151–160 of 200 posts
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Had a SD card die in my Pi a few months back, good to know HA was the cause. Now running on a proper box.
HA wasn't the cause, just consumer level SD cards are shit. Get an "industrial" card.
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I use Forest drapery rails ( https://www.forestgroup.com/ ). They're awesome, they have a zwave interface build in (the ones I use - they have multiple systems) and they have been 100% rock solid for 4+ years for me. They behave like light dimmers, so you just send them a '50%' message to close them half way etc. Also, you can still open them by hand; if you give them a slight tug, they will open or close the rest by…
Fully second this, we also have Forest. They have proven to be the most reliable Home Automation part in our home. Prices start at about EUR 500, but increase with curtain length (excluding the curtains). Seems like at lot, but having to recalibrate / repair a cheaper system every now and then will be more expensive in the end when your time is valuable.
Founder of Home Assistant here. Happy to answer any questions.
My initial experience with Home Assistant has been very frustrating. I filled my house with HomeSeer HS-WD100+ and HS-WS100+ wall dimmers/switches. I thought I was safe as they are best sellers in zwave devices. But Home Assistant doesn't seem to support them without elaborate workarounds that, as a noob, I haven't been able to penetrate. The forums have been talking about a solution coming soon ... for years now. In…
I have a feeling that my next step will be reading the source code to get a better sense of how the YAML is translated into the internal state machine, but an official "beginners guide" would go a long way to making this not necessary.
I've been using Home Assistant for a couple of years now. I won't go too much into what I use it for, there's a bunch of info about that, and the guys on the Discord have entire public repos full of all their cool automations (on Github). What I would share is that in the couple of years I've been running it, I've been through a dozen Sandisk and Samsung MicroSDs on my Pis _even though_ I was running my time-series d…
I've been using Home Assistant for a couple of years now. I won't go too much into what I use it for, there's a bunch of info about that, and the guys on the Discord have entire public repos full of all their cool automations (on Github). What I would share is that in the couple of years I've been running it, I've been through a dozen Sandisk and Samsung MicroSDs on my Pis _even though_ I was running my time-series d…
It's possible that my use of an extra large SD card has allowed the card to write to previously-unused memory cells rather than erase and overwrite memory cells, helping the card last longer. I wonder if anyone has studied that.
Since this comment thread involved a lot of people talking about their smart devices, I’ll just put out a PSA: don’t bother with cheaper zwave light switches and dimmers :) if you’re looking for a high quality decent price option, just get Lutron Caseta. Or if you want higher end / better style, get Lutron’s RA 2 Select hub (basically Caseta++) for $100 more and then you can use Caseta dimmers or higher end Maestro d…
Caseta is the way to go. I HAD a mix of Elgato, iDevices, Belkin, and Insignia switches and outlets, added ad-hoc based on promotional pricing and free time. It was an unreliable mish-mash with varying levels of compatibility with iOS, Android, and Alexa. Seeing or hearing "The device is not responding" was common. I scrapped it all and went Caseta for everything, giving every device a "one last chance" and swapping…
I've been using Home Assistant for a couple of years now. I won't go too much into what I use it for, there's a bunch of info about that, and the guys on the Discord have entire public repos full of all their cool automations (on Github). What I would share is that in the couple of years I've been running it, I've been through a dozen Sandisk and Samsung MicroSDs on my Pis _even though_ I was running my time-series d…
I’ve been looking to replace my RPi with something a bit beefier. Some of the components I’m running are memory heavy, and my pi is struggling to stay responsive.
I've been using Home Assistant for a couple of years now. I won't go too much into what I use it for, there's a bunch of info about that, and the guys on the Discord have entire public repos full of all their cool automations (on Github). What I would share is that in the couple of years I've been running it, I've been through a dozen Sandisk and Samsung MicroSDs on my Pis _even though_ I was running my time-series d…
Does Home Assistant let you make all IOT devices safer? For example, I imagine the business plan for products like Hue involves selling information to data brokers, but after glancing at the Hue section[1], I couldn't quickly tell whether you are still publishing information about your home environment. [1] https://www.home-assistant.io/components/hue/
For starters, you need to ditch all those hubs and apps and that means you need to look into Z Wave and Zigbee. Briefly and in my experience and testing, Z Wave devices are more expensive but more compatible with each other. Z Wave has a longer range without any relays. Both are very well supported but I think Z Wave is better supported. Philips Hue is Zigbee as is Tradfri (Ikea). I've got both USB dongles plugged into a VMWare esxi in a VMware cluster at work and both survive vMotion and are very stable. I'm using this for Z Wave: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00YETCNOE/ref=oh_aui_de... (£43) and people on the forums offer to make up Zigbee USB devices with ready flashed firmware for about £20 or you can buy your own bits from Alibaba and DIY for a bit more for one but a lot less for more than say five.
You should also investigate the MQTT protocol and consider say Mosquitto and proper SSL for it for external stuff like Owntracks. Internal only access can be satisfied by using the built in MQTT broker in Home Assistant.
Also, consider ESP8266 (or ESP32) devices. You can get two for £8 on Amazon with pins etc already to slap in a small breadboard. Note that you can power them using PoE and a PoE to USB converter to get them up to 100m away. You can fit these things inside the sort of wall mount box you might have for a light switch or ethernet ports.
When I've finished testing at work (!) I'll be looking to control my underfloor heating, lights (note that you need three wires (live, neutral, switched neutral) for switch box controls or something like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fibaro-FGS-213-Single-Switch-Black/... that can go in the light fitting itself. I'm in the UK BTW. Also I'll be putting in window and door open/shut detectors and a fair few of something like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0141FQDJQ/ref=oh_aui_de... to see what is going on in a room. I aim to defang my Sonos speakers eventually. The TVs already go through Squid with quite a lot of monitoring and a lot of pfSense keeping an eye on things.
ZoneMinder is well supported for cameras.
Proper home automation is not cheap but is very cool if done right. Do your research very carefully. If you have a SO, then be very, very careful and test, test, test otherwise you will be kicked into touch very quickly. I'm aiming to have manual overrides (switches etc) for nearly everything and will be putting in a lot more wifi and UPS, RAID etc along with proper backups. If you are going to do more than a toy lighting system than do it right.
I don't fear my IoT stuff because they live on VLANs with names like THINGS and SEWER (for the really scary ones) but I'm not your average home owner (IT-wise) and am extremely pissed off at the vendors of these things for the frankly cynical approach taken to security and your privacy.
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Does Home Assistant let you make all IOT devices safer? For example, I imagine the business plan for products like Hue involves selling information to data brokers, but after glancing at the Hue section[1], I couldn't quickly tell whether you are still publishing information about your home environment. [1] https://www.home-assistant.io/components/hue/
The Hue does not rely on HA for network connectivity. The Hue hub connects to wifi, and you talk to it over the network. I don't believe HA is doing anything other than reading/writing the state of the bulbs.
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/zigbee2mqtt-getting-ri...
(I can personally vouch for Scott Darby's ability to put together a device for UK users - see comment 162. I've got one of his)