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Home Assistant iOS app adds local push notification support

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Re: Home Assistant iOS app adds local push notification support

#32

What kind of hardware do people install Home Assistant hubs on? Does anyone have a good guide to a minimal but clean smart home setup?

Originally I had mine on a Pi3, but the SD card died. I have a Windows machine that's always on, so now I have HA OS running in a headless VM on there. I went from a USB Zigbee coordinator to tinkering with a separate coordinator that's got a wired connection to the network, so there's no need to pass a USB antenna to the VM and the coordinator can sit closer to the smart devices.

Maybe I'll move to something more container driven in the future, but for now it's been working well for me and I really like being able to snapshot the image before upgrading.

Re: Home Assistant iOS app adds local push notification support

#33
HA is great and their support Discord is the easiest way I’ve had getting tech support for any software product ever. I wish they had a better system for packaging it than their current system (either you run their closed down Docker image or their even more closed down Linux distro where you can’t enable ssh without an add on). But once you get it up and running it does exactly what it says on the tin and does it well.

Re: Home Assistant iOS app adds local push notification support

#34

What kind of hardware do people install Home Assistant hubs on? Does anyone have a good guide to a minimal but clean smart home setup?

I apologize for being a bit late to this comment, but I would also like to suggest that people look into eMMC boards. As one commenter suggested, SD cards are prone to failures (we saw this as Seam and earlier at Sonder!). The Black Beaglebone was a decent choice a year ago. ODroid is good too.

Re: Home Assistant iOS app adds local push notification support

#35

What kind of hardware do people install Home Assistant hubs on? Does anyone have a good guide to a minimal but clean smart home setup?

Raspberry Pi 4. Just make sure to use Postgres as your storage backend and disable storage of past events (unless you specifically really care about it). Otherwise it’ll overwhelm your SD card IO.

Re: Home Assistant iOS app adds local push notification support

#36

What kind of hardware do people install Home Assistant hubs on? Does anyone have a good guide to a minimal but clean smart home setup?

I use openHAB, but they're comparable enough I guess. I have a Raspberry Pi 4 that runs it, with a connected Aeotec Z-Wave USB stick that I have all my smart switches, thermostat, security system, etc. connected to.

The OS is running off a SD card, and despite the horror stories I hear about them wearing out and dying, mine's been running for a couple years now without issue. I've been planning to replace it with a SSD or NVMe drive and USB adapter, but never seem to get around to it.

As for guides, honestly can't remember using any. I just followed the openHAB install guide (I assume HA has something similar) and went from there, DDG'ing and looking on forums for solutions to problems.

Re: Home Assistant iOS app adds local push notification support

#37

What kind of hardware do people install Home Assistant hubs on? Does anyone have a good guide to a minimal but clean smart home setup?

I run it on my Synology NAS inside a docker container, managed via the command line rather than the web GUI. I know this is not the best solution but since my NAS is on 24/7 anyway and has heaps of spare RAM and CPU, it's the best solution for me.

If you want to buy hardware, get the ODROID N2. It's the closest thing to an officially supported hardware platform in the HA universe. (The ODROID N2 was bundled and sold as "Home Assistant Blue" for a period.)

Re: Home Assistant iOS app adds local push notification support

#38
post #36

What kind of hardware do people install Home Assistant hubs on? Does anyone have a good guide to a minimal but clean smart home setup?

I use openHAB, but they're comparable enough I guess. I have a Raspberry Pi 4 that runs it, with a connected Aeotec Z-Wave USB stick that I have all my smart switches, thermostat, security system, etc. connected to. The OS is running off a SD card, and despite the horror stories I hear about them wearing out and dying, mine's been running for a couple years now without issue. I've been planning to replace it with a S…

i jad a lot of problems at some point with the rPi staying running and the sd cards. i ended up moving them to a differn circut in my house when i suspected that it was overloaded and causing minor brown outs (this was older wiring with the slow trip fuses not a modern breaker)

everything cleared up after that and no problems since.

Re: Home Assistant iOS app adds local push notification support

#39

HA is great and their support Discord is the easiest way I’ve had getting tech support for any software product ever. I wish they had a better system for packaging it than their current system (either you run their closed down Docker image or their even more closed down Linux distro where you can’t enable ssh without an add on). But once you get it up and running it does exactly what it says on the tin and does it we…

> either you run their closed down Docker image or their even more closed down Linux distro where you can’t enable ssh without an add on

What would you suggest? For their target audience (people who are tech savvy, but don't necessarily know anything about Linux or programming) this seems like the ideal way to distribute it.

Their website also has virtual machine images in various formats, and instructions to manually install it.

https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/linux#install-hom...

Re: Home Assistant iOS app adds local push notification support

#40
post #6
post #2

Very handy considering myself (and most people I know) have their HA+devices setup with as local-only. I don’t want my home automation connected to the internet at all, but I still want notifications if my kids room temps dropped too low or my garage door opens in the middle of the night.

What type of smart theromstat allow local only operation? The popular ones I've looked at (nest, ecobee, honeywell) all look like they require internet connection to work.

I would not recommend ecobee, it does not allow you to apply simple actions you may want to do. For example, using HA I am monitoring co2 in the bedroom, if the level rises above 1000ppm I wanted to turn on house fan until level reaches a value. You cannot simply turn central house fan on/off at will, you can only apply a hourly duty cycle controlled by ecobee. I wish I would have purchased a thermostat with basic api controls.
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