In fairness to Rheem, the way the app didn't work WAS pretty funny. See, it made you register with them before you could schedule your water heater. So first it'd ask you what username you wanted.
I'm not gonna tell you my Rheem username, you'll have to wait for the inevitable data breach for that, so let's say it was ifixcoinops. So you tap the box (you have to do this on a phone, you can't register in a browser) and you tap the letter i on the keyboard and a little i pops up on the screen, quite clever really, then you press the f and the text hole has iif in it. Hmm. Alright well the next letter in "ifixcoinops" is another i, let's press the i on my keyboard, the text hole now says iififi.
Which is slightly unconventional, but okay, let's see where this is going, iifiifiiififiifix. So I introduce myself as mister iififiifixifixcifixcoifixcoiifixcoinifixcoinoifixcoinopifixcoinops, and it tells me there's not enough digits in my phone number
Now I'm vaguely aware on some level that an awful lot of android apps are just a web browser with no clothes on, and that's certainly what this feels like, and buddy lemme tell you, HTML wants to work. It takes concerted, dedicated effort to make something fail this hard. Like, you've gotta code up some truly trollish javascript to make that kinda thing happen. So I guess hats off to Rheem.
Did I mention there wasn't even a place to put my phone number
It occurred to me at some point that if I had the app, I could tell this water heater Dude, it's ten o'clock at night, there's no need to be actively making more hot water right now, be quiet.
So I scanned the barcode and downloaded the app, which didn't work.
Things didn't go sensibly because an unrelated series of events did not go sensibly a few years before, and now I have a couch that reclines in such a way that my head enters an adjacent room.
Why do I recline into the next room over? For the same reason I had to build a four inch wide coffee table. Don't ask me questions about that today. The important part is that when I settle down at night with a glass of whiskey and some Star Trek, I press a button and lean my head back into a void in a rack that sits in my workshop, which is where this water heater lives, and the water heater, being a fridge, goes BRRRRRRRR
I called out the going-up-ladders people because there's only so many different types of danger my spouse will let me get into, given how many people she knows who've fallen off them. The ladder people tell me alright you've got some shingles damaged and some flashing leaking, that's no big deal, but the mid deal is that my chimney's so badly knackered that it's way beyond a simple slap-some-mortar-in job, there's several courses of bricks unaccounted for, I go "Oh aye I did find some underneath my window," the chimney was bollocksed is the headline, and it was gonna cost a LOT of money to fix it.
It was gonna cost so much money, in fact, that it'd be cheaper to remove the need for a chimney in the first place. The only thing left in the house that still used the chimney was the 20-odd-year-old gas water heater. I figured that thing was probably getting ready to rupture anyway so hell, heat pump water heater time.
So I order this inside-out-fridge contraption from a company called RHEEM, also known as RUUD, and yes I very much am naming and shaming this company, and after going back and forth to the hardware store eight times I was on first name terms with the lady in the plumbing aisle and the proud owner of a new 240v line and a machine that makes my water hot by making my basement cold.
And there was a QR code on the side and a thing saying Download The Econet App! and I said "Pfft no" and if all went sensibly that should have been the end of it
Anyway at some point one of Rheem's other customers got pissed off enough with this tragicomedy to just completely write their own software from scratch, and of COURSE it works way better than the dogshit that Rheem put out
So yeah, the solution is to install Home Assistant on and old Raspberry Pi, get an ESP32 module and some phone wire, plug into the diagnostic port on the front and bypass everything to do with the official app and wifi interface entirely in favour of one that works.
Unfortunately this means you now have Home Assistant in your home, which means you now have a new hobby whether you want it or not
So here I am, whiskey in my hand, trying to watch Captain Picard being competent, head in one room and feet in another, hearing a fridge getting my shower ready, big red angry face shouting at a cylinder
Eventually - and I mean the sort of eventually that's measured in seasons - one of these apps lets me register for a Rheem account (why they couldn't just give me a link to those webpages I could access in a browser, I do not know) and then crashes, but another one lets me get the water heater connected to the wifi (there's no ethernet hole on this 300kg tank of water plumbed and wired into the house, it uses wifi only like your phone or handheld game console) and holy shit it works
Eventually one night listening to it go BRRRRRR I get big mad and want all the functions that I paid the better part of two grand (!) for, and I search around for other people having the same problem.
(note: I want to schedule the water heater's heaty times. There's a big dotmatrix screen and a bunch of buttons on the water heater itself. Someone at some point should have said "Wait.")
Turns out everyone's having this problem! Everyone's been having this problem for over four months! But in the meantime, instead of using the Rheem app, try the Rheem Econet app, or the Econet app.
