Home Assistant beginners

andy_mk3 said:
There’s many people way more creative than I am :p

I’m using a combination of fully kiosk browser and browser-mod for it.



I’m using a Fire HD10 (9th Gen I think). Used firetoolbox to debloat it and it’s perfectly ok. Screen is perfectly good enough.

I ripped the battery out of it and soldered some wires up inside to run it directly off a 5v transformer. Did not want the hassle and risks of a battery either being on charge or constantly cycled.
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Nothing against the Fires but I preferred the snappiness and IPS HD screen on the Huaweis (sunlight etc)
 
I need to look at making the interface more use friendly a bit like @ShivP was doing. Need to find some time to do some fiddling (i.e. I don't have any!) But I'll get there. What I'd like to do is enabled my wife to control things better too.

Ultimately I am interested in data from the sensors (so that I can see what's going on and make decisions) but also need to think about automations which to be honest I've never done in anything in my life as I'm a bit of a control freak. Other than being able to reply to the 30+ emails I get per day automatically!

I don't want to force automation for the sake of it, it has to be something which will help life. However what's amazing so far is having everything in one place and not have to go half dozen different apps to be able to check, turn on, and do various things. Still a massive learning curve to do but considering I can commit 1hr to it every few weeks it will be a while!

Delighted to have been introduced to it though I think long term it'll be really useful. Thank you to Katie and others for all your help to date.
 
CapitalOne said:
To all the wallmounters out there, I was doing this, I started with Kindle fires but they were too sluggish for me so I moved to Huaweis as they had a better screen and spec and they were great (apart from the sideloading needed because of Huaweis app store).

There was a big problem though - batteries. The battery bulge on both types of tablet (i.e. malfunction and fire risk) as a result of having them on power all the time. What are you doing to prevent this - do you charge them up when needed?
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Could you not set up an automation to flick a charger on and off i.e. bounce it between 20% and 80% perhaps using a smart plug
 
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Freefaller said:
I need to look at making the interface more use friendly a bit like @ShivP was doing. Need to find some time to do some fiddling (i.e. I don't have any!) But I'll get there. What I'd like to do is enabled my wife to control things better too.

Ultimately I am interested in data from the sensors (so that I can see what's going on and make decisions) but also need to think about automations which to be honest I've never done in anything in my life as I'm a bit of a control freak. Other than being able to reply to the 30+ emails I get per day automatically!

I don't want to force automation for the sake of it, it has to be something which will help life. However what's amazing so far is having everything in one place and not have to go half dozen different apps to be able to check, turn on, and do various things. Still a massive learning curve to do but considering I can commit 1hr to it every few weeks it will be a while!

Delighted to have been introduced to it though I think long term it'll be really useful. Thank you to Katie and others for all your help to date.
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Great to hear it's helped - of course, just post your musings/ideas and sure everyone can help reduce the learning curve a bit!
 
nst68 said:
I've bought a Dell WYSE 5060 N07D Thin Client from eBay for £29 delivered.

It's fanless and (fingers crossed) will run HA ok.

I'm going to follow this video to get it set up
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I loaded HA on to the Dell, I tried to use the HA backup/restore but couldn’t get it to work, created a throw away HA logon and then used the Google Drive add on to transfer my old setup across.

The only issues was that I had the old and new instances running along size each other for about an hour and all my Zigbee devices stopped working and my Alexa link broke.
Turned off the VM and Zigbee sorted itself out, had to delete all my HA devices in Alexa HA skