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Home Assistant Presence Simulation

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Re: Home Assistant Presence Simulation

#61

Post by orev »

jitl wrote: post #36

I use a normal automation to turn on the lights every day at sundown, and to turn off the lights every night at ($BEDTIME + 1hr), just as part of daily life. I don't need anything tricky to simulate that pattern when I'm traveling; I just don't disable the automation. I wonder how many people using HomeAssitant for their lights are manually turning lights on and off all the time. I would think most people would set u…

I did this for a long time with timer switches that could be programmed similarly, and switching to HA wasn’t some huge change, it was just nicer. I had to periodically make sure the clock was correct on them, as they would drift a few minutes, and the interface itself was via small LCD screen and buttons.

HA is just a nicer experience, but I wouldn’t say it (or any home automation) is a “need”. It’s better seen as something for tech people to tinker with once they’ve settled a bit in life and are looking for something to do.

Re: Home Assistant Presence Simulation

#62

Post by enobrev »

reaperducer wrote: post #56
nurettin wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need some of those cat-sensitive motion triggers.

Old school hardware stores have them. They screw in between the lightbulb and the lamp.

My z-wave sensors of various brands tend to recognize my cat. Most of them have a "pet" setting which is supposed to ignore them, but then I would lose my entire security system.

Re: Home Assistant Presence Simulation

#63

Post by wlesieutre »

lannisterstark wrote: post #60
NiekvdMaas wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or buy an officially supporter Home Assistant Green for $99: https://www.home-assistant.io/green/

Honestly, to be fair, You can buy two more powerful 1L dell optiplexes or HP prodesks for this cost. i5-7/8xxx with 8G/16G ram often go for $40-50 on eBay. Install proxmox and HAOS and you can use the rest for other stuff.

How’s the power consumption compare? If you don’t need more powerful it might not be the bargain it looks like.

Re: Home Assistant Presence Simulation

#64

Post by jjeaff »

orev wrote: post #61
jitl wrote: post #36

I use a normal automation to turn on the lights every day at sundown, and to turn off the lights every night at ($BEDTIME + 1hr), just as part of daily life. I don't need anything tricky to simulate that pattern when I'm traveling; I just don't disable the automation. I wonder how many people using HomeAssitant for their lights are manually turning lights on and off all the time. I would think most people would set u…

I did this for a long time with timer switches that could be programmed similarly, and switching to HA wasn’t some huge change, it was just nicer. I had to periodically make sure the clock was correct on them, as they would drift a few minutes, and the interface itself was via small LCD screen and buttons. HA is just a nicer experience, but I wouldn’t say it (or any home automation) is a “need”. It’s better seen as s…

I'm guessing you have to do a bit more in maintenance for your Home Assistant instance than set the clock every once and a while?

Re: Home Assistant Presence Simulation

#65

Post by ThatPlayer »

NiekvdMaas wrote: post #58
joshstrange wrote: post #13

Just a note to anyone interested in trying out Home Assistant: It's amazing _but_ do NOT use a raspberry pi to run it. Save yourself a ton of headaches and buy a mini pc (there was a list of used mini pcs posted here yesterday from ebay). Also I recommend using HAOS (or whatever the "we install and run the whole OS" option is called) so that you can use things like plugins without messing around with docker. I love d…

Or buy an officially supporter Home Assistant Green for $99: https://www.home-assistant.io/green/

I've been using a Home Assistant Yellow, which is running on a Raspberry Pi CM4. Bit more specialized than the Green I think.