These are real apps made by Rheem. They all do the same job but fail in different ways at different points
I'm scratching my head over this and wondering if maybe something in my autocomplete settings are screwing with the input, I eventually figure out that they've somehow managed to make a form field that only works with specific software keyboards.
This is the first time I've ever seen anything like this. There's something new in the world. It's oddly beautiful, but haunting, a little melancholy. Luckily I have a few different keyboards installed on this thing so I change around a bunch until one of them works and lets me input normal words instead of this whimsy.
But there's still nowhere to put this phone number it's been asking me for, and no way to proceed, so I cast the app out of my mind for several more months
You know how when you go to the house of an absolute colossal nerd and you ask them
🐇 Hey, how do I watch Netflix?
🦝 Yeah no problem, well first you've gotta turn on the amp. That's the power button on this remote here. The right-hand power button that is, the left-hand one isn't programmed to anything yet
🐇 OK
🦝 Sometimes that makes the TV come on automatically, but if it doesn't then you've gotta turn on the TV. That's this button here on this other remote.
🐇 So we're on two remotes now
🦝 Nearly finished. Oh by the way, if you want to adjust the volume, use the first remote, the volume on the second remote doesn't do anything. Well it does, but it sounds terrible because that's the TV speakers, so leave that at zero
🐇 But I'm *watching* tv
🦝 Yes but you're *listening* to the amp. Oh, sorry, forgot, set the amp input to 2.
🐇 on the amp remote?
🦝 Yeah, the video goes through the amp too.
🐇 In my house we set the TV to a different input, should -
🦝 Don't do that here. Don't. The TV stays on input 1 with its sound muted. Next you've just gotta use this third remote, for the -
🐇 for Netflix?
🦝 Well, technically for Kodi, but that's nothing to worry about yet
🐇 yet?
🦝 We'll come to that,
🐇 I'm being *so* patient right now, I'm really proud of myself
Anyway, imagine that, but your your lightbulbs. This is what Home Assistant promises
Actual quote from the Home Assistant Community Store:
"To download HACS
"How you download HACS depends on your Home Assistant installation type. In the instructions below, select the tab that matches your installation type (OS/Supervised, Container, or Core).
Warning
If you don't know what type of Home Assistant installation you are running, you should not use HACS (or any other custom integration)."
Is there a link to find that out? Is there any further explanation of what these terms mean? Is there so much as a crumb of information available to help answer this question?
Did the operator of this website install a sense of smug FOSSbro elitism where they should have wired in, say, competence?
This is the most useless documentation I've seen in years. And that includes the monitor schematic that had the middle third replaced with a lewd limerick.
"If you installed Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi using the Raspberry Pi imaging tool, choose OS/Supervised" there, fixed, wasn't hard. Jesus.
Nothing winds me up harder than people who chat like they're clever while being aggressively, stubbornly incompetent.
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
Computers are hard and most of the stuff that computer people do to try to make them easier ends up making them harder, everybody who remembers Clippy can tell you that
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
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"
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
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 use Home Assistant so I ripped all the lightswitches out, wired all my light sockets to be live all the time, and replaced the switches with Smart Switches that radio the computer and tell it to radio the bulb to turn off" ~ actual things that people do with Home Assistant
As someone who works with electricity, my absolute favourite thing in the world is components that are energized while giving the appearance that they are not
There are some things, if you shit all over them on the internet and say all the ways they messed up, their fanboys will come out and tell you hey no, you just don't understand it yet, it's not shit you are
Home Assistant, the fanboys come out and say haha yeah join the club, wait hold on I've got some even wilder stories, just you wait lol
Better minds than mine have been warning about this shit since The Twilight Zone was new. What happens in every show that ever had an episode about The House Of The Future? Everyone's impressed for about five minutes and then it all goes wrong and there's usually at least one death.
But on the other hand, cosy lighting and RGB LED coolness so, y'know,
*Rod Serling voice* Imagine a house, with a mind. A mechanical mind. Not one built by scientists, but by a pinball machine repairman. One unlucky family is about to discover the ramifications, in, The Twilight Zone
🦝 Anyway I got some Tradfri lightbulbs and a ZigBee dongle plugged into a spare Pi on a long USB extension to avoid radio interference, and I went on aliexpress and ordered some cheap ZigBee knobs and buttons so I can set up cosier circadian-rhythm-respecting lights as a sidequest to schedule my water heater and monitor my eventual photovoltaic setup.
^ see that sentence? That's both a legit telling of what I've been up to lately, AND a self-parody shitpost. The only people who recognise it as a legit post are other doomed individuals.
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)
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..."
For all this nonsense, home assistant has actually saved me a lot of time by telling me that JSON doesn't "do" comments, because I was gonna use it for an unrelated thing and now I know not to
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