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Home Assistant Presence Simulation

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Re: Home Assistant Presence Simulation

#81
post #44
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

what?

HA is a hell of YAML and more and more things doable only from the WebUI, this means you can't nor automate nor document your setup, so you can't replicate it.

It's a common issue in modern software: devs are so inhabited to use cloud stuff not knowing what's behind they are mentally unable to comprehend why doing so it's a totally absurd thing. Software MUST REPLICATE with easy, your home infra should be replicated from scratch without much more than booting a custom live. You shouldn't need to re-do the same step again. In *nix we have this concept since decades, those from Windows land simply do not understand because replication for them it's a myth.

Give NixOS or Guix System a try and you'll understand: your setup is just a single or few text files, a command read them and generate a new deploy for you. No need to traveling ever changing UIs by hand, no YAML hell.

At another level it's the same for those from stratis/mdraid/lvm/btrfs vs zfs. Zfs is done for the operation, as a storage should be, flexible, simple, effective, the others are a pile of CRAP those who develop them do not even recognize why, because they have no real idea of automation even if they are core devs of some very low level system stuff. Another example: "systemctl status something" is a CLI designed by some who have no idea of the real world needs, otherwise it would be "systemctl something status" because typically when you look for a service status you might want thereafter reload/restart/stop it, if not the word exchange does change nothing to you. These are the sign of devs born on Windows that have never go behind their desktop or someone else cloud service so they have no idea about how to build an infra.

For HA most of it's devs I suppose have no p.v. at home, or they have no personal automation to maximize self-consumption so they do not know how many lines of YAML and wasted time on their UI such design imply. Instead with "dumb end users" in mind, people who NEVER EVER use HA seriously simply because they lack too much knowledge even if someone gives the a ready made system, they focus on "visual code" like Node Red, augmenting them messiness level while still no option exists to establish sensor data retention and pruning, you need aside InfluxDB so another dependency for next to nothing and an issue at a time HA became just a part of a system with NO UI at all because to use InfluxDB you need for instance Grafana and so you entirely replace HA slick UI. In the end you have done A MONSTER to handle simple automation of many stuff due to wrong design ideas, while it could perfectly be a single simple app, HA itself, for instance exposed in python directly.

At some level many start to understand and from UIs they tend to REPL, from disappearing menus to "dashes", from widgets to NotebookUIs for some scientific software, LLM prompts and so on, but even with that most still have to understand a decades old IT principle.

Re: Home Assistant Presence Simulation

#82

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…

As a Linux systems engineer I’ve looked behind the curtain at HAOS and was very impressed by how well things are implemented. Been running it for years in KVM and have never had an issue.

Re: Home Assistant Presence Simulation

#83
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a Linux systems engineer I’ve looked behind the curtain at HAOS and was very impressed by how well things are implemented. Been running it for years in KVM and have never had an issue.

The only thing I run into is that when HAOS reboots, or occassionally when I restart the core, the KVM host has a short disconnect of my Zigbee stick.

Re: Home Assistant Presence Simulation

#84

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…

> 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.

If you don’t use HAOS you miss out on Home Assistant add-ons, which themselves sometimes integrate in Home Assistant.

Re: Home Assistant Presence Simulation

#85
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. If you don’t use HAOS you miss out on Home Assistant add-ons, which themselves sometimes integrate in Home Assistant.

You can install all of them as stand-alone docker containers.

Re: Home Assistant Presence Simulation

#86
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. If you don’t use HAOS you miss out on Home Assistant add-ons, which themselves sometimes integrate in Home Assistant.

You can install all of them as stand-alone docker containers.

Is there any documentation on how to do this, I've always wanted to try the voice related ones but there is no documentation to run them outside of the haos setup

Re: Home Assistant Presence Simulation

#87
post #81
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what?

