Smart Home Automation

von Chaps said:

Thanks for the heads up.

Can you give some examples of your NFC based automations. I've often considered getting some stickers, but I can't think of any use for them.

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ChaoticUnreal said:

I'm still setting them up actually. Planning on setting one up for laundry (tag on washer/dryer) that sends a notification to the device that scanned it.

The only one I planned currently is the one to track my water intake but need one of the anti-metal tags for that to put the sticker on my water bottle.

My smart home stuff is currently limited to mostly sensors after moving to a new house since I don't have neutrals to install smart switches.

Most of my other uses for nfc tags would just be replacing switches or triggering scenes (all off / sleep mode etc)

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alias: Laundry
description: ""
trigger:
  - platform: tag
    tag_id: aef49d21-18c8-49f1-9518-189db855e304
condition: []
action:
  - service: timer.start
    data: {}
    target:
      entity_id: timer.laundry
  - service: input_select.select_option
    data:
      option: "{{ trigger.event.data.device_id }}"
    target:
      entity_id: input_select.laundry_device
mode: single

alias: Laundry timer
description: ""
trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id:
      - timer.laundry
    to: idle
    from: active
condition: []
action:
  - service: script.notify_devices
    data:
      notify_devices:
        - "{{states('input_select.laundry_device')}}"
      notify_title: Laundry
      notify_message: Laundry should be done
mode: single

aquova said:

Are there any microcontrollers out there with Zigbee support, and how hard are they to program? I bought a number of addressable RGB Christmas lights a while ago, and I've been controlling them with a Raspberry Pi Pico W. It listens for MQTT topics which it then parses for the various light effects.

This has worked pretty well for me, but I've recently switched my Home Automation stuff to be almost entirely over Zigbee. I love not having to have my items on my network, and the ease of setting them up is great. It's not a vital change, but I'm curious if there are boards out there that would do basically this same functionality, but listen over Zigbee instead. The ESP32-H2 seems to support the protocol, but it doesn't seem very widely used, and frankly if parsing its signals is orders of magnitude more complex than MQTT, I'm not sure if I'm terribly invested.

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wobblytickle said:

Opinionated rant follows, but one I hope starts dialogue.

Hello, automation noob here looking at it for the first time now that we have panels/inverter/battery and smart energy meters, with a view to get a zigbee gateway up to talk to them and then take it from there with sensors and lightbulbs/switches.

I've had a look in earnest at HA over the last couple of days; the initial onboarding is slick and pretty though it is... wow it appears to be a car crash of a dumpster fire of a titanic-iceberg level of bad architectural software choices* which has left me pretty despondent. Has anyone tried anything else? next biggest as far as I can gather would be OpenHAB but doesn't seem to have the user polish nor the mindshare.

* diatribe** in the spoiler below:


I'm not usually over here, usually hanging out in LKF/Server Room/Networking matrix and thought about posting this in LKF as it's that angle I'm really coming from.

To sum up, the maintainers seem to be really anti others packaging HA but I don't know if that's the cause, or an effect. The only way HA is fully functional is if you download HAOS (i.e. they seem to have created their own operating system). They do have an official container on ghcr which is great but don't support addons if you're running the container (i.e. HA Core). This is because the addon ecosystem needs HA Supervisor (a service in HAOS). Addons are actually docker containers. So not only is HAOS a new OS it's also a container orchestration platform too.

I wanted to run this in k8s or at worst via docker-compose as that's what I already have with my own implimentations; no addons mean no external database support as I have a MySQL database VM that I'd like to use for this (ootb it's sqlite, and that's fine, but not really container orchestration friendly), and I also have my own TLS cert solution which I could have bolted onto this but the DB is a dealbreaker so:

OK fine, so I spin up a kvm instance, install HAOS (which is a systemd linux but beyond that I can't really see, I couldn't get the ssh add-on to work; 502 bad gateway...) and once Secure Boot is disabled(!) it starts and comes up. Again, very slick onboarding. To the addons! the LE addon (that duplicates what I already have) at first sight won't work in my environment, so then to trying to think up some convoluted way with another VM to proxy_pass but at this point I gave up.

I understand people make opinionated choices and I understand that this is not my project but it's just so frustrating that they have made the choices that they have because they limit interactivity/composability with that which already exists





**I wrote diatrible, it's late but somehow fitting because it's mostly drivel...

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Wildbill said:

I've got HA and MQTT running on Docker containers on a Pi after multiple attempts (some of the instructions I chose were out of date).

Next step, get the temperature data in the house (that I already collect on another Pi) into HA via MQTT. HA Instructions are long and tedious - so I'll likely be dicking around with it for much of the day.

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