CheddarGoblin posted:In that case, if it were me I'd swap the pi zero with a nodemcu and run ESPhome on it. It's tempting but id rather not given how it's installed, wired etc and has been functioning perfectly for a year already. Unless it's prohibitively difficult to do what I want to. The thing I am unclear on the most is how to get the pi to talk to HA.
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Apr 12, 2021 21:42
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MQTT works well.
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Apr 12, 2021 21:44
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Thanks. I'll read up on it.
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Apr 12, 2021 21:45
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namlosh posted:Out of curiosity, scripting where? Home assistant? Home Assistant, yes. It's barely even scripting, it's just setting a few properties based on current state. For example, I have an automation called "Press button to toggle bedroom lamp". On a single button press event, it calls a script to determine the current state of the smart bulb in my bedroom lamp and then changes its state (on to off, or off to on at 100%/white). I originally used the light.toggle service instead, but that service brings the bulb back to its previous state. So if it was purple at 25% brightness when turned off, it'll come back on to that state. I want pressing the button to reset it to 100%/white. If I want it at a different level, I'll do it via a long-press scene trigger, or via voice commands.
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Apr 12, 2021 23:08
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What's up with a few of my Hue bulbs randomly going offline? They become unresponsive and when I'm not home, I get angry wife messages about how the kitchen lights aren't working. I've never had any issues with distance from the hub either, even my outdoor lights can hit it just fine. I tried rebooting the hub, but the only thing that seemed to fix it was deleting the bulb in the Hue app and re-adding it. Which is a massive pain because I have to go back and re-add it to all of my Homekit automations again.
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Apr 13, 2021 17:16
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I have yet to have that happen, but my furthest bulb is like 25ft
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Apr 13, 2021 19:40
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Does anyone have a rough idea of the range on devices like these? https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07D37VDM3/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Also, thanks very much for all the advice. I have HA running on my NAS as a VM and have also managed to hook up several sensors, got MQTT running on my Pi in the chicken coop and have it pushing a notification to HA etc each time it opens and closes the door. One annoyance about that is while I get a notification when the script fires off to open / close the door, the actual door status is not reflected so I want to have a direct sensor installed to show the status instead. Thus the question about range above.
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Apr 14, 2021 17:42
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That Works posted:Does anyone have a rough idea of the range on devices like these? Note that Zigbee uses a mesh network, so the sensor doesn't have to be within 10-20 meters of the hub; it just has to be within range of another device already connected to the network.
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Apr 14, 2021 17:52
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WhiteHowler posted:Zigbee range is rated at 10-100 meters, but generally falls around 10-20 meters in real-world applications (ie. you're going through walls and have other 2.4 GHz interference nearby). Thanks. It's gonna be cutting it close but not too terrible. I only have the hub I am using for Z-wave at the moment so have to get zigbee configured right on it.
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Apr 14, 2021 17:53
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WhiteHowler posted:Zigbee range is rated at 10-100 meters, but generally falls around 10-20 meters in real-world applications (ie. you're going through walls and have other 2.4 GHz interference nearby). Welp, didn't work but that was the only zigbee device on the hub so far. I ordered a pair of smart plugs that act as repeaters and I'll put them on 2 diff receptacles on the back wall of the house closest to the coop and see if that makes a connection.
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Apr 15, 2021 01:55
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A very busy wifi router can drown out a huehub if they are next to each other. When mine were on the same shelf a max speed wifi download would stop the hues from responding. Changing to 5Ghz wifi and moving the huehub a little resolved it.
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Apr 15, 2021 13:19
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Hmm, maybe that's it? The hub has to be plugged into the router, so of course it's going to be right next to it. I'll play with the exact spots of them next time it happens. Thanks!
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Apr 15, 2021 17:09
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USB 3 also has horrible interference problems and is probably the reason a lot of my Wink stuff would be up and down constantly (I worked it out when I moved to SmartThings where the interference blocked it out completely and had to look up why)
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Apr 15, 2021 17:12
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So I'm about to close on my new house, I have cat 6 run everywhere and I'm hyped! Moving out of my 2 bedroom apartment so I'm excited to do all the smart home stuff. What is the gooncensus on what brands/ecosystems to look for? Stuff I'm interested in: * Dome/Inside/Outside cameras * Garage Doors * Smoke Detectors et el * Smart locks * Smart Light switches * Doorbell * Home security system (?) * Blinds? or any other smart stuff I should look into?
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Apr 20, 2021 01:19
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Might've been overkill pricewise, but I just installed about 6 GE Enbrighten switches this week and they're good. However, even with the reduced depth of the version 2 switch, it still felt a bit crammed when pushing them into the box. Also looking for a doorbell that I don't need a subscription for.