HA is a hell of YAML and more and more things doable only from the WebUI, this means you can't nor automate nor document your setup, so you can't replicate it. It's a common issue in modern software: devs are so inhabited to use cloud stuff not knowing what's behind they are mentally unable to comprehend why doing so it's a totally absurd thing. Software MUST REPLICATE with easy, your home infra should be replicated…

Sir. You Win teh Internets today. This has been my gripe with HA for the longest time. That YAML / GUI-only / etc. approach is just atrocious.

Unfortunately it works well enough, and there are little or no alternatives to it as far as I can tell. Were there a reasonable alternative, with a configuration as an actual code (YAML isn't), I would dump HA in a heartbeat. I mean I could even live without the GUI - just configuration as a code, and stable support for Zigbee (and BLE etc devices). But then again HA mostly works. And if it works, then...shrug.

My use case is mostly to be able to 1) monitor/understand our electricity consumption, 2) be able to turn off all/selected electrical devices when leaving house etc., 3) automatically lower/raise outside shutters based on weather/where sun is(!) to keep house cooler, 4) and as a bonus, have leak detectors send me a text if there is a leak. My setup is some 30 zigbee smart switches / sockets, couple of IKEA badring leak sensors, solar inverter and something zigbee in main electric panel to get total electric consumption. And five door/window sensors (that aren't really used for anything, but you know how one goes down the rabbit hole with these things...).

How I've made it somewhat manageable is that I run it in a following manner (first in Pi5, now in N100 -- no difference between those observed regarding HA):

- have /opt/homeassistant/config mounted to zram

- on boot unpack /opt/homeassistant/backup/latest.tar.zst -> /opt/homeassistant/config

- run HA from docker (where /opt/homeassistant/config is now on zram)

- cron will make a backup of /opt/homeassistant/config weekly (or I can run backup manually if I've made changes/addedd devices) and then these are backed up 'offsite'.

So now whenever HA goes bonkers, or more likely I've messed something up with it, end result being the same, I simply roll back to some earlier known good configuration. Docker is wonderful in this regard. Really, I don't know how else people live with the HA, other than backing up their entire config, and then re-installing.

Re: Home Assistant Presence Simulation

#88
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been running it for a year on a RPi 2, via WiFi, from a SD card *and* a Zigbee dongle, which is basically what everyone seems to say you should not do, and never had a single issue with it. I don't think these issues have anything to do with HA itself but rather the extensions people install on it.

I think it also has to do with how many devices you have on it and how often they update state. I have 300+ IP devices and have to run it on a mini PC because RPi was too slow. No custom plugins or extensions, just a few basic integrations.

300+ IP devices. Astounding. Do you mind sharing any details?

Re: Home Assistant Presence Simulation

#89

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 been using a Pi 3 for years and years, it's always been rock solid. The only problem was in the beginning, when I didn't use the official power supply, I'd get frequent brownouts, even with good bench power supplies. Apparently the Pi (especially older ones, not sure if they've fixed it now) had too much of a voltage drop, and needed a slightly higher voltage supply to work properly.

After that, zero problems.

Re: Home Assistant Presence Simulation

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can install all of them as stand-alone docker containers.

Is there any documentation on how to do this, I've always wanted to try the voice related ones but there is no documentation to run them outside of the haos setup

Basically you need to run this docker compose file from below and enable "Wyoming" integration in HA (I think it'll detect piper & whisper and propose it automatically). Don't worry about picking model too much - you can change it later in HA UI.

  version: "3"
  services:
  ## wyoming
    whisper:
      container_name: whisper
      image: rhasspy/wyoming-whisper
      command: --model base-int8 --language en
      volumes:
        - ./whisper-data:/data
      environment:
        - TZ=Europe/Brussels
      restart: unless-stopped
      ports:
        - 10300:10300

    piper:
      container_name: piper
      image: rhasspy/wyoming-piper
      command: --voice fr-siwis-medium
      volumes:
        - ./piper-data:/data
      environment:
        - TZ=Europe/Brussels
      restart: unless-stopped
      ports:
        - 10200:10200
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