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Home Assistant waters my plants

finnian.io

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Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#41

Post by belthesar »

longtermemory wrote: post #2

Nice! For the hardware, why didn't you considered using a Raspberry Pi?

Cost-wise, there's a solid chance that the Pi would have been more expensive. Jeff Geerling ran some numbers (^1) on this last year, before the current chip crisis we're in, and it was bad enough already.

Home Assistant does a surprising amount of Disk I/O, if for nothing than for logs. Sibling commenters are also advising not running it on the SD card to avoid wearing it out, so there's definitely some truth here. This means we're adding a Pi M.2 hat + SSD into the mix. The Pi5 SSD kit for 256 GB, when it was available, was around $60 USD. A Pi5 with 8 GB of RAM is $130 USD. Now we need a cooler, a case that will fit the Pi5 with said M.2 hat, and a power supply. We're already well north of $250 USD, encroaching on $300, and we're not even using the core benefits of the Pi's platform. No need for GPIO pins, tightly integrated cameras or other sensors, none of that.

For all we know, the blog author did this assessment (or trusted the assessment of others, eg: Jeff) and came to the came conclusion - it wasn't worth the price of entry.

^1: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/intel-n100-better-val...

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#42

Post by xolox »

randusername wrote: post #31
davemp wrote: post #17

Fun project. Though it’s kind of unreal how complicated it is to set up HA and I literally do this for a living, both embedded sw and backend web dev. Docker compose with a zwave management server, reverse proxies for TLS, vlan isolation for the server, macvlan for HA container so it does see the host network, etc, etc. All to turn on and off a lightbulb with the sun. All the while AI is telling me to configure thing…

I also feel overwhelmed with HA homelab stuff. HA on my RPI is just not reliable, requiring a reboot 4-6 times a year for reasons I don't understand. Frustration at being in the literal dark doesn't translate to the right mindset to root cause. What I need is an opinionated guide on minimum viable virtualization, but so much of the resources online are from folks that are homelabing maximalists. I feel the same tempt…

If you are at all comfortable with Linux system administration, manually setting up one or a handful of KVM/qemu powered virtual machines is not actually that hard at all (in my experience). If you like a GUI to guide your initial steps, "virt-manager" is pretty okay. I've been running 3-5 virtual machines for several years now based on a pretty vanilla Ubuntu Linux install (Debian would work just fine as well).

Now I do like a challenge every now and then, so I'm currently setting up Proxmox to gain live migrations and high availability for virtual machines, because I've become quite dependent on all of these services in virtual machines actually running successfully :-) even in the face of eventual hardware failure (like what happened to me in the past months).

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#43

Post by 93n »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #37
davemp wrote: post #17

Fun project. Though it’s kind of unreal how complicated it is to set up HA and I literally do this for a living, both embedded sw and backend web dev. Docker compose with a zwave management server, reverse proxies for TLS, vlan isolation for the server, macvlan for HA container so it does see the host network, etc, etc. All to turn on and off a lightbulb with the sun. All the while AI is telling me to configure thing…

While you can run HA as a container. I think it's a mistake - Its more complicated and has reduced features. I would instead recommend people use HAOS instead - either running on dedicated hardware OR as a VM. Just dont run it from an SD card if you go down the Raspberry Pi/SBC route - it will kill the card from IO cycles. I have an IOT VLAN on my network that all the IOT bits sit in, including WIFI devices. What int…

I go the container route, and have only had one issue: allowing HA to access my system's Bluetooth adapter. I had some ESP32s lying around, so I used ESPHome to make a Bluetooth proxy, which solved that issue.

I don't run addons though, which might be part of it.

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#44

Post by c-hendricks »

davemp wrote: post #28
briHass wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making it complicated with all the VLANs. HAOS in a VM (proxmox helper scripts for one-line install), and HA has plugins for all the other things. Just deny WAN access to the IoT junk you don't trust at the router, or for things like cameras, a separate switch for those. That usually makes sense, since they're one of the few devices that must be powered with PoE and doesn't require gig+ bandwidth. A cheap 100m…

I’m not giving untrusted devices unfettered access to my lan and an airgapped network sounds more complicated tbh. VLANs aren’t really that bad with good networking gear.

What zwave devices do you have that also require LAN access?