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Apr 20, 2021 02:02
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Gyshall posted:So I'm about to close on my new house, I have cat 6 run everywhere and I'm hyped! Moving out of my 2 bedroom apartment so I'm excited to do all the smart home stuff. What is your general feeling on cloud services for this type of thing? Because there is a huge divide between "my poo poo is my own and I'll put in the time and effort to do that" and "gadget of the day on my wifi". Just based on my description you can tell where I'm at. I'm also on team "all things must have a switch that functions without automation."
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Apr 20, 2021 03:12
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Be aware that if you're going to have a professionally-monitored security system, all of those devices will be cloud-based. It doesn't completely prevent you from integrating them with your other automation, but you'll be at the mercy of what the security company's API will let you do. For example, you can monitor and manipulate Simplisafe devices from Home Assistant. However, sensor data is up to 30 seconds delayed, because there's no locally-accessible device API, and their cloud API limits the number of non-native update requests per minute.
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Apr 20, 2021 03:22
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I'm okay with cloud, I already have a unifi UDM and some access points. Are their cameras worth getting if I'm already halfway set up on the hardware?
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Apr 20, 2021 03:32
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Their cameras are fine hardware-wise but I found the Protect software absolutely garbage. Like you can't get notifications for a specific zone of motion (where packages would get delivered) or anything like that. I ended up switching to Blue Iris which is way more packed with features - the Ubiquiti cameras fortunately work with it but in hindsight I'm glad I kept most of the analog cameras and only got the UI doorbell. Obviously having something to run BI is the far end of the spectrum so I would just say if you are cloud-comfortable you can do much better than Ubiquiti's.
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Apr 20, 2021 03:35
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Gotcha. I do have a little cluster of NUCs and pis I can run stuff on, and Home Assistant running local as well. Also the wife factor I'm trying to figure out too.
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Apr 20, 2021 03:38
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Oh yeah perfect, a NUC is great for Blue Iris. There's a zillion reasonably priced RTSP/ONVIF cameras that would work just fine with it. The cameras in the place I moved into were all analog Coax/BNC (except the aforementioned doorbell) and I grabbed a cheap 8-port capture card off of eBay and Blue Iris handles running motion detection across 5 cameras on a loving ancient 3770. It's very resource-friendly. Less Fat Luke fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Apr 20, 2021 |
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Apr 20, 2021 03:40
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WhiteHowler posted:Be aware that if you're going to have a professionally-monitored security system, all of those devices will be cloud-based. I mean.....to some extent this might be true but it's really not. You can have a circa 1980s system monitored still. It just depends on what you want to install and if you want to call the central station "the cloud".
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Apr 20, 2021 03:44
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Motronic posted:I mean.....to some extent this might be true but it's really not. You can have a circa 1980s system monitored still. It just depends on what you want to install and if you want to call the central station "the cloud".
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Apr 20, 2021 03:54
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WhiteHowler posted:Well, sure, but I mean as far as things you're going to be able to integrate with home automation. I don't think that's true at all. Can you explain what you mean? It sounds like you think the only things you can integrate with home automation as far as alarms are Simplisafe/Abode and that's simply not at all true. All of the standard DSC panels and the other usual suspects have, at minimum, a serial port. Many/most have ethernet add on options available. Boom: local "API" for your alarm system.
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Apr 20, 2021 15:47
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There’s also (for wireless systems) the potential to use a SDR setup to directly interpret the wireless data sensors are sending out. That’s what I wound up doing with our GE/Interlogix setup.
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Apr 20, 2021 17:14
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Yeah, that can work. There are also devices that can be added to sensor loops that are just dry contacts/relays to give you loop status.
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Apr 20, 2021 17:17
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Kalman posted:There’s also (for wireless systems) the potential to use a SDR setup to directly interpret the wireless data sensors are sending out. That’s what I wound up doing with our GE/Interlogix setup. Look at this guy  ing it up  (That's legit pretty cool)
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Apr 20, 2021 18:19
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In fairness, I basically just piped the output from rtl_433 into an MQTT python script to feed it to Home Assistant - rtl_433 does all the hard work for me.
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Apr 20, 2021 18:27
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Less Fat Luke posted:Oh yeah perfect, a NUC is great for Blue Iris. There's a zillion reasonably priced RTSP/ONVIF cameras that would work just fine with it. Any recommendations on cameras? I kind of like having the storage on the UDM so the Unifi cameras are attractive to me.