Re: Home Assistant Presence Simulation

#66

Post by mixedCase »

kkfx wrote: post #29
joshstrange wrote: post #13

Just a note to anyone interested in trying out Home Assistant: It's amazing _but_ do NOT use a raspberry pi to run it. Save yourself a ton of headaches and buy a mini pc (there was a list of used mini pcs posted here yesterday from ebay). Also I recommend using HAOS (or whatever the "we install and run the whole OS" option is called) so that you can use things like plugins without messing around with docker. I love d…

I've pip-install it in my homeserver (a small celeron with enough ram and storage) BUT I have a note to all HA users and devs: why the hell keep insisting on the WebUI for configuring, it's NOT reproducible nor simple. Oh, of course, for a casual user it's simple, unfortunately no casual users know about HA or how to physically integrate HA in a smart home, so the idea of making a generic end-user system it's a failu…

I've given up on Home Assistant because of this. Particularly because since I've switched to NixOS I really don't want to be arsed reconfiguring stateful crap from the start every time I make some change that requires a reinstall.

Sadly, I've yet to find a viable alternative.

Re: Home Assistant Presence Simulation

#67

Post by Fabricio20 »

joshstrange wrote: post #13

Just a note to anyone interested in trying out Home Assistant: It's amazing _but_ do NOT use a raspberry pi to run it. Save yourself a ton of headaches and buy a mini pc (there was a list of used mini pcs posted here yesterday from ebay). Also I recommend using HAOS (or whatever the "we install and run the whole OS" option is called) so that you can use things like plugins without messing around with docker. I love d…

I want to go the other way and say DO NOT use HAOS if you know anything about docker. If you have ANY experience working under linux/docker just don't bother with HAOS and save yourself the headache. You will have an incredibly better experience just running your HASS docker container by yourself.

HAOS caused so many issues for me while it tried to set up the other containers (such as Node Red), specially during home assistant updates, and it also made the whole UI extremely confusing because it would "redirect" some things to HAOS while others would be done inside HASS itself. With it auto trying to manage the containers it was also never clear when things were still booting/loading or crash looping and when you had issues the extremely limited access HAOS gives you was painful to deal with.

As with other personal anecdotes in this thread, it may not be relevant to you, but I'd share my own experience as well, as someone that has had HASS running for 6+ years now.

Re: Home Assistant Presence Simulation

#68

Post by dostick »

jitl wrote: post #36

I use a normal automation to turn on the lights every day at sundown, and to turn off the lights every night at ($BEDTIME + 1hr), just as part of daily life. I don't need anything tricky to simulate that pattern when I'm traveling; I just don't disable the automation. I wonder how many people using HomeAssitant for their lights are manually turning lights on and off all the time. I would think most people would set u…

Exactly! What’s the point of that if most of people have evening lights and blinds automated to run daily.

Re: Home Assistant Presence Simulation

#69

Post by lurking_swe »

joshstrange wrote: post #13

Just a note to anyone interested in trying out Home Assistant: It's amazing _but_ do NOT use a raspberry pi to run it. Save yourself a ton of headaches and buy a mini pc (there was a list of used mini pcs posted here yesterday from ebay). Also I recommend using HAOS (or whatever the "we install and run the whole OS" option is called) so that you can use things like plugins without messing around with docker. I love d…

i’d recommend buying “home assistant green”, it’s plug n play:

https://www.home-assistant.io/green/

Re: Home Assistant Presence Simulation

#70

Post by hughesjj »

joshstrange wrote: post #13

Just a note to anyone interested in trying out Home Assistant: It's amazing _but_ do NOT use a raspberry pi to run it. Save yourself a ton of headaches and buy a mini pc (there was a list of used mini pcs posted here yesterday from ebay). Also I recommend using HAOS (or whatever the "we install and run the whole OS" option is called) so that you can use things like plugins without messing around with docker. I love d…

100% this, my rpi3 kept running out of ram running all the services I wanted on home assistant so I moved it to proxmox and use the roi+touchscreen as a dedicated web client for the interface now

Be careful with the beelinks though, I have one with a nice ryzen API that's basically useless because the USB gave out and it's a chicken and the egg problem trying to get Bluetooth on it. Haven't gotten around to attempt manually configuring Bluetooth on the SSD yet (from another computer) or otherwise fixing those ports

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