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#45

Post by eurekin »

randusername wrote: post #31
davemp wrote: post #17

Fun project. Though it’s kind of unreal how complicated it is to set up HA and I literally do this for a living, both embedded sw and backend web dev. Docker compose with a zwave management server, reverse proxies for TLS, vlan isolation for the server, macvlan for HA container so it does see the host network, etc, etc. All to turn on and off a lightbulb with the sun. All the while AI is telling me to configure thing…

I also feel overwhelmed with HA homelab stuff. HA on my RPI is just not reliable, requiring a reboot 4-6 times a year for reasons I don't understand. Frustration at being in the literal dark doesn't translate to the right mindset to root cause. What I need is an opinionated guide on minimum viable virtualization, but so much of the resources online are from folks that are homelabing maximalists. I feel the same tempt…

Few years on an OrangePi - zero issues. Few months on an N100 Odroid - no issues.

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#46

Post by the__alchemist »

xolox wrote: post #42
randusername wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also feel overwhelmed with HA homelab stuff. HA on my RPI is just not reliable, requiring a reboot 4-6 times a year for reasons I don't understand. Frustration at being in the literal dark doesn't translate to the right mindset to root cause. What I need is an opinionated guide on minimum viable virtualization, but so much of the resources online are from folks that are homelabing maximalists. I feel the same tempt…

If you are at all comfortable with Linux system administration, manually setting up one or a handful of KVM/qemu powered virtual machines is not actually that hard at all (in my experience). If you like a GUI to guide your initial steps, "virt-manager" is pretty okay. I've been running 3-5 virtual machines for several years now based on a pretty vanilla Ubuntu Linux install (Debian would work just fine as well). Now…

IMO Linux system administration, KVM/Qemu, Docker, and virtual machines, and third-party tools in general are not something that should be involved in smart light bulb/sensor/pump etc management.

Task for an RTOS or no OS IMO. Or a single executable that runs on any OS without config. Should be simple, fast, "just work".

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#47

Post by sloped »

I have been using HA to water my garden for 4 summers. I setup a Tempest weather station this fall, and will have some fun experimenting with using rain and temperature data collected in my back yard to make watering decisions.

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#48

Post by zikduruqe »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #37
davemp wrote: post #17

Fun project. Though it’s kind of unreal how complicated it is to set up HA and I literally do this for a living, both embedded sw and backend web dev. Docker compose with a zwave management server, reverse proxies for TLS, vlan isolation for the server, macvlan for HA container so it does see the host network, etc, etc. All to turn on and off a lightbulb with the sun. All the while AI is telling me to configure thing…

While you can run HA as a container. I think it's a mistake - Its more complicated and has reduced features. I would instead recommend people use HAOS instead - either running on dedicated hardware OR as a VM. Just dont run it from an SD card if you go down the Raspberry Pi/SBC route - it will kill the card from IO cycles. I have an IOT VLAN on my network that all the IOT bits sit in, including WIFI devices. What int…

> it will kill the card from IO cycles.

It might not. I have a Raspberry Pi 2 that has been running a weather station for over 12 years, and it has been on the original SD card. I have other RPi's doing dumb things around the house and I have never had an SD card failure.

YMMV and all that.

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#49

Post by mholm »

zikduruqe wrote: post #48
paranoidrobot wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you can run HA as a container. I think it's a mistake - Its more complicated and has reduced features. I would instead recommend people use HAOS instead - either running on dedicated hardware OR as a VM. Just dont run it from an SD card if you go down the Raspberry Pi/SBC route - it will kill the card from IO cycles. I have an IOT VLAN on my network that all the IOT bits sit in, including WIFI devices. What int…

> it will kill the card from IO cycles. It might not. I have a Raspberry Pi 2 that has been running a weather station for over 12 years, and it has been on the original SD card. I have other RPi's doing dumb things around the house and I have never had an SD card failure. YMMV and all that.

HA in particular creates a lot of log churn. It's not a 100% certainty, but after running for 4 years I finally had to copy the SD image to a new one because it had become unwritable.

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#50

Post by vablings »

randusername wrote: post #31
davemp wrote: post #17

Fun project. Though it’s kind of unreal how complicated it is to set up HA and I literally do this for a living, both embedded sw and backend web dev. Docker compose with a zwave management server, reverse proxies for TLS, vlan isolation for the server, macvlan for HA container so it does see the host network, etc, etc. All to turn on and off a lightbulb with the sun. All the while AI is telling me to configure thing…

I also feel overwhelmed with HA homelab stuff. HA on my RPI is just not reliable, requiring a reboot 4-6 times a year for reasons I don't understand. Frustration at being in the literal dark doesn't translate to the right mindset to root cause. What I need is an opinionated guide on minimum viable virtualization, but so much of the resources online are from folks that are homelabing maximalists. I feel the same tempt…

I have had the opposite experience; I have an old trash intel NUC with a decent SSD and a moderate amount of RAM and it runs several services (on proxmox).

- Smokeping - Nginx proxy manager (with tailscale and - copyparty - home assistant - regular samba fileserver

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