Home Assistant beginners

katie279 said:
Ooh, I'm plotting the same - thinking of using ESPHome to control the water and this'll then integrate nicely with HA scheduling.

What's your thinking for this?
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Moisture sensors either per plant pot, or per area of greenhouse, or even per plant type. Remember esp8266's can only support a single moisture sensor as they only have a single ADC port. Esp32's have a few more ports depending on model (upto 12 I believe).

I would then have a pump 5v or 12v that sits in the water butt* that can be powered on by the esp chip, along with a solenoid valve that opens when the pump is activated. The purpose of the solenoid valve is to direct water at the plant pot/area where the moisture sensor has reported dry conditions. *(I don't trust my electronics connected upto the main water line - it'll be my luck that I'll be out one day and the solenoid will fail to close and I'll come back to a flooded garden, at least the water but has a limited amount of water).

Then just irrigation tubing to pipe water directly to plant pots or areas.

I would probably then just run on an automation rather than a schedule. If it's been a cold dull day then plants probably won't need watering compared to during a heatwave.
 
If you really want to get into the electronics and DIY element, it'd be easy to run a multiplexer if you have a few digital output pins, then can send loads of sensors to the one ADC.
 
Hello all
How do you manage home assistant running on an android tablet? Do you guys leave the screen on all the time?
Any suggested way to get the screen to wake from a notification or similar, or wake and go to sleep at set times of the day?
I'm using a Samsung tab s6 lite for this purpose
Cheers
 
ShivP said:
Hello all
How do you manage home assistant running on an android tablet? Do you guys leave the screen on all the time?
Any suggested way to get the screen to wake from a notification or similar, or wake and go to sleep at set times of the day?
I'm using a Samsung tab s6 lite for this purpose
Cheers
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Fully Kiosk Browser is the most used. You can set the screen to wake when camera detects movement (this can be fine tuned) and it can stay on for a set time which can all be configured in the settings of the App. You can try the 'Plus' features without buying, you just see a watermark on the screen. If you like it though, it's worth the money, £7.90.

Also forgot to mention, if it's a tablet you plan on putting on the wall, use the Fully Kiosk integration and you can can see a lot of entities. One being battery so if you have a smart plug, you can create an automation to stop charging (turn plug off) when at 80/85%, to preserve battery life, and also start charging (turn plug on) when it gets to about 20%.
 
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The1nonly1 said:
Fully Kiosk Browser is the most used. You can set the screen to wake when camera detects movement (this can be fine tuned) and it can stay on for a set time which can all be configured in the settings of the App. You can try the 'Plus' features without buying, you just see a watermark on the screen. If you like it though, it's worth the money, £7.90.

Also forgot to mention, if it's a tablet you plan on putting on the wall, use the Fully Kiosk integration and you can can see a lot of entities. One being battery so if you have a smart plug, you can create an automation to stop charging (turn plug off) when at 80/85%, to preserve battery life, and also start charging (turn plug on) when it gets to about 20%.
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Yeah, I've got a smart USB adaptor to bounce the charge 20 to 80%, just looking for a smart way to get the screen going which seems exactly what you have suggested :)
 
Set up an Alexa Echo 5th generation with 2 smart bulbs for my bedroom (shared house) - can see why this kinda thing is addictive. :o

May roll out to the rest of the house soon. :)
 
I'm currently having a bit of an issue with one of my devices, a Wiser Heating Hub, it's working generally really well but suffers from frequent disconnects from my wifi network. Drayton are on the case and having a look at diagnostics etc but the logs they can pull from the hub only show if it's disconnected for more than a minute. When I look at the logbook for the device in HA it shows a lot of disconnections lasting about 30 seconds or so. However, the logbook only stores a limited amount of history for the device which is not super helpful.

Is it possible to set HA up to keep more entries in the log for this device so I can gather much more info for the company to look at to try to work out why it's disconnecting? If so, can anyone talk me through how to set this up and how to export it so I can send it over to Drayton for them to look at?
 
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valve90210 said:
I'm currently having a bit of an issue with one of my devices, a Wiser Heating Hub, it's working generally really well but suffers from frequent disconnects from my wifi network. Drayton are on the case and having a look at diagnostics etc but the logs they can pull from the hub only show if it's disconnected for more than a minute. When I look at the logbook for the device in HA it shows a lot of disconnections lasting about 30 seconds or so. However, the logbook only stores a limited amount of history for the device which is not super helpful.

Is it possible to set HA up to keep more entries in the log for this device so I can gather much more info for the company to look at to try to work out why it's disconnecting? If so, can anyone talk me through how to set this up and how to export it so I can send it over to Drayton for them to look at?
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Yes!

Depends on how much data and how long, but short answer is to look up and change your recorder limit in your settings:
community.home-assistant.io

How to keep your recorder database size under control

Note: This guide was written for an earlier version of Home Assistant (around 2021). Since then, changes have happened, but this guide hasn’t been updated (yet). Please be aware your Home Assistant version can be slightly different, and thus you need to adapt yourself the instructions from this...
community.home-assistant.io community.home-assistant.io

If you need loads (ie a whole year) then setup grafana, just Google for a YouTube video on this
 
Is anyones zigbee network rubbish?
I have plugs which are showing as routers in z2m, but they aren't routing anything properly. Motion sensors are trying to connect to the rasp pi when there's a smart plug router 2 metres away, got no idea how to fix this :/
If I try permit join to that specific plug, it just doesn't get picked up
 
ShivP said:
Is anyones zigbee network rubbish?
I have plugs which are showing as routers in z2m, but they aren't routing anything properly. Motion sensors are trying to connect to the rasp pi when there's a smart plug router 2 metres away, got no idea how to fix this :/
If I try permit join to that specific plug, it just doesn't get picked up
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Hmm, nope mine works great - I use ZHA to run mine, but don't think that should make a huge difference?

One thing I had initially is I needed to get a short usb extension for my ZigBee usb device to take it further from my PI (seems to suffer from interference).

Once I did that it's worked well, so might be worth a test?
 
katie279 said:
Hmm, nope mine works great - I use ZHA to run mine, but don't think that should make a huge difference?

One thing I had initially is I needed to get a short usb extension for my ZigBee usb device to take it further from my PI (seems to suffer from interference).

Once I did that it's worked well, so might be worth a test?
Click to expand...
I have done that already tbh, this motion sensor shouldn't be attempting to connect to the USB at all, rather the plug right next to it. I have to take the sensor next to the hub, pair it, then take it upstairs at which point it loses signal and is useless and won't connect :/
 
Are battery powered WiFi-enabled buttons generally a bad idea?

I bought one and set it up. It works and triggers my automation but takes 30+s to start. I hadn’t realised (thought about) that on each button click it would need to wake up, connect to the WiFi and then send the signal.

Do Zigbee buttons give a more instantaneous response?
 
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