlling my lights to give constant light was one of the first things I wanted to do with HA, but the learning curve meant there was never enough time. I'm also a big fan of edge code, since a lot of this could happen much more gradually and discreetly. That's especially true for things with motors, like blinds, where a very slow stepper could make it silent.
1) You can basically do this today with Blueprints. There's also things like Pyscript [0].
2) The Node-RED implementation in HA is phenomenal and kids can very easily use with a short introduction.
3) Again, already there. ESPHome is a first class citizen in HA.
I feel like you've not read the HA docs [1,] or took the time to understand the architecture [2]. And, for someone who has more than enough self-proclaimed skills, this should be a very understandable system.
(1) You are correct that I have not read the docs or discovered everything there is. I have had HA for a few weeks now. I am figuring stuff out. I am finding the learning curve to be steep.
(2) However, I don't think you understand the level of usability and integration I'm suggesting. For most users, "read the docs" or "there's a github repo somewhere" is no longer a sufficient answer. That worked fine for 1996-era Linux. In 2023, this needs to be integrated into the user interface, and you need discoverability and on-ramps. This means actually treating developers as customers. Take a walk through Micro:bit and MakeCode to understand what a smooth on-ramp looks like. Or the Scratch ecosystem.
This contrasts with the macho "for someone who has more than enough self-proclaimed skills, this should be a very understandable system" -- no, it is not a very understandable system for me. Say what you will about my skills, that means it will also not be an understandable system for most e.g. kids and families.
That said, if you're correct, a lot of this may just be a question of relatively surface user-interface stuff, configuration and providing good in-line documentation.
(3) Skills are not universal. A martial artist might be a great athlete, but unless you're Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, that doesn't make you a great basketball player. My skills do include (1) designing educational experiences for kids; and (2) many semesters of graduate-level coursework on control theory.
That's very different from being fluid at e.g. managing docker containers, which I know next to nothing about. My experience trying to add things to HA has not been positive. I spent a lot of time trying to add extensions which would show me a Zigbee connectivity map to debug some connectivity issues. None worked. I eventually found a page which told me this was already in the system *shrug*. I still don't know why the ones I installed didn't work, or where to get started debugging.
For me, that was harder than doing a root-locus plot, implementing a system identification, designing a lag or lead compensator, or running the Bode obstacle course.
Seriously. If I went into HA, and there was a Python console with clear documentation and examples, this would be built. That's my particular skills, but a userbase brings very diverse other skills.
I think people might be a bit offended by what sounds like arrogance. But I completely agree with your general concern that nuts and bolts of making somebody else's software work is often frustrating, complicated and inaccessible while math, logic and domain knowledge is "easy" for many people and far more generally known. Even to the point that it's often easier to write your own thing than bother to learn about an existing one.
A way I sometimes evaluate whether to implement some feature in my work is the ratio of the work it does for the user to the work the user has to do for it. Adding a page header in MS Word used to have a very low ratio. A web based LLM is at the other extreme. Installing a bunch of interdependent finicky software just to do simple child-level programming for HA seems like a poor ratio too.
Thank you so much for that comment. I really appreciate the feedback.
I do sometimes come off as arrogant. That's unfortunate, and in part due to my cultural background. It's helpful feedback. It's difficult to be downvoted or attacked, and not know why.
I will mention: They're just different skill sets. I know people who can dive into a complex piece of code or dev-ops infrastructure and understand it in hours or days. I'm just not one of them.
Learning to design control systems is a very deep (and rather obscure) pile of mathematics which takes many years of study and is a highly specialized. I picked it up for oddball reasons a few decades ago. Doing proper control systems requires a lot of advanced linear algebra, rational functions, frequency domain analysis, parts of differential equations, etc. That's not the same thing as general math skills. Most people who specialize in this field work in Matlab, wouldn't know what docker is, and in terms of general mathematics, have never taken a course on abstract algebra or topology. Even something like differential equations, one needs only a surface understanding of (it disappears when one shifts to Laplace domain or matrix state space representations).
There's a weird dynamic where things we can't do often seem easier or harder than ones we can. Here, I just have a specialized skillset relevant to the conversation. That doesn't imply I'm a genius, or even a brilliant mathematician.
That just implies I can design an optimal control system. Especially for a system with dynamics as simple as room lighting. And would have a fun time doing that for everything in HA in my house and sharing.
I'd really like to have other things work the same way too, for that matter, where e.g. my HVAC runs heating 24/7 at the right level, rather than toggling on and off. With my background, the intimidating part isn't the math or the electronics, but the dev-ops.
What's not a trivial amount of work is figuring out how to integrate that into HA.
I can guarantee that there is an uncountably infinite number of people like me, and very few people like you. You don't need to do my work for me; you just need to enable me to do it easily. What's really needed are decent APIs. If I go into Settings->Automation, I get a frustrating trigger/condition/action system.
This should instead be:
1) Allow me to write (maximally declarative) Python / JavaScript, in-line, to script HA. To define "maximally declarative," see React / Redux, and how they trigger code with triggers
2) Allow my kid(s) to do the same with Blockly
3) Ideally, start to extend this to edge computing, where I can push some of the code into devices (e.g. integrating with ESPHome and standard tools like CircuitPython and MakeCode).
This would have the upside of also turning HA into an educational tool for families with kids, much like Logo, Microsoft BASIC, HyperCard, HTML 2.0, and other technologies of yesteryear.
Specifically controlling my lights to give constant light was one of the first things I wanted to do with HA, but the learning curve meant there was never enough time. I'm also a big fan of edge code, since a lot of this could happen much more gradually and discreetly. That's especially true for things with motors, like blinds, where a very slow stepper could make it silent.