Home Assistant beginners

Demon said:
Is a R-Pi (probably a 5 with SSD) definitely not a good idea for HA?

I've been running HA as a VM in Unraid but due to the length of time and number of updates I am at a point I've got issues with legacy integration baggage and side loaded stuff that is now officially supported that I want to clear it out and start again.

I have had a couple of server hardware issues that meant it was out of action for a week which was a PITA as all my automation stopped, and on top of that, I have dedicated cores/memory for the VM which I could free up for Unraid which at times is max'd out.

I can see people mentioning compatibility issues so just wanted to check if it's a daft idea!
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I've been running on a 4 with SSD for a few years now, and I'd say I'm probably a med-heavy user. As an intro into HA it'll do you well, and last for a while.

Some of my energy monitoring devices are very chatty and those write out a lot to the database. I've now decided to move over a VM running on Proxmox - a) for the performance uplift and b) for the ease of backing up. Rather than having to deploy a new VM and then restore from backup I can just restore the entire VM.
 
What Zigbee controllers are people using? I've been running a Conbee2 for 5+ years now, and whilst it's been mostly good the range is a bit temperamental. I think support for Deconz is falling behind ZHA/Z2M, so looking to move forward with a slightly different setup, but also with much better range.

The contenders at the moment look to be:
- Sonoff zigbee 3.0 Plus E
- SMLight SLZB-06p7 (PoE)

I don't mind either PoE or USB.
 
Semple said:
The contenders at the moment look to be:
- Sonoff zigbee 3.0 Plus E
- SMLight SLZB-06p7 (PoE)
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I have a couple of SMLight SLZB-06P7 and they have been excellent so far - I wanted to get away from USB due to issues with virtualisation and placement. The only odd thing I noticed is one of them showed much higher temperature readings than the other but checking with an IR thermometer and thermal camera showed no difference so I used the temperature sensor calibration feature to sort that.
 
Simon42 said:
I have a couple of SMLight SLZB-06P7 and they have been excellent so far - I wanted to get away from USB due to issues with virtualisation and placement. The only odd thing I noticed is one of them showed much higher temperature readings than the other but checking with an IR thermometer and thermal camera showed no difference so I used the temperature sensor calibration feature to sort that.
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Interesting, you say a couple - was my understanding you could only run the one 'router' per network, with the idea of having repeaters to extend range / build redundancy. Do you have multiple zigbee networks set up? (Or are these in entirely different locations)
 
Semple said:
Interesting, you say a couple - was my understanding you could only run the one 'router' per network, with the idea of having repeaters to extend range / build redundancy. Do you have multiple zigbee networks set up? (Or are these in entirely different locations)
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You can have multiple coordinators with Z2M using multiple instances or ZHA and Z2M at the same time. I did have two for a while to experiment with ZHA vs Z2M but am now back to one coordinator for all devices plus a number of dedicated routers (re-flashed Sonoff Zigbee Dongles) so the second SLZB-06P7 is a spare that I can put in service in a few minutes if ever needed.
 
Pickers said:
So I have done this, but dont seem to have access to any new devices or entities in the integration :(
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I can't remember if it was this or one of the other Octopus integrations but they needed 24hrs before you saw any data (guess it needed to fill some data structure :confused:).

Are you still seeing nothing?
 
Pickers said:
So I have done this, but dont seem to have access to any new devices or entities in the integration :(
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I added mine recently and both gas and electric showed up as devices/entities immediately.

I assume you can view your live feed in the octopus app? Think you also needed your account number.
 
Finally got around to creating a 3D floor plan. Created using Sweethome3D.



Ive got some YAML code that changes the main image between day and night views using a sensor template.
All lights are clickable and cast lighting changes on the plan using this great Sweethome3D plugin https://github.com/shmuelzon/home-assistant-floor-plan/
and ive done some more code to select the correct lighting depending on day or night.
All my home cctv is also viewable.
Still got a few things to tidy up and to add some more info like room temperatures, time/date etc but quite happy with how it looks at the moment.
 
