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Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

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Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#201

Post by bpye »

hedora wrote: post #186
bpye wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still running an 8th gen HP micro server, but I would run something else if I could get >=8GB memory and 4 SATA ports for relatively cheap. I haven't seen anything that gets me there yet though.

It sounds like you want a Synology, at least hardware-wise. This one supports up to 6 GB of RAM, four SATA ports, and idles with low wattage and low noise. Built-in virtualization and docker. It's $500 at Newegg. https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS420+#specs They make bigger ones, of course.

Are you stuck with their software though? I've ended up pretty deep down the NixOS rabbit hole...

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#202

Post by alexk307 »

tomxor wrote: post #192

Unless it magically cleans and tidies everything I really don't see the appeal of home automation. Pressing a switch is far more convenient to me when walking into a room than fishing out a smartphone - whether it be through a raspberry pi or otherwise. Same with central heating, I rarely need to adjust it and I don't see the appeal of messing around with some integrated interface, i'd rather an old fashioned radiato…

You're missing the point. It's home automation, not home connect everything to your phone. The whole idea is to create custom automations using network connected devices; the ability to use your phone as a switch is just a bonus IMO.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#203

Post by amelius »

rcarmo wrote: post #148
amelius wrote: post #48

How much convenience does this bring? Is it life-changing, or is it more like nice to have?

It's very handy to get off work, grab a mug of barley coffee, sit on the couch, say "Siri, let's watch Movies" to your watch, and have the TV turn itself on, the audio routed to the AV system, and the Apple TV set as input. All the above is done by Siri talking to the Apple TV (which is the home hub) and homebridge nudging the TV and inputs via plugins. And _nearly_ all the above happens solely inside your LAN, excep…

Ok, how many % of the time does it work, versus how often do you have to perform admin work to fix it?

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#204

Post by syshum »

nomel wrote: post #193
syshum wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must be lucky then because I have lot of Zigbee and Zwave devices all running Transmitting to Nortek GoControl USB stick attached to a rPI running Home Assistant. I have several vendors of both Zwave and Zigbee Sensors, HVAC thermostat, Bulbs, Switches, etc.. All of them play nice with each other, and FAR FAR simpler to setup than WiFi which often requires the use of some weird mobile app, and play hopsotch with th…

Yes, but you are not the average consumer, who is making Wi-Fi popular. > all running Transmitting to Nortek GoControl USB stick attached to a rPI running Home Assistant > and FAR FAR simpler to setup than WiFi These two sentences are absolutely silly, for that average consumer. An average consumer can install a proprietary app in a few minutes and is totally uninterested in installing operating systems on little com…

Before I moved to HA, I was in the smart-things Ecosystem

That was also very easy out of the box, far easier than WiFi Device

I am not sure why you are doubling down on WiFi being easier, it is not

The reason these companies are going for WiFi is because they want to Lock People into continue Telemetry being sent to the cloud, not local hubs.

It has nothing to do with ease of access, or consumer friendly and everything to do with Lock in, and Privacy violating data collection

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#205

Post by testmasterflex »

tomxor wrote: post #192

Unless it magically cleans and tidies everything I really don't see the appeal of home automation. Pressing a switch is far more convenient to me when walking into a room than fishing out a smartphone - whether it be through a raspberry pi or otherwise. Same with central heating, I rarely need to adjust it and I don't see the appeal of messing around with some integrated interface, i'd rather an old fashioned radiato…

100% agree on this. There are very few things I want to do on a daily basis from my phone instead of from a physical switch. One exception is controlling my bedroom lights which I do with Hue lights from my bed.

The other thing I want to automate is music to start playing when I enter the bathroom, to give me privacy in there when my girlfriend is home. And that’s the startup I’m working on: https://Loodio.com since there are no other solutions for it out there (that aren’t crap)

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#206

Post by maxerickson »

scottlamb wrote: post #57
kkielhofner wrote: post #5

Home Assistant[1] is the best approach I've found for this. It's pretty amazing but has a pretty steep learning curve (although they're getting better and better at this). The real power of HA is the rich integration ecosystem[2], the Community Store[3], and that it runs locally (more reliable and much faster for things like motion sensors, etc). It expresses everything from every integration as an entity in various…

I'm still figuring out Home Assistant. I love that it has a real ecosystem and that it seems to have a decent HTTP/WebSocket API (that I just started playing with). Some things I don't love: * A lot of the integrations seem half-baked or to not quite fit the generic Lovelace cards. I think to some extent this is an inherent problem in supporting a lot of devices that have crappy, non-standardized APIs. Example: if I…

On my Venstar you can adjust the spread. I guess you probably wouldn't really want to.

