Home Assistant KNX Integration - Features

[meti]

I have received replies from "Mathias"

Chances are quite high that was me 🙂 I'm written with double-"t" though 😉

The HA climate has only setting of temperature and on/off only. It cannot display valve position or fan speed.

HA Climate (not KNX) supports "fan mode" but not speed. I'd recommend to use a "fan" entity for that. Valve positions are not supported by the HA climate abstraction - this can be displayed by using a sensor entity.

Yaml is a nightmare to deal. A simple space missing and the whole thing falls apart.

I'd recommend using VSCode (the HA Add-on if you use HA OS) and its auto-completion feature from the Homeassistant Plugin.
And using the config validator found in "Developer Tools -> YAML" after doing changes and before restarting. It should point out such mistakes.

Since lights are simple to deal with - maybe you can start by automating the yaml part of lights.

Lights are probably the second most complex platform (after climate) to deal with 😬 There are a million and five ways controllers expect their objects to be handled 🤪
That said, I'm not sure how to "automate" configuration, as KNX has no means of device/function discovery. The only way I can think of right now would be reading the .knxproj file of a project having clean ETS Functions defined - which to my knowledge is hardly used. So I guess it will always be some kind of "manual" configuration - through yaml right now, maybe through UI (with imported project file) some day. If you know another way, I'm listening 👂.

the day MQTT was made - I sighed

Wasn't that in 2015? 🗓 It's been before my time anyway 😆

HA talks to everything - so why to talk to KNX, we need to use automations?

How does it work for other integrations? I'm not aware of any other way to control, say a Hue light from a Shelly sensor (or any other 2 different integrations), than using an automation.
That is, except for KNX. We have `expose` which is exactly a direct bridge from HA states to KNX addresses - even if HA core devs don't like the idea that much 😉. https://www.home-assistant.io/integr...ime-to-knx-bus

[Nitin]

Thank you farmioMatthias Alphart (you helped me in HA forums)

MQTT Bridge - I meant modules by Christian(der Paul) and modbus by Sven. They help extend Gira HSFS to 90% of the scenario.(these are downloads which extend HSFS)

HA-
The expose of addresses only works one way. It doesnt work the other way (ie, if I write something on KNX bus, I have to do something explicitly in HA to do some action. The concept of "bus" and actions around that bus are missing in HA.

But ofcourse HA has large community which develops modules(add ons) such as BMW connect etc - which is very useful for me and makes me go both HA and HSFS ways.

Matthias - If you ever play with HS/FS - you will see how elegant it is compared to clunky HA. Can you help bring that elegance into HA. This is not related to your OP, but still..

Coming back to knx, knxproj files - I did ask on a lot of forums and the only github page to convert knxproj to yaml didnot work for me (and its a LOT of work). The way I look at it is it will take a HUGE amount of manhours to bring that functionalty to HA.

On documentation- Most of the users will get confused with old forum examples(which dont work). The documentation should include a lot of examples(or snippets).

On xknx front - its the best implementation compared to lot of other half baked stuff I see (Eg Loxone).

If you are contributor to xknx - my heartful thanks for developing the best possible open sourced solution to knx.

[meti]

The concept of "bus" and actions around that bus are missing in HA.

Not sure I agree. There is the HA event bus - where `knx_event`s are fired - which can trigger actions. These are defined in automations - but I guess they have to be defined somewhere...
I think there is still room for improvement of `knx_event` - like possibly adding an `event_id` to easier correlate configured yaml (GAs) to fired events or maybe wrapping them in device triggers...
I'm curious how it would work without explicitly defining something in HA?

If you ever play with HS/FS - you will see how elegant it is compared to clunky HA. Can you help bring that elegance into HA. This is not related to your OP, but still..

No no, this is right on topic imho.
Unfortunately I don't see me playing with HS/FS in foreseeable future - and I never have, so don't know how the configuration there works. Can you maybe describe it a little bit so I can get a picture?
I own a Gira X1 - and find its configuration way more clunky than HAs (I may be a little biased 🤣). They allow import of knxproject to have names, GAs and mostly DPT available, to drag and drop it into a group object abstraction that works very different (sending address and status address are both defined in one object there so drag and drop only does half way...). Is that comparable to HS/FS?

I did ask on a lot of forums and the only github page to convert knxproj to yaml didnot work for me (and its a LOT of work). The way I look at it is it will take a HUGE amount of manhours to bring that functionalty to HA.

That's the problem I mentioned earlier with ETS Functions. A knxproj file per se has no extractable information of which GAs belong to one entity if these Functions are not defined. (eg. one lights switch-GA, brightness-GA, colortemp-GA and all of their status-GAs). I guess that project you are talking about relied on these Functions (but used a now outdated yaml format).
We are currently working on parsing knxproj files, but it will indeed take lots of time to build something out of that. https://github.com/XKNX/xknxproject

On documentation- Most of the users will get confused with old forum examples(which dont work). The documentation should include a lot of examples(or snippets).