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Apr 20, 2021 20:01
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Nah I ordered some Unifi G4s and cancelled when I found that the generic analog ones already installed worked fine.
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Apr 20, 2021 20:26
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Motronic posted:I don't think that's true at all. Can you explain what you mean? It sounds like you think the only things you can integrate with home automation as far as alarms are Simplisafe/Abode and that's simply not at all true. All of the standard DSC panels and the other usual suspects have, at minimum, a serial port. Many/most have ethernet add on options available. Boom: local "API" for your alarm system. Okay, I'll defer because you definitely know more about this than I do, but it might be a bit much to ask of an automation newbie. Stuff like this: Kalman posted:In fairness, I basically just piped the output from rtl_433 into an MQTT python script to feed it to Home Assistant - rtl_433 does all the hard work for me. That's all great and awesome and probably works wonderfully, but I have no idea what any of it means, and I've been tinkering with Home Assistant pretty constantly for several weeks now.
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Apr 20, 2021 22:38
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WhiteHowler posted:Okay, I'll defer because you definitely know more about this than I do, but it might be a bit much to ask of an automation newbie. I'm going to suggest that anyone who's going to be happy with HA long term is looking at it as more of a hobby. If you want something you can plug and play everything with you're probably looking for something more like Smartthings/Amazon/Homepod. I'd also suggest you don't start telling a bunch of people what you can and can't do with integrations when all you've got it "several weeks" of experience.
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Apr 20, 2021 22:58
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For Home Assistant, is it worth running off a Pi or is the Docker container good? I'm trying to understand the differences between "Home Assistant OS" and the other methods of install.
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Apr 23, 2021 01:06
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Gyshall posted:For Home Assistant, is it worth running off a Pi or is the Docker container good? I'm trying to understand the differences between "Home Assistant OS" and the other methods of install. The idea of running it off of a Pi is to have it cheap and power efficient. If you've got something you're already running full time that you can throw a docker container on (I run it in a vmware VM) you'll probably be a lot happier with it. It was pretty slow on a Pi2 when i tried it, but maybe on a modern pi it would be better.
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Apr 23, 2021 01:14
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I'm running it on a Pi 4 and it's good enough for my purposes. I can see how putting it on a real computer would be way better, but that's for another day. I don't have a frame of reference so I couldn't really say how bad it is. If you use a Pi just don't do what I did and assume the SD card will last forever. It won't... at all. Make periodic images or snapshots and store them remotely so you can restore quickly and not have to reconfigure every goddamn thing from scratch (there's ways to automate that, but I haven't done it yet). Booting from a USB SSD is possible, but last I read it's still kinda sketchy to configure.
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Apr 23, 2021 01:37
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Isn't there also a limitation of the non-OS version? Can't use plugins or something?
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Apr 23, 2021 03:16
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IUG posted:Isn't there also a limitation of the non-OS version? Can't use plugins or something? I can't keep up with the name changes, but the version I'm running was HASSIO before, running on HASSIOS, and was the one that had the pug in store built in from the beginning. I thought it was the roll your own HA builds on bare OSes that didn't have that (which is certainly a possible way to install it on a VM/Docker, etc). I initially tried to install HA on a Debian VM and quickly realized the packaging was absolute garbage (at the time at least) and grabbed a pre-made VM. And in case you were asking in the other direction....that you can't have plugins on a Pi version, i've been running the same thing on an original Pi (boy is it slow) as a secondary instance in my barn. Works just the same, just much much slower.
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Apr 23, 2021 03:25
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FWIW, I downloaded the homeass pi image but instead of installing it on a SD card for a pi, I mounted it to a plain Linux install as a VM. I’m not a guru but followed an article about it. It was easy and I’m so glad I did it. It runs fantastic on a 12 year old laptop with an SSD and I can back it up as a VM now instead of using internal snapshot crap built into Homeass I have like 5 Pi’s and love them but stability is not one of their strong points
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Apr 23, 2021 16:12
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namlosh posted:I have like 5 Pi’s and love them but stability is not one of their strong points Agreed, I have a terrible history of SD cards getting corrupted with my RetroPi installations. Tried multiple pis, multiple cards, but sooner or later we have a power bump, and it doesn't want to come back up. So far Home Assistant on Pi has been incredibly stable, even though power losses (we get a lot of storms in the Southeast), but I've been obsessively backing up the HA config snapshots for that reason.
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Apr 23, 2021 16:29
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I run my HA instance on a VM which is on my Unraid server / NAS that I use for all my  and PLEX etc. It was really easy to get up and running and I am happy that it can piggyback so easily onto an already 'always on' device.
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Apr 23, 2021 16:39
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