121–130 of 140 posts
The valves were 12v solenoids from ali express, and the plumbing was from the hardware store. I almost guarantee it was far, far cheaper than this project.
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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.
Add-ons (now apps) can't be done without HAOS. It's one of those non-obvious things. There's other things I forget which are also more difficult/annoying to manage on the container version. I have a rather large docker compose stack so my first experiments with HA were as running it there. That lasted maybe a week before I went and ran it as a VM instead.
After years of doing this, I determined that dumb controllers are superior for my uses. A once a week irrigation with a simple rain sensor results in the same quality lawn/beds and better can run with pretty much zero maintenance burden on the sw/hw side. The vegetable garden is even dumber, just drip lines, a hose bib, and a dumb timer that flips daily in the morning powered by AS batteries. In my apartment days I j…
I have almost everything in my house HA-automated, but anything touching the water supply is all on dumb physical valves and electrical timers. If my light switches don't work, that's annoying. If a robot vacuum doesn't run, that's frustrating. If a water valve is stuck open, that's catastrophic.
Automation to determine that the thing watering the plants has failed is crucial.
This is especially true if the system is some form of setup in which there isn't a bunch of soil to buffer a couple of days of not watering correctly (like hydro- or aqua- ponics).
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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".
Plus, for the full HAOS experience (as a “server”) running add-ons that are convenient one-click installed Docker-based packages for popular 3rd party tools used for home automation (but not developed by Open Home Foundation themselves) like Zigbee2Mqtt, Frigate (DVR for IP cams), EspHome etc so you can manage everything in one central location.
You could definitely flip light switches and read sensors with a 20kb executable. But you’d sacrifice the core value-add of HA serving as the single lynchpin connecting every smart device you own today plus whatever you may add in the future.
I started with a 100% Philips Hue setup that forced me to use their app, and eventually wanted to add some unsupported Zigbee devices that Google Home didn’t do a good job exposing which pushed me to explore Home Assistant.
Since then I’ve added (and removed) countless different protocols, proprietary cloud integrations for robovacs or air purifiers, ESP32 boards I built myself, web cams, TVs, etc over the years with the only unchanging constant being Home Assistant at the center linking it all together.
How to spot a man without wife. My home assistant also waters my plants. She generally enjoys working in the garden.
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HA is an absurdly heavyweight pile of Python and Docker. Get it a real computer — a used “thin client” with 8 GB of RAM is probably less expensive than an RPi4 plus case and power supply.
an intel n100/150 minipc is perfect, if you get an old enough build (don't ask) you can install proxmox on it and set up hass as a vm as God intended. if you have to ask, mine was too new and had to settle for a non-LTS Ubuntu Server. it works, but I can't wait for LTS in a few months.
I’m rocking a Dell Wyse “thin client” that cost rather less than any comparable N150. It’s fanless, still gets firmware updates (via LVFS!), and takes about 5W at the wall plug.
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Sounds like the complexity is somewhat self-inflicted? I set up HA from scratch on a new mini PC with Proxmox and HAOS in about 30 mins having never touched either before. For VLANs, I just used port-based VLAN to attach it to the IoT VLAN, with firewall rule to allow UI access, but Proxmox has tagging support if preferred.
There’s like 10 replies telling me it’s not actually that complex then describe an equally or more complex solution that’s probably missing some of the security or features I have. I guess I wrote “complicated to set up” when I meant “complicated stack”. A heavyweight blob of python running in a container talking to other containers running node-js on a Linux VM on a Linux host behind layers of networking to toggle 1…
My pretty minimal stack:
- Intel NUC running Ubuntu LTS.
- Zigbee dongle I bought off Aliexpress.
- Zigbee2MQTT installed via package manager configured to use the Dongle.
- One single container running HomeAssistant with net=host
That's it. Has worked for years. Whenever I feel like it I ssh into the box, docker pull the latest image, rerun my two line bash script to recreate the container and go on my merry way.
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I've never heard about "Home Assistant Green". Seems like another step down the slippery slope of "work on my machine". First docker, than a dedicated OS, now dedicated hardware. I wonder why is Home Assistant so complex as to require all this.
It's not that it's that complex to need all of this. It's about ease of use. Home Assistant OS makes life simpler for users (such as myself), it makes it easy to use adding that run as additional docker containers, it makes plugging in USB z-wave/zigbee devices a breeze. While it is technically no longer supported, you can still install the whole kit and caboodle using pip in a Python virtual environment, but why wou…
This is how I did it, instead of the container or HA OS in a VM.
If you want the simplicity of everything preconfigured, managed, and hands-off, go with HA OS, whether in a VM on a beefier machine, standalone, or the HA Green/Yellow dedicated hardware.
But if you already have a home server and want to add HA, I found just pip installing to be easier than dealing with the container.
Maybe I'm just the silly type that enjoys fiddling with Linux, but I'd argue that it actually makes more sense to install HA bare metal over a container. HA doesn't actually have any major dependencies outside of what pip installs, so setup wasn't any more annoying than via container. And then you never have to deal with container annoyances like passing hardware through to it or weird failures and misconfigurations.
Contrast this with https://frigate.video/, which has so many fragile native dependencies and a super complex stack that trying to install manually is an exercise in futility. I gave up and used the container.