For the benefit of anyone else interested. I ended up replacing my old Actron with a 10kw Daikin system and am very happy with it.
Influencing the decision, I noticed the Daikin Airbase integration was officially maintained by Home Assistant core dev team (not HACS) and had one of the highest reported install percents for AC systems brands (a bit over 1% of all HAs).
They have a remote wall control which includes 4 or 8 zone control at 24v or 240v. Unfortunately it’s a little ugly to look at (and can’t really hide it since it has a temperature sensor, unless you purchase a separate external temperature sensor) but it’s nicer than the old Actron control, and with the zone features integrated this seems a great option for retrofit needs.
And with this configuration, the Airbase WiFi unit (on 2.4 or 5GHz) includes ability to control the zones.
I needed the Daikin app on my phone to do initial Wifi pairing, but I haven’t needed to create an online account or permit remote internet access.
Over LAN, the Home Assistant integration just detected the Airbase and worked without any hassle whatsoever.
So very happy with the result and we saved probably $3k in ducting and zone motor and control replacements which weren’t strictly necessary.
Sing out if you have any questions.
Home assistant is in the top 10 most popular and active open source projects.
@Rah, you need to pull your head in with your repeated assertion that it is poorly engineered simply because it doesn’t use a particular distros packaging system. Perhaps you haven’t used it enough to fully appreciate the things HA does?
The devs are listening to their customers who value: ease of use, reliability, stability and security in the system which orchestrates the iot devices in their home or workplace.
HA often runs exposed to the internet, has a catalog of thousands of integrations and a good hundred add-ons, (before we even get into the HACS community store), has its own desktop and mobile and even watch apps. Each of these components and configurations may be backed up and updated within HA itself with no external dependency. Yet the team and volunteer devs remarkably manage this complexity and release features and changes almost every week.
Initially the project was a lot more flexible in supporting bare scripted installs. I used to run a custom supervised installation myself, managed lots of entries in a configuration.yml, however this mode of installation and operation was deprecated as the project matured. I believe it was the right call to make.
As the project’s popularity grew amongst smart home enthusiasts and vloggers and started to reach the general populace who might have never touched Linux or a command-line before, supporting all that demand meant that tighter controls were necessary to define what a ‘supported’ system and environment was. That is, a predictable and reproducible environment at millions of installations.
The solution is to recommend users install the system as a complete appliance, an entirely contained, managed and controlled operating system HASSOS, on bare metal or as a virtual machine. Or fallback to HA Core if the user is comfortable managing Docker. Experienced Linux users who want to spend time managing dependencies themselves are no longer the primary audience or user base for Home Assistant, but are still free to do so if they accept zero support and various warnings.
Hope that helps and wasn’t a waste of time explaining.