Last edited:
Spent a good few hours on this tonight.
Got the time and weather displayed and also a avatar pictures of different family members depending who's at home
If anyone wants help with the yaml for something like this let me know.
 
ScoobyDoo said:
Finally got around to creating a 3D floor plan. Created using Sweethome3D.



Ive got some YAML code that changes the main image between day and night views using a sensor template.
All lights are clickable and cast lighting changes on the plan using this great Sweethome3D plugin https://github.com/shmuelzon/home-assistant-floor-plan/
and ive done some more code to select the correct lighting depending on day or night.
All my home cctv is also viewable.
Still got a few things to tidy up and to add some more info like room temperatures, time/date etc but quite happy with how it looks at the moment.
Click to expand...
I've been trying to decide if I should have a play at setting up a system over winter, and I think you may have just swung it for me!
 
the-evaluator said:
I like that. I like that a lot,

I've been planning to do something similar but just haven't had the time. The plan is to have it displayed on a couple of small screens around the house so that smart lights and what no can be turned on without needing to deal with the ball ache that is Alexa.
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How is alexa a ball ache? My 3 year old can manage to turn her own light on with it :cry:
 
the-evaluator said:
I like that. I like that a lot,

I've been planning to do something similar but just haven't had the time. The plan is to have it displayed on a couple of small screens around the house so that smart lights and what no can be turned on without needing to deal with the ball ache that is Alexa.
Click to expand...

I've got three Fire HD 10 tablets (refurbs bought when heavily discounted) around the house and some other tiny audio input devices and use all these devices with HA voice control and internal network only speech processing and it works really well. This is helpful for us as it reduces the space needed for the main HA dashboard as its primary view is 70% CCTV as we have lots of cameras and like to view them all the time.
 
Gav_r26 said:
How is alexa a ball ache? My 3 year old can manage to turn her own light on with it :cry:
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Because most of the time the Alexa that responds to me is the one that's far enough away that I can't hear the response. With Echo Dot's and Sonos One's we've got quite a few Alexa devices around the house and I'm not joking when I say that when I'm downstairs in the kitchen it'll often be the Echo in the bedroom that responds.

Oh, and quite a lot of the time NONE of them will respond.

I could reduce the number of devices, but the reason we have the number we have is that we needed extra to get it to hear us.
 
Sounds odd. We have them in most rooms and have no issues.

Having said that the wife struggles with them sometime but she also hasnt done the voice teaching routine. Then again nor has the child and they quite happily turn on lights and play frozen for her!
 
ScoobyDoo said:
Finally got around to creating a 3D floor plan. Created using Sweethome3D.



Ive got some YAML code that changes the main image between day and night views using a sensor template.
All lights are clickable and cast lighting changes on the plan using this great Sweethome3D plugin https://github.com/shmuelzon/home-assistant-floor-plan/
and ive done some more code to select the correct lighting depending on day or night.
All my home cctv is also viewable.
Still got a few things to tidy up and to add some more info like room temperatures, time/date etc but quite happy with how it looks at the moment.
Click to expand...

Is it usable on mobile device?

I'm still finding the dashboards finicky, I either view a dashboard on my 30" PC monitor, or on my phone in portrait.

I tried the new sections thinking this allowed more control over positioning, but this just allows you to drag and drop the ordering, the layout is terrible. Sidebar works great on a big monitor, but then scales down terribly when looking on my phone.

I refuse to go down the route of creating separate dashboards for the different devices.
 
Semple said:
Is it usable on mobile device?

I'm still finding the dashboards finicky, I either view a dashboard on my 30" PC monitor, or on my phone in portrait.

I tried the new sections thinking this allowed more control over positioning, but this just allows you to drag and drop the ordering, the layout is terrible. Sidebar works great on a big monitor, but then scales down terribly when looking on my phone.

I refuse to go down the route of creating separate dashboards for the different devices.
Click to expand...
It doesn't work on my phone. The layout is all over the place. I'm using it on a 10inch wall mounted tablet which is perfect.
I've found the only way to get it to look right on a phone is to create a separate dashboard but we don't use our phones to control the house so haven't needed to do this luckily
 
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