Poll results: What do you think of Gladys Assistant 4?

News
1

Hello everyone!

I posted a survey two weeks ago (J'ai besoin de vous : Que penses-tu de Gladys Assistant 4?) to get your opinion on Gladys and understand what prevents some of you from upgrading to v4!

As usual, I’m posting the results here so everyone can benefit from them (I’ve anonymized the responses).

For the multiple-choice questions:

The Gladys Assistant website

The site (gladysassistant.com) seems to please you, and I’m glad because it took us a lot of time! It’s a new site based on Docusaurus, with quite complete, light, and easy-to-consult documentation.

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The Gladys 4 installation process

Regarding the installation, as you can see, the v4 installation process seems quite simple to understand for everyone. A few people had difficulties, but it’s far from the norm. v3 is far behind us on this one :smiley:

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Integrations

This is where the survey becomes interesting.

The most used integrations are naturally those used in all installations (Telegram, OpenWeather).

Then, we find Cameras, MQTT, Z-Wave, and Zigbee2mqtt.

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But where it gets interesting is that many of you haven’t yet upgraded to v4 because it’s not yet compatible with the devices you use:

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I did a small analysis on the most cited integrations in the responses:

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Z-Wave seems to be the integration that causes the most frustration currently, and I’m not surprised: the current integration is partial, and unfortunately, as we haven’t had a developer in the last year, many devices are not supported.

But this is changing as we have new contributors trying a migration to ZWaveJS => https://community.gladysassistant.com/t/v4-integration-z-wave/6057/60

For many of you, I recommended my latest video that talks about the Node-RED <> Gladys integration and which allows you to use Node-RED to compensate for Gladys 4’s shortcomings for now:

Full results

The complete survey results with responses are available here:

Conclusion

Thank you to everyone who provided their responses; that’s what allows us to progress :folded_hands:

What I take away is that the Gladys 4 product pleases many, but the integrations are not yet complete enough to attract everyone.

The developer documentation could be better expanded to encourage more developers to join us; I’ll try to work on this point in the coming weeks.

I’m even thinking of doing a live coding YouTube session to show you how to create a Gladys Assistant 4 integration :slight_smile:

2

That’s a great idea! I’m interested. It will help to get started more easily with the development of a service.

Can you cover the part about using the devices used on the Raspberry? For example, how to develop a service that would use the USB Zigbee adapter?

3

There’s already an integration, but I’m not sure it will help as the code is already there

Could it be Gpio?

4

Yes, why not.

Actually, the idea was to show how to use equipment only available on the rpi with dev versions, including the setup, organization, etc.

5

In this case, this is something that is really very, very rare. Apart from the GPIO, there is nothing unique to the Raspberry Pi.

All the integrations we have currently are developed on our laptops:

  • A Zigbee USB key works just as well on a Pi as on any other machine. You can run Zigbee2mqtt locally on your machine with a local Mosquitto broker on your development machine.
  • Same for Z-Wave. I plug a Z-Wave.me into my Mac and it is recognized and works perfectly with Gladys.
  • Otherwise, the rest (camera, Xiaomi, etc.), everything works on any machine.

So, I have the impression that what you are asking for is more of a special case than the norm (and in this case, it should be done on a case-by-case basis), since this case has never occurred to my knowledge :smiley:

In any case, my recommendation is to develop on your development machine. No one develops on the Pi to my knowledge (The Pi can be used in the testing phase of course, but after that it’s via Docker images, no more different than a classic installation).

6

It will be Thursday!