Looks like that integration is implemented on top of an external library (so you have 3 layers of implementation):

https://github.com/hpeyerl/venstar_colortouch/blob/master/sr...

The HA integration doesn't use it, but the library exposes the spread value.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#207

Post by xconverge »

brimble wrote: post #177
xconverge wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I approach it like this. As you go through the next week, try and see if you can identify something that you do every day, almost like a habit, and think if automation could remove that task from your life. A few of my favorite examples: 1. Checking front/backdoor is locked every single night, now I have an automation that turns on the front hall light and sends my phone a notification that the door is unlocked. 2. T…

What's kept me from trying this stuff out is a few interrelated factors: 1) There's no possible way setting up and managing this stuff manually is going to be worth it if it only controls a couple things. 2) Doing enough to overcome point 1 seems to begin with "step 1: spend lots of money and time to replace tons of stuff that already works completely OK" and/or a bunch of research (I've used enough AirBnB IoT "actua…

Your math checks out. For me I came to different sums for each bullet point primarily starting at the place of "I do/did enjoy setting it up as a hobby". I also really liked maturing my solutions from a this is fun to hack together, to things my partner actually has said "wow this is actually pretty nice I like it".

I have also been very impressed with some of the infrastructure/solutions that the open source community has available, it is a pretty rich infrastructure that is not unbearably-brittle if you know what you are doing, but definitely is not user friendly enough to be easy to recommend to everyone.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#208

Post by ThatPlayer »

justin66 wrote: post #98
djanogo wrote: post #42

Better yet, run your home on Dell/HP micro computers that get decommissioned by enterprises/hospitals/big-orgs every 3 years. Find them on Offerup or FB or Craigslist market place for $100-$200. These are built solid with metal enclosures, fan cooled, UL certified PSU, ~7k CPUbenchmark.net. Usually i5 6thGen Intel CPU, 8GB-16GB RAM and have REAL storage(SSD) and M.2 NVMe. If you are lucky you might find vPro version…

> fan cooled As if that is a benefit. Putting a server in a corner of my home and forgetting about it is an application where I want the machine to be powerful enough to work without active cooling, as small as possible, and with no moving parts. None of these constraints is difficult to accomodate in this day and age.

I do like some of the thin clients you can get cheap off eBay. A used Dell Wyse 3040 only costs a bit more than a Pi, and gives me full x86. Still no fan. If I didn't have a stack of Raspberry Pis, that would be my choice with the shortages.

I would probably move my Home Assistant setup to one if I hadn't preordered their Home Assistant Yellow board which has built-in Zigbee and other features.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#209

Post by xconverge »

jrm4 wrote: post #67

I'm curious about other people's experiences with this stuff, especially if you're someone who likes simple scripting and found Home Assistant to be too clunky. Basically, I've bought a lot of these little devices, and am much more interested in doing this in a more "Unix Way" way; give me text streams/web APIs and let me figure it out. I think there are things like Huginn and there's a like a Perl one or something?…

I use home assistant to create my list of "entities", then I do all logic/automation in nodered, but this could easily be bash if you really wanted. This allows me to leverage the communities work on integrations for stuff (python libraries interfacing with xyz hardware/api/cloud/local device), and then put all of my automations in one place (nodered for me)

If I add new "stuff" I add it to home assistant, if I want to do things with my "stuff" I do it in nodered.

Also, if the "stuff" I want to add is a little sensor or arduino or esp8266, I can just have it send MQTT messages, and then all of a sudden without touching anything in home assistant, I have access all the way in nodered to use these messages to do anything I want.

Re: Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi

#210

Post by Narkov »

dchesterton wrote: post #198
tomxor wrote: post #192

Unless it magically cleans and tidies everything I really don't see the appeal of home automation. Pressing a switch is far more convenient to me when walking into a room than fishing out a smartphone - whether it be through a raspberry pi or otherwise. Same with central heating, I rarely need to adjust it and I don't see the appeal of messing around with some integrated interface, i'd rather an old fashioned radiato…

A well-designed home automation system will still work with manual controls and/or if the system is offline. I have smart devices everywhere yet I can still adjust the thermostat manually, turn on lights using a normal switch, set the house alarm using the keypad etc. However, I also have a 'Night' scene in Home Assistant which sets my alarm to night mode, turns off all the lights in the house and sets the thermostat…

^ this. You need to have a high WAF - wife acceptance factor. Another analogy is that grandma needs to be able to stay in the house and not need a computer science degree.

Your home automation system is a complimentary enhancement to a traditional, switch-on-the-wall and physical TV remote control set up.

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