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Home Assistant waters my plants

finnian.io

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Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#71

Post by zikduruqe »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #63
zikduruqe wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I wouldn't put running a weather station in the same class of disk activity as running Home Assistant. It is writing a fairly large amount of logs, plus statistics for every attribute/sensor for every device. The more devices you have, the more you will be writing. There are regularly threads from people with "I restarted HA and now I get this weird boot error message", and it's because their SD card died. You do you…

I run HA on another RPi, so I am familiar.

On the weather station I wrote to the SD card 1,068,266 database records, along with all the nginx logs, etc...

> it's common enough of a problem

It's probably survivorship bias, where everyone complains about SD card corruption, while those with no issues really don't say anything. Well, except my comments today.

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#72

Post by tjoff »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #69
93n wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apps/add-ons is just another container, so you can add them manually in the compose file.

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#73

Post by 93n »

tjoff wrote: post #72
paranoidrobot wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apps/add-ons is just another container, so you can add them manually in the compose file.

Yep, I run esphome in a separate stack w/o issues.

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#74

Post by cityofdelusion »

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 just used an elevated water container and the same dumb timer to gravity feed my garden.

I find home lab stuff has far more return on investment for like automatic blinds, lights, etc. It’s not like you can just stay inside anyways and get amazing vegetables, you still need to be on top of thing like checking for pests and disease. The automatic garden is a myth.

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#75

Post by aconsult1 »

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've tried using HA a couple years ago and gave up. It was too complicated to run it in a Pi4 - I'm an experienced software engineer, familiar with containers and Linux.

I was trying to get some of the IoT I have at home like pool equipment, lights, HVAC, blinds, etc. Some of the setup were an uphill battle looking for more information in forums and trying to figure out what was broken.

Recently I decided over the weekend to use Claude and write a small app that controls my pool equipment and then deployed it using Cloudflare Zero Trust (kind of a reverse VPN). What a joy! Not only I had lots of fun reverse engineering my pool equipment API (I didn't want to depend on existing libraries - which I know exist) but I managed to create a fun and custom UI with React that my kids and wife love using. For example, whenever the pool heater is on, it adds an animated flame to the UI and change the background to a red-ish color. Plus it has a bar chart that shows the pool temp progression (takes hours to heat it up) with an animated volcano colors. The theme of the app is beach/pool vibe.

I don't think anyone here would be that excited if we were using the lower-denominator that HA turns out to be. I know it's a very cool automation tool, but just not very exciting and pretty obscure to configure every equipment I have at home.

I've been thinking about writing a blog post with the details of my fun project, let me know if anyone is interested in this. So far I've done the blinds and pool equipment. Next will be HVAC and lights. Took me 1-2 weeks total for each using Claude in my spare time.

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#76

Post by kalaksi »

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.

Yeah, I haven't had issues with SD cards in a long time. Many years ago (maybe 10), I think they weren't quite as good and I probably skimped too much when buying a card. RPi 1 also had power regulation issues. Now I only use higher tier cards and make sure there's enough free space for wear leveling and operations.

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#77

Post by amluto »

aconsult1 wrote: post #75
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've tried using HA a couple years ago and gave up. It was too complicated to run it in a Pi4 - I'm an experienced software engineer, familiar with containers and Linux. I was trying to get some of the IoT I have at home like pool equipment, lights, HVAC, blinds, etc. Some of the setup were an uphill battle looking for more information in forums and trying to figure out what was broken. Recently I decided over the we…

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.

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#78

Post by tamimio »

I love HA, after setting it up I used an old tablet as the dashboard to control and monitor the house, plus the app. It’s very easy to setup and work with, maybe a bit convoluted in the initial setup but once done, you barely do anything until you add new sensor. You can setup a whole SCADA-like system with it, controlling your garden, power grid/solar and monitoring it, integrating CCTV and all, and it’s free. A similar industrial project I did before, SCADA and RTUs that monitored and controlled many actuators and solenoid valves and sensors, cost wise was ~$9M, and all the functionalities were implemented can be done with HA on principle.

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#79

Post by steezeburger »

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 run an HAOS vm via VirtualBox and then use Tailscale for a secured network.

Re: Home Assistant waters my plants

#80

Post by cossray »

zikduruqe wrote: post #71
paranoidrobot wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't put running a weather station in the same class of disk activity as running Home Assistant. It is writing a fairly large amount of logs, plus statistics for every attribute/sensor for every device. The more devices you have, the more you will be writing. There are regularly threads from people with "I restarted HA and now I get this weird boot error message", and it's because their SD card died. You do you…

I run HA on another RPi, so I am familiar. On the weather station I wrote to the SD card 1,068,266 database records, along with all the nginx logs, etc... > it's common enough of a problem It's probably survivorship bias, where everyone complains about SD card corruption, while those with no issues really don't say anything. Well, except my comments today.

Fair point on survivorship bias. But, I think SD card being flash memory is technically expected to fail over time, with that failure compounded by the number of write cycles. These cycles are a spec of the SD card. If a section/page of the flash is being overwritten more frequently than the other, then surely it'll fail faster than an SD card whose erase/write cycles are distributed uniformly across all the sections/pages.
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