Home Assistant beginners

Pickers · 10 Sep 2023 at 13:30

9th gen I think. Most dashboard components are ok, but the GivTCP stuff seems to be slow to load on most hardware, but painfully so on the fire7...

katie279 · 11 Sep 2023 at 07:22

Pickers said:
I got.it set up on the fire 7 but the dashboards are so slow to populate the data - no idea why the tablet should be slow as this would surely be a networking thing? The same dashboards show up near instantly on my phone and desktop.

Oh, and the battery died overnight - so yeah the fire7 isn't going to be the display I ultimately use!!

Heh, well it sounds like it was more the hardware than the software then - sounds like it was on its last legs!

SoliD · 11 Sep 2023 at 11:58

Semple said:
If they have integrations then an automation script is probably easiest. If you always want them all on, then you could use the TV as a trigger - i.e. when TV changes state to on then switch on X device.

I'm sure there will be integrations for sky q, shield and ps4 but the amp might be a more involved one. If that's just a case of powering on you could use a smart plug for it.

Just wanted it to run the harmony hub activity but I can't find it in the automation piece.

ScoobyDoo · 17 Sep 2023 at 12:36

Migrated from a raspberry pi install to a WYSE 5020 system. Got the 5020 for £30, absolute bargain.
Took some doing getting home assistant installed on it but once installed it runs great. Well worth it, its got a higher electric usage than the pi but
its much more stable, i was having quite a few crashes with the pi.

fish · 17 Sep 2023 at 16:24

JRJ said:
Let me know how you get on with it? Didn't realise the r4 had been released, nice smaller size and the detach relay function is pretty cool, still only 2.4gHz WIFI though

Installed 2 today for the front and back outside lights. Fairly painless ordeal easy just get into the correct wires and then pair with the app, I’m pretty impressed so far

fish · 17 Sep 2023 at 16:26

ScoobyDoo said:
Migrated from a raspberry pi install to a WYSE 5020 system. Got the 5020 for £30, absolute bargain.
Took some doing getting home assistant installed on it but once installed it runs great. Well worth it, its got a higher electric usage than the pi but
its much more stable, i was having quite a few crashes with the pi.

Did you run the pi from an sd card? I have moved over to ssds for all mine due to this, the logging in home assistant will kill a card in no time

ScoobyDoo · 17 Sep 2023 at 21:04

fish said:
Did you run the pi from an sd card? I have moved over to ssds for all mine due to this, the logging in home assistant will kill a card in no time

Yeah I changed over to an external SSD drive on the pi but still had daily crashes. It could just have been the setup I suppose as I've done a new install on the Wyse.
Luckily everything just feels snappier on the Wyse.
I'll put the pi to good use for some other project

Pickers · 17 Sep 2023 at 22:02

How did you find migrating? I want to migrate to a VM...

ScoobyDoo said:
Yeah I changed over to an external SSD drive on the pi but still had daily crashes. It could just have been the setup I suppose as I've done a new install on the Wyse.
Luckily everything just feels snappier on the Wyse.
I'll put the pi to good use for some other project

dlockers · 17 Sep 2023 at 22:19

Pickers said:
How did you find migrating? I want to migrate to a VM...

Just do a full backup and restore. I've got a bit lazy and just left my Pi and VM running but they're pretty much identical. Some debugging I'll get to later probably due to session IDs and having both simultaneously running but it's a piece of cake.

Pickers · 18 Sep 2023 at 06:26

When you installed the new instance, at first log in, did you find an option to restore from.backhp, or did you have to create the system first (name, location etc) and then overwrite it with a restore from.backup?

dlockers · 18 Sep 2023 at 07:14

Pickers said:
When you installed the new instance, at first log in, did you find an option to restore from.backhp, or did you have to create the system first (name, location etc) and then overwrite it with a restore from.backup?

The installer wizard offers install or restore as like screen 1.

alphaomega16 · 18 Sep 2023 at 18:04

Anybody here got HA running on a laptop via USB drive?

LuckyBenski · 18 Sep 2023 at 18:51

alphaomega16 said:
Anybody here got HA running on a laptop via USB drive?

In what sense? Using a USB stick as the storage for it? Not sure why you'd want to do that, maybe I've misunderstood?

Edit: Ah do you mean bare metal HA running from a bootable USB?

alphaomega16 · 18 Sep 2023 at 22:43

LuckyBenski said:
In what sense? Using a USB stick as the storage for it? Not sure why you'd want to do that, maybe I've misunderstood?

Edit: Ah do you mean bare metal HA running from a bootable USB?

Yes, install home assistant to an nvme drive then slap it in an enclosure, saves faffing about opening up a laptop and whatnot and I was going to use mums laptop that she isn't currently using but keep the option open for if she wants it for anything, has to be more efficient than leaving a gaming PC on 24/7 that has a 12700k and 3080 in it lol, this thing idle is ~60w minimum but jumps around 60-80, laptop has to be a lot less than that, its a cheapie one with 4gb ram.

Pickers · 4 Oct 2023 at 22:12

It's early days still but touch wood since migrating HA to a virtual machine on a mini PC, I have had no drop outs and sensor fails.

The proof will be in the pudding when some of the integrations update as this usually was when my GivTCP sensors would stop communicating and only kicked back in after a full restart.

Now I just need to get a Bluetooth proxy set up as I can't pass through the Bluetooth to the virtual machine.

Bluecube · 4 Oct 2023 at 22:39

What are you using for your VMs? Bluetooth should be straightforward to pass through. I use Proxmox for my HA VM and passing through the onboard Bluetooth was as simple as selecting it. Maybe try a dongle?

Pickers · 5 Oct 2023 at 21:02

hyper-V..I'm quite happy with it and don't really want to start from.scratch again with a different hypervisor....

I'm just as happy to use esphome

TechMinerUK · 7 Oct 2023 at 22:26

Bluecube said:
What are you using for your VMs? Bluetooth should be straightforward to pass through. I use Proxmox for my HA VM and passing through the onboard Bluetooth was as simple as selecting it. Maybe try a dongle?

Hyper-V doesn't support USB pass-through as far as I'm aware, well not in a straight forward and documented way
@Pickers I'd be interested to see how to setup a Bluetooth proxy, I've just started with Zigbee2MQTT for some of our Zigbee stuff however we have some weird Bluetooth RGB strips which for the life of me I can't figure out how to get bolted onto HA

Pickers · 8 Oct 2023 at 06:19

TechMinerUK said:
Hyper-V doesn't support USB pass-through as far as I'm aware, well not in a straight forward and documented way
@Pickers I'd be interested to see how to setup a Bluetooth proxy, I've just started with Zigbee2MQTT for some of our Zigbee stuff however we have some weird Bluetooth RGB strips which for the life of me I can't figure out how to get bolted onto HA

Really easy!! I was done in 5 minutes and because I migrated my HA from a raspberry pi, all of my previously connected Bluetooth devices just popped back up without configuration.

I got some generic esp32 microboards (sp-cow esp32 are the ones I got).
Plugged them into pc using usb cable
Clicked the connect button on https://esphome.io/projects/ (I had to download the windows driver from a link there)
This flashed the esp32 boards with esphome software and then a prompt sent me to the Home assistant integration from there.

dlockers · 8 Oct 2023 at 08:32

I'm progressively having everything fail on mine - the Samsung integration, Mercedes and Peugeot are all unavailable. Annoying!

I raised a bug on the PSA app but the dev just closed it after 3 or 4 months despite many sharing the same issue.