Soldato
you are a genius
Home Assistant beginners
- Thread starter katie279
- Start date
Soldato
I'm learning - just added a few things for now, awaiting my home mini so i can add an energy dashboard from my smart meters
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Check out Hildebrand Glow (DCC) Integration. If you sign up to Bright (play store) it connects to your smart meters via the big data warehouse in the cloud. It's only every 30 mins but can give you reasonable usage stats on gas and electricity.I'm learning - just added a few things for now, awaiting my home mini so i can add an energy dashboard from my smart meters
Soldato
i have bright app already - but i need to learn all this stuff...its alien to me, but i will get there
Yeah as anything, takes a little while then it becomes less stressful and quite fun.
Soldato
i need to install hacs first, as i dont have it installed currently
I still haven't grasped why they haven't included hacs in the base install when so many users install it anyway.
I know there's the line between it being a fully tested and supported component to end up in the add-on store, versus anyone has made a component and stuck it on hacs, but just seems a faff.
I know there's the line between it being a fully tested and supported component to end up in the add-on store, versus anyone has made a component and stuck it on hacs, but just seems a faff.
Soldato
Does it give you export data too??
Soldato
how can you add yaml code if you dont have supervisor in HA.... i have a sensor that needs to be reconfigured from power to energy, but i need to add the yaml code for it to work
Looks like i need a newer version of HA.....aaahhhhhhhhh its a headache lol
Looks like i need a newer version of HA.....aaahhhhhhhhh its a headache lol
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But just wait until you get it working, you'll be able to achieve unlimited levels of madness.....
Hands on Katie on Instagram: "I made some Home Assistant powered smart art for my dining room! Each picture is based on a theme relating to a nationality of music and tapping your phone in 3 secret spots on each plays custom playlists in one tap! (
69 likes, 5 comments - Hands on Katie (@handsonk80) on Instagram: "I made some Home Assistant powered smart art for my dining room! Each picture is based on a the..."
www.instagram.com
Do post if you have any questions! We're here to help (well except @dLockers he's here to take you down, but he told me not to say that.... )
I've now got a pretty good working prototype of my smart irrigation system for the greenhouse.
It's pretty basic setup, and fairly cheap too.
- 1x ESP32 module (Cannot be ESP8266 due to single ADC channel - didn't want to go the multiplexing route)
- 4x plant moisture sensors
- 4x solenoid valves
- 1x pump
- 5v relay with enough channels for solenoid valves and pumps
- Mixture of tubing lengths and diameters
- Mixture of Y connectors
- DC drop down voltage due to 12v needed for pump and solenoids
- DHT22 sensor for tracking temperature and humidity.
Essentially the pump splits off twice into 4 channels to connect each to a solenoid valve. Then the valves and the pump each connect to a separate relay channel to turn them on/off or open/closed for the valves. From there some smaller tubing then connects to irrigation drips in the plant pots. Additionally I also have the moisture sensors placed in each pot that has a drip.
A couple of concerns I had thought of / have observed with remote usage:
- sometimes there can be a delay with the relay activating, and if I activate the pump first and then a valve doesn't open then it's trying to pump water nowhere and might spring a leak.
- when observing remotely after I've activated the pump and valve the moisture levels sometimes haven't budged much despite running for a couple of minutes. I did notice from my initial testing that it sometimes suffers with a vacuum/siphon effect which can cause an air bubble and shut the pump off (safety feature of the pump when it runs dry).
I set up some basic scripts for each plant pot that essentially does:
1 - checks if the soil moisture level is below 50% (if it's above then the script ends there)
2 - opens the valve for that plant pot and waits 15 seconds (allows for a delay if the relay is slow)
3 - switches on the pump for about a minute and a half
4 - after a 15 second delay it closes the valve for that plant pot (in case of any delay)
I then have an automation that runs through those in sequence - the pump can manage 4 channels in parallel but you can see the pots furthest away not getting as much water, so I felt it was better to only have one valve open at a time.
Probably quite crucially the whole thing is fed from a very big bucket of water (I don't trust my electronics being connected to the main water supply - visions of coming back home one day to a lake in my garden). At least if there is a fault then it's only what's contained in the big bucket that would be lost.
I haven't fully decided what to display in a dashboard yet, but at the moment I just have gauges for moisture levels, and buttons to run the scripts for the above sequence.
Future expansions:
- I've got a second esp32 board to add, I've normally got more than 4 plants in the greenhouse, so figured doubling up wouldn't take much effort
- flow level sensor after the pump to a) confirm water is flowing and b) measure water consumption
- some sort of water level sensor on my water storage tank - can alert me when it's low / needs topping up.
It's pretty basic setup, and fairly cheap too.
- 1x ESP32 module (Cannot be ESP8266 due to single ADC channel - didn't want to go the multiplexing route)
- 4x plant moisture sensors
- 4x solenoid valves
- 1x pump
- 5v relay with enough channels for solenoid valves and pumps
- Mixture of tubing lengths and diameters
- Mixture of Y connectors
- DC drop down voltage due to 12v needed for pump and solenoids
- DHT22 sensor for tracking temperature and humidity.
