Home Assistant beginners

964rs said:
Just to let everyone know screwfix have aqara stuff on sale at the moment for the black friday sale
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Even with their black Friday discount they're still quite pricey. Unless you need them today. For the price of their single temperature sensor I've bagged an additional one for £2 more and delivered in 6 days.
 
I currently have a range of smart home equipment (tado thermostats, nest cameras/doorbell, hue bulbs, hue dimmers, SmartThings sensors (leak/multi/motion/plugs), echo dots, Sonos, etc.) that don't all interact with each other so thinking about getting the Home Assistant Green with Sky Connect adaptor and moving everything over to Home Assistant (eventually removing SmartThings hub but continuing to use the sensor which I believe is possible with the Sky Connect).

I feel it'll give me a bit more freedom with integrations too, as SmartThings is a lot more limited in what it'll interact with compared to Home Assistant.

Am I right in thinking I would need cloud subscription for integration with Alexa and would need to pay for Google API for Nest integration?

Any general thoughts on the Home Assistant Green + SkyConnect?
 
Scotteh said:
Am I right in thinking I would need cloud subscription for integration with Alexa and would need to pay for Google API for Nest integration?
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The Nabu casa subscription is the easiest and best way to use Alexa but it's not the only. There's a lot of guides online that involve making your own Alexa skill which is free. I've done it and it's not that hard at all.

I can't help with the rest other than to say I use the sky connect and have no problems with it
 
Gentwee said:
The Nabu casa subscription is the easiest and best way to use Alexa but it's not the only. There's a lot of guides online that involve making your own Alexa skill which is free. I've done it and it's not that hard at all.

I can't help with the rest other than to say I use the sky connect and have no problems with it
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Thanks, I'll have a look around but hoping long term I wouldn't have much need for voice assistants if I can truly automate everything.
 
dlockers said:
Did anyone watch the latest LTT video that was clearly a paid advert for Homey? https://homey.app/en-gb/
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Was the massive banner at the start of the video and the call out that Homey sponsored the video before they started talking about the Homey product not the clue that it was sponsored by Homey? :p

I agree it was very clearly a paid advert.

Edit: yes I saw it, it looked interesting. I will of course need to do some further research as the above was sponsored.
 
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Has anyone moved from ZHA to Z2MQTT? I considering making the move as I've got a few Ikea devices that just are not happy with ZHA so I figured I'd give it a try with M2QTT. I run HAOS on a Dell Wyse 5060 Thin Client and would be looking to run the MQTT broker on there to through the broker addon. I use a Sonoff Zigbee USB 3.0 Dongle Plus.

Fortunately I don't have many devices connected to zigbee at the moment so it hopefully wouldn't be too bad a job to make the move but just wondered if anyone had any experience with doing so?
 
I’ve made the move. I had a lot of devices so I bought another dongle and made the move gradually, removing a device from ZHA on the old dongle and adding it to the new. It was a straight forward process that took me a couple of hours.

If you’ve only a few devices then it’ll be a matter of removing them from ZHA, removing ZHA, starting up Z2M and adding everything to Z2M.
 
Can anyone help me with Frigate camera setup? I believe I have them setup correctly but I'm not 100% sure as I got most of the information from various sources to get them working. They do show fine in HA using the Frigate card.

This is how I have the config for one of my cameras. I have 4 in total, all Reolink, 2 x RLC-510A, 1 x RLC-520A (all 3 using POE) and 1 x E1 Pro which is wireless.

I did have the RTSPtoWeb - WebRTC add-on running but since upgrading to 2024.11.2, I saw that WebRTC is built in so I disabled the add-on I had.

