Home Assistant beginners

dLockers said:
What do you folk run HA on? I'm using a Pi and it does struggle a bit with CCTV feeds.
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I run a Dell Optiplex 5050, upgraded to an i5 7500. It runs ESXi with 3 virtual machines, OPNsense, Home Assistant and Pihole. Even with the original dual core G4400 it was never under any stress from HA, just a little underpowered for high speed internet over vpn.

But it’s a great little machine and idles at around 15w.
 
andy_mk3 said:
I run a Dell Optiplex 5050, upgraded to an i5 7500. It runs ESXi with 3 virtual machines, OPNsense, Home Assistant and Pihole. Even with the original dual core G4400 it was never under any stress from HA, just a little underpowered for high speed internet over vpn.

But it’s a great little machine and idles at around 15w.
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That's very cool actually - 15w idle is very neat!
 
katie279 said:
That's very cool actually - 15w idle is very neat!
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It is yeah. It was actually as little as 9w with the original pentium cpu :D

I also have a Dell Optiplex 5070 with an i7 9700 which runs unRaid. I preferred to have my essential services on a separate box, so the internet remains uninterrupted if I need to reboot unraid or something.
 
andy_mk3 said:
I run a Dell Optiplex 5050, upgraded to an i5 7500. It runs ESXi with 3 virtual machines, OPNsense, Home Assistant and Pihole. Even with the original dual core G4400 it was never under any stress from HA, just a little underpowered for high speed internet over vpn.

But it’s a great little machine and idles at around 15w.
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Ah fair - I have an Optiplex 3020 that runs Plex. I guess I can run HA on it as a VM or something?
 
YMMV but I started off using HA as an Unraid VM before moving to RPi4. After the move there was a very noticeable improvement in responsiveness across the board from motion activated lights to heating based automations to zigbee button based automations.
 
just to post an update on my sunset/sunrise automations problems i was having, so have had the following running for the last two nights and it appears to be running fine, so will duplicate it and move all my HK automations over and let them run and then go about trying the 30 minutes before sunset option.
Thanks all

condition: sun
before: sunrise
after: sunset
enabled: true
 
Having been tinkering with Home Assistant since just before Christmas, and keen to add more to it to make it worth while - it currently can control all my lights, my heating etc, I recently setup a system for reminding me to take vitamin tablets each day. It's based on a post I found from someone who has a similar setup for remembering to feed their dog but with a few adaptations so it works nicely for me.

Basically I have an NFC tag on the container, which I scan with my phone when I take a tablet, this is then recorded by HA, and it keeps a running counter of how many days in a row I've done it, and sends me a reminder if I've not taken a tablet by 8pm. A bit daft I know but actually I've found it really helpful.

At the weekend I intend to setup an NFC tag that will toggle away mode on my heating when scanned with my phone which will be handy, but I'm now trying to think what else I can use HA for.
 
valve90210 said:
Having been tinkering with Home Assistant since just before Christmas, and keen to add more to it to make it worth while - it currently can control all my lights, my heating etc, I recently setup a system for reminding me to take vitamin tablets each day. It's based on a post I found from someone who has a similar setup for remembering to feed their dog but with a few adaptations so it works nicely for me.

Basically I have an NFC tag on the container, which I scan with my phone when I take a tablet, this is then recorded by HA, and it keeps a running counter of how many days in a row I've done it, and sends me a reminder if I've not taken a tablet by 8pm. A bit daft I know but actually I've found it really helpful.

At the weekend I intend to setup an NFC tag that will toggle away mode on my heating when scanned with my phone which will be handy, but I'm now trying to think what else I can use HA for.
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There will be a lot you can do, lights on/off at certain time of day, lights on when motion (need motion sensor) etc for basic automation. Just because HA can do something, should you have an automation for it? You don't want to over complicate tasks.

One of my favourites I have is if there is motion detected on entry points (with motion sensors) and the alarm is armed (Yale), after 11 seconds (the time I have to disable alarm before it triggers), all lights will come at 100% brightness and my Google Home speakers will start playing sound at 100% volume.

I also have another for kitchen lights that, depending on the time of day/night, will come on at a certain brightness. It's a lower brightness between midnight and 5 am compared to 5pm to midnight.

Have another that announces the temperature of my sons room 30 minutes before we take him to bed so we know if it needs warming or not.

Outside light will turn on if motion detected from cameras during the night.

Alarm armed at certain time if we forget to put it on.

I get notifications to discord whenever person comes onto the front drive regardless of time of day. Also if motion is detected on any camera, recording of that event is saved.
 
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ShivP said:
It is a Pi 3B+ 1GB to be fair, should think about moving to something more beefy
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Assume you're using an SD card? Maybe look into replacing it with an SSD. There's plenty of guides for how to do it.

I switched my PI4 out from a memory card to an old SSD I had lying around and it made a world of difference. The main reason I did it was my SD card got corrupted, which is a known issue with HA because it's constantly writing to the SD card

I bought a cheap "Sabrent USB 3.0 to SSD / 2.5-Inch SATA I/II/III Hard Drive Adapter (EC-SSHD)" adapter but I'm assuming you can use one of these instead.
 
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Pho said:
Assume you're using an SD card? Maybe look into replacing it with an SSD. There's plenty of guides for how to do it.

I switched my PI4 out from a memory card to an old SSD I had lying around and it made a world of difference. The main reason I did it was my SD card got corrupted, which is a known issue with HA because it's constantly writing to the SD card

I bought a cheap "Sabrent USB 3.0 to SSD / 2.5-Inch SATA I/II/III Hard Drive Adapter (EC-SSHD)" adapter but I'm assuming you can use one of these instead.
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I would not go with that case or adapter but instead get the argo pi case. There's one where u can put either a ssd nvme hdd or a 2.5hdd
 
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