Essentially the pump splits off twice into 4 channels to connect each to a solenoid valve. Then the valves and the pump each connect to a separate relay channel to turn them on/off or open/closed for the valves. From there some smaller tubing then connects to irrigation drips in the plant pots. Additionally I also have the moisture sensors placed in each pot that has a drip.
A couple of concerns I had thought of / have observed with remote usage:
- sometimes there can be a delay with the relay activating, and if I activate the pump first and then a valve doesn't open then it's trying to pump water nowhere and might spring a leak.
- when observing remotely after I've activated the pump and valve the moisture levels sometimes haven't budged much despite running for a couple of minutes. I did notice from my initial testing that it sometimes suffers with a vacuum/siphon effect which can cause an air bubble and shut the pump off (safety feature of the pump when it runs dry).
I set up some basic scripts for each plant pot that essentially does:
1 - checks if the soil moisture level is below 50% (if it's above then the script ends there)
2 - opens the valve for that plant pot and waits 15 seconds (allows for a delay if the relay is slow)
3 - switches on the pump for about a minute and a half
4 - after a 15 second delay it closes the valve for that plant pot (in case of any delay)
I then have an automation that runs through those in sequence - the pump can manage 4 channels in parallel but you can see the pots furthest away not getting as much water, so I felt it was better to only have one valve open at a time.
Probably quite crucially the whole thing is fed from a very big bucket of water (I don't trust my electronics being connected to the main water supply - visions of coming back home one day to a lake in my garden). At least if there is a fault then it's only what's contained in the big bucket that would be lost.
I haven't fully decided what to display in a dashboard yet, but at the moment I just have gauges for moisture levels, and buttons to run the scripts for the above sequence.
Future expansions:
- I've got a second esp32 board to add, I've normally got more than 4 plants in the greenhouse, so figured doubling up wouldn't take much effort
- flow level sensor after the pump to a) confirm water is flowing and b) measure water consumption
- some sort of water level sensor on my water storage tank - can alert me when it's low / needs topping up.
Love it, great work!!
I was just thinking about doing the same!
What's your relay/valves that you've used??
I was just thinking about doing the same!
What's your relay/valves that you've used??
Just cheapy 5v relay and 12v solenoids from AliExpress, I think they have something called a low level trigger on the relays. I think the solenoids are about £2ea and for an 8 channel relay was maybe £6-8.
Soldato
i have finally got a new raspberry Pi4 for decent money..... lets re-do the HA journey
Managed to deploy a HA Docker container on my RPI4 and get the start of a dashboard going.
Even wrote a simple scraper sensor to pull Oil Tank levels from the suppliers website...took some trial and error!
Need to start looking into what smart enabled plug sockets and light switches to trial now.
Even wrote a simple scraper sensor to pull Oil Tank levels from the suppliers website...took some trial and error!
Need to start looking into what smart enabled plug sockets and light switches to trial now.
I'm new to HA but have done some tinkering but it does seem sluggish at times, and my log does show lots of warnings - fairly often it will lose bluetooth and hence knock out govee humidity/temp bluetooth sensors
I have it running on a pi 3b+ running from an external SSD and I think the RAM usage is close to capacity. Do you you think its worth updating to pi4 for stability?
KIOSK
Secondly, I have an amazon fire 7 kicking around doing nothing, and would like a permanent display for home assistant display (now that my smart meter IHD is redundant due to not being able to cope with changing daily electricity costs).
Has anyone repurposed a kindle to be a HA display/kiosk? Any good guides?
I've got one for the Fire 10...
Make a wall mounted control panel for your Home Assistant – Hands on Katie
Ever wanted to make your smart home smarter? With this guide, transform your Kindle Fire 10 into a sleek wall-mounted Home Assistant touch screen using a custom 3D printed frame. Let’s get started!
handsonkatie.com
Hopefully you might get some ideas from this and obviously PM me if any extra questions/bits not clear!
Well now that's fairly straight forward. I might give the fire toolbox a go first as the fire7 is pretty sluggish. I've seen guides with pages of info on how to actually link kiosk and HA with integrations and the like - what did you do, or did you simp just put the HA URL and left it on the Lovelace dashboard?I've got one for the Fire 10...
Make a wall mounted control panel for your Home Assistant – Hands on Katie
Ever wanted to make your smart home smarter? With this guide, transform your Kindle Fire 10 into a sleek wall-mounted Home Assistant touch screen using a custom 3D printed frame. Let’s get started!
Hopefully you might get some ideas from this and obviously PM me if any extra questions/bits not clear!
Yes exactly right, really simple really just load the URL and that's it - there's a few tweaks you can make for convenience (eg I use the webcam to wake the tablet when I pass, but purely optional).
I'm pretty sure using firetoolbox will improve the performance of the fire 7 also as it'll take a lot of bloat away, so wins all around!