YAML: 
mqtt:
  host: 192.168.1.19
  user: USER
  password: PASSWORD

detectors:
  coral:
    type: edgetpu
    device: usb

go2rtc:
  streams:
    front_camera_fr_main:
      - "ffmpeg:http://192.168.1.100/flv?port=1935&app=bcs&stream=channel0_main.bcs&user=USERNAME&password=PASSWORD#video=copy#audio=copy#audio=opus"
    front_camera_fr_sub:
      - "ffmpeg:http://192.168.1.100/flv?port=1935&app=bcs&stream=channel0_ext.bcs&user=USERNAME&password=PASSWORD"

#Cameras
cameras:
  front_camera_fr:
    ffmpeg:
      inputs:
        - path: rtsp://127.0.0.1:8554/front_camera_fr_main
          input_args: preset-rtsp-restream
          roles:
            - record
        - path: rtsp://127.0.0.1:8554/front_camera_fr_sub
          input_args: preset-rtsp-restream
          roles:
            - detect
      output_args:
        record: preset-record-generic-audio-aac
    best_image_timeout: 60
    detect:
      fps: 7
      enabled: true
      width: 896
      height: 672
      max_disappeared: 25
    objects:
      track:
        - person
    motion:
      mask:
        - 0.213,0.193,0.473,0.108,0.723,0.11,0.792,0.211,1,0.541,1,0,0.436,0,0.001,0,0,0.494
        - 0.301,0.927,0.231,0.897,0.182,0.924,0.153,1,0.31,1
    zones:
      front_camera_drive_zone:
        coordinates:
          0.426,0.613,0.354,0.719,0,0.629,0,0.804,0,0.909,0,1,0.244,0.879,0.318,0.928,0.363,1,0.41,1,0.527,1,1,1,0.96,0.487,0.768,0.182,0.724,0.118,0.471,0.116,0.454,0.204,0.462,0.333,0.463,0.491
        objects: person
        inertia: 3
        loitering_time: 0
    snapshots:
      enabled: true
      timestamp: false
      bounding_box: false
      crop: false
      required_zones:
        - front_camera_drive_zone
      retain:
        default: 10
        objects:
          person: 10
    record:
      enabled: true
      expire_interval: 360
      retain:
        days: 0
        mode: motion
      events:
        pre_capture: 3
        post_capture: 3
        objects:
          - person
        retain:
          default: 10
          mode: motion
          objects:
            person: 10

    review:
      alerts:
        required_zones: front_camera_drive_zone

I then have the Frigate card set as:

YAML: 
type: custom:frigate-card
cameras:
  - camera_entity: camera.front_camera_fr
    live_provider: auto
    webrtc_card:
      entity: camera.front_camera_sub
 
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I was getting the 'no frames detected message' message yesterday (before upgrading to 2024.11.2) on two cameras despite the inputs being the same for all. I did change a couple of settings on the cameras and haven't had it since. How do I know webRTC is being used for them correctly?

I don't fully understand this part '- path: rtsp://127.0.0.1:8554/front_camera_fr_main'. How is port 8554 defined as in the Reolink app for the camera settings, that's set to port 554 for RTSP. Is the 8554 port from WebRTC on HA as it's restreaming and not using RTSP from the camera?
 
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I've taken the plunge with HA Green and the Sky Connect - I've got a load of SmartThings sensors that I've just pulled into HA with the SmartThings integration but thinking of getting more contact sensors, temp sensors, etc.

What are the recommendations for contact sensors? From what I can see the sonoff sensors seem very hit and miss, Aqara sensors need to be T1 or they don't fully comply with Zigbee 3.0? Any other recommended brands or things to watch out for?

Anything else that's a must do for a HA newbie? I've so far got all my devices integrated (nest, harmony, hue, smartthings, sonos, tado, etc.) and had to use Google Assistant SDK to control the floodlight (for whatever reason Google Nest integration doesn't allow you to control the floodlight only the attached camera, but using Google Assistant SDK you can send a notification with boolean for state), a few automations set (open food = floodlight on, battery notifications, daily backup, door/windows left open, etc - i'll eventually move ones from SmartThings over).

I've installed HACS but not done anything with dashboards yet, and hoping to eventually get a tablet wall mounted - but that can wait until I've had a play about with dashboards.
 
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