[Proposal] Combine ha-paneld hardware abstraction layer with Ava's Zigbee/BLE/voice backend

[knoop7]

your work on ha-paneld is genuinely impressive. The clean multi-vendor HAL design, mDNS auto-pairing, fleet provisioning, and the reverse-engineering on those undocumented Rockchip panels — really solid engineering.

I think there's a real opportunity here. I maintain knoop7/Ava (github.com/knoop7/Ava) — a backend service layer that runs alongside HA Companion adding Zigbee + BLE gateway, local voice assistant, Snapcast multi-room audio, floating overlays, and a Mod system. Tiny APK, optimized for Rockchip/Allwinner SoCs.

Our projects are highly complementary: ha-paneld as the hardware abstraction layer, Ava as the feature service layer. I'd love to explore merging development efforts or at least ensuring tight interoperability between the two. If you're open to it, happy to discuss technical details and collaborate.

[maxlyth]

Thanks for reaching out. I’m open to practical interoperability, but ha-paneld’s feature set is still evolving fast, so I’m not ready to divide ownership of features between the projects or commit to avoiding overlap.

If you have a specific integration point or coexistence problem in mind, I’m happy to evaluate it on its merits.

[maxlyth]

Hi @knoop7, I don't know if you have been watching but ha-paneld is slowly edging towards v1.0 and I think I have finally got my house in order on the core capabilities and the whole new user onboarding process. I have been slow but I am just a single developer on a mission to make old panels usable for all those who loved they idea but found the hardware does not work in practice for almost comedic reasons.

I promised in my manifesto to add some form of Voice Assistant support and I am now faced with the harsh reality of delivering that. I can also see that you have also been making progress and it would be pretty insane for me to keep up so collaborating seems to be a good idea if you are interested.

It is a public holiday in the UK today so have all day to talk if you want to DM me at https://discord.gg/n342kY8mm

[knoop7]

Thank you for your attention. Your project really resonated with me; it was the first time I thought, "Wow, is it actually possible to do things this way?"

I also really appreciate your attitude—it stands in stark contrast to authors who rely on "glue code." Perhaps it’s a case of kindred spirits recognizing one another; the current landscape of AVA development feels somewhat adversarial, and being at odds with several other projects has left me feeling a bit drained.

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