Home Assistant beginners

Personally i'd always go down the VM route so that i can use the hardware for other things, HA doesn't use a huge amount so it seems a shame to lock a NUC just for that

I went the opposite and did a bare metal. I just didn't want the extra complication of virtualization - altho I had a sour taste from a dodgy Bluetooth/virtual box install so probably unfounded.

I went down the VM route too when I outgrew my raspberry pi w/ SSD instance. Helper scripts for promox etc. make it super easy to spin up an instance and it barely tickles the host machine's resources. Passing through USB for zigbee was as simple as a tick box too.

On a powerful enough host device I always go for virtualisation. HA has had some releases that have broken my setup for a while so being able to restore the whole VM back in seconds is worth it.

The other thing I do for an easier life with HA is to use an ethernet based Zigbee controller. Although USB can be passed through I've never found that as reliable (drivers/mobo issues etc) as ethernet based and the ability to locate it in the best location.
Thanks for the replies everyone

Ok then, fun times ahead, Im not too worried about locking up the NUC, but if Im going to experiment I might as well go all in and try virtualisation. Im comfortable with installing Linux, updating packages I wasn't so sure on, but I was reading now that Linux has a package manager which should make things easier. Last time I used Linux was Mandrake and it would have been around the early 2000's and that was me testing it for moving away from Red hat, it has been a while, so this will be a fun little project.

Something tells me this could develop into a proper little rabbit hole :D
 
For VMs I’d use Proxmox rather than a standard Linux install. It’s got a bit of a learning curve but is relatively straight forward to use from the get go. There’s even a script to install HA which requires minimal work from yourself - https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/
Is that a distro or something more like virtualbox?
From a very quick google it looks like a VM environment/OS, Id rather have the additional functionality of a linux distro.
I might have got this wrong so will have a google later when I finish work
 
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It’s a Linux based VM environment and a very good one too. It uses the same virtualisation tech as that which you’ll install on a normal Linux distro
 
Just a heads up incase it helps anyone as I was getting pretty annoyed with this for a few hours :D Recently bought a few cheap athom smart plug V2's to dot about in key areas. It was very hit and miss on setup, sometimes taking hours to detect in HA. Then when updating they wouldn't come back and on power loss they took ages to come back. Would get random drop outs for periods of time.

Anyway I tracked it down to my wifi settings, these things do not like 40mhz wide on the 2.4ghz band. Switched it to 20mhz from 20/40 and they all connect in seconds now.
Please never use 40MHz on 2.4GHz.
 
Ha Ha, this NUC is older than I thought! By about 6 yrs!
2C/4T 4th gen i5-4250U, though 16Gb of RAM, and CPU supports VT-x

I think I will go for a bare metal install of home assistant so that it has all the resources available. It is good to repurpose old forgotten hardware and bring it back to life for something.
 
I bought a few(!) Aqara light switches from AliExpress.

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I fitted a two single switches ok and then hit the problems.

Tried to fit a single switch that was one of a two way pair (bottom switch for the landing light).
Despite me trying all the wiring combinations I could think of, I couldn’t get it to work properly, either the light only worked on one switch or neither worked.
Doesn’t look like the switches work in a 2 way setup, so might have to change one of them to a purely wireless one, which will control the one that’s wired in.

Then went to fit the 3 way one in the kitchen, but it’s a shallow back box and the switch doesn’t fit :(

I’ve got an electrician coming on Monday to do some other work, will have to pick his brains.
 
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Another +1 for the VM route. I described my fiasco in this thread about a couple of weeks ago where something funky happened to my install that was causing it to crash about every 15 minutes. It was an absolute delight to be able to restore a working VM within minutes. It's that much quicker I don't even bother with the internal HA backup feature anymore.

Also another +1 for one of SMLight's POE zigbee coordinators. The fact you can just plug it into the network and it's picked up by HA makes it incredibly easy to setup.
 
Another +1 for the VM route. I described my fiasco in this thread about a couple of weeks ago where something funky happened to my install that was causing it to crash about every 15 minutes. It was an absolute delight to be able to restore a working VM within minutes. It's that much quicker I don't even bother with the internal HA backup feature anymore.
It is definitely something I will look at in the future, especially on seeing how cheap mini pc's have become, but with a 10yr old NUC as a trial device for now a bare metal install will save on resources as I don't have that many to start with
2C/4T and 16GB of RAM...
 
HA will run happily on a Pi3, you’ll be fine!
Im going to take it into work tomorrow, USB boot works fine and I get to the Proxmox install screen but that is as far as I get, it isn't recognising my mech keyboard so I can't select an install option.
Gonna find some crappy usb2 keyboard and see if that helps
 
Hi. does anyone use these https://www.tapo.com/uk/product/smart-light-bulb/tapo-l900-5/ or similar that works with HA?

I am looking for one and came across this one. However i seem to see that although many of these can be cut to length, it seems once you cut it, the discarded strips are useless as you need to get a seperate wifi controler and power cable for the other one and for TP link at least, i cannot find them selling the wifi controller and power seperately so you can in theory cut the 5m ligth strip in half and use two wifi controllers to connect and place the light strips in different locations
 
I’ve just got another mini PC that I’ll get set up as a Proxmox host over the weekend. I think I’ll try out the full HA VM route just to see what it’s about, but I’m not sure I’ve got anything automate-able in the house :D
 
Hi. does anyone use these https://www.tapo.com/uk/product/smart-light-bulb/tapo-l900-5/ or similar that works with HA?

I am looking for one and came across this one. However i seem to see that although many of these can be cut to length, it seems once you cut it, the discarded strips are useless as you need to get a seperate wifi controler and power cable for the other one and for TP link at least, i cannot find them selling the wifi controller and power seperately so you can in theory cut the 5m ligth strip in half and use two wifi controllers to connect and place the light strips in different locations
I use govee ones. It has a web app and a lan controller
 
Having had a few sonoff motion sensors fail on me, I decided to go for a Everything Presence Lite to go in my kitchen to turn the lights on when it's getting dark and there are people in the kitchen.

It arrived yesterday and I've quickly set it up and it seems to be working nicely, I setup a quick test automation to turn the lights on when I went in the kitchen and turn them off when the kitchen was unoccupied. This worked beautifully so I decided to update my kitchen light automations which I had previously been using with a sonoff motion sensor.

But I seem to be having a problem with the automations now in that they don't seem to be working if I have before/after sunset/sunrise as a condition? They used to work fine until the motion sensors died on me but now they're not. I can see that they have been triggered but the lights aren't turning on. When I remove the sun condition they work again.

Has anyone else noticed any issues with this?
 
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