Yes, this is indeed a problem I see quite often. Same for Youtube videos.
In our documentation all of our platforms have at least one example. Are you missing something specific? Imho its already a nightmare to scroll through that page because its so long 😬

If you are contributor to xknx - my heartful thanks for developing the best possible open sourced solution to knx.

Thank you very much! We do our best to keep it up to date and reliable.

[ow66]

Hallo Zusammen,
da ich ziemlich faul bin und meine Raspberry-Pi Home-Assistent an meine KNX-Hausautomation anbinden möchte habe ich ein kleines Tool geschrieben, welches mich dabei unterstützt. Man kann damit exportierte knxproj-Dateien laden und Gruppenadressen für Light, Switch und Cover per Mausklick in die Home-Assistent-Config eintragen. Vielleicht nützt es dem Einen oder Anderen was.
Ich mache die nächsten Tage noch ein Setup...
https://github.com/comcowo/OCTiS-Open

[meti]

Coole Sache. Wie sieht das dann aus Bzw wie funktioniert das? Braucht es dafür spezielle Benamung oder Gruppierung der GAs?

Hatte noch nix mit C# zu tun.

[richardpub]

Node-red peut être une alternative à l'importation des groupe adresse dans HA, il suffit d'importer l'export des CSV dans le module Node-Red KNX Ultimate. pas facile à appréhender mais c'est fonctionnel

[meti]

richardpub sure, but this doesn't create any HA entities.

[richardpub]

Tu as raison, mais on peut intégrer toutes les adresses dans MariaDB, et faire une comparaison entre les groupe adresse déjà dans HA et celle dans ETS, afin de faire un suivi lors de modification dans ETS.
Mais mon idée est peut être farfelue??

[meti]

This seems quite complex. Now you need NodeRed and MariaDB - which are both not part of a standard HA installation, but need external services (or Addons). And somehow have to mangle with this MariaDB - write the GAs used in HA and compare to the NodeRed imported GAs 🫥
And act accordingly - if a GA has a different DPT after a change - how would a user be notified about that, and where do you get the information about what DPT is needed for what HA configuration key?

It seems a little bit simpler to just look at the HA logs if any errors from already configured addresses occur if you somehow missed to keep them in sync after a change in ETS 😃
Or alternatively help out with the implementation of HA native ETS project import.

[knxlog]

Ich weis nicht ob es schon erwähnt wurde, aber eine Erweiterung um Telegramme zyklisch zu senden wäre super. Gerade beim Wetter aus dem Internet.

[meti]

Das wird üblicherweise mit einer Automation gemacht mit einem Time trigger und knx.send

Oder mit expose - das ist dann zwar nicht zyklisch, aber bei jeder Änderung - was ja meistens eh das gewünschte Verhalten ist.

[henfri]

habe ich ein kleines Tool geschrieben, welches mich dabei unterstützt. Man kann damit exportierte knxproj-Dateien laden und Gruppenadressen für Light, Switch und Cover per Mausklick in die Home-Assistent-Config eintragen. Vielleicht nützt es dem Einen oder Anderen was.

https://github.com/comcowo/OCTiS-Open

Vielen Dank dafür!
Ich wollte es ausprobieren. Leider hat das zu einem Github-Issue geführt:

https://github.com/comcowo/OCTiS-Open/issues/1

Gruß,
Hendrik

[ow66]

Coole Sache. Wie sieht das dann aus Bzw wie funktioniert das? Braucht es dafür spezielle Benamung oder Gruppierung der GAs?

Hatte noch nix mit C# zu tun.

Nein.
Es werden auf der linken Seite alle Gruppenadressen gelistet, die man dann per Checkbox auswählen kann. In der Mitte gibt es Buttons um die Adresse in das Configfile an der Cursorpostion zu übernehmen. Klickt man auf "- name" wird der Space und der Adresspfad übernommen.
Grüße Werner
image.png

[ow66]

Vielen Dank dafür!
Ich wollte es ausprobieren. Leider hat das zu einem Github-Issue geführt:

https://github.com/comcowo/OCTiS-Open/issues/1

Gruß,
Hendrik

Hallo Hendrik, habs gefixt.
Grüße Werner

[benschi11]

Hallo,
vielen Dank für den github - Link. Ich wollte mir den Code einmal anschauen und kann aber leider nicht builden, da ich das Modul von devexpress leider nicht habe. Bekomme ich das irgendwo kostenlos her, oder muss man dafür zwingend zahlen?
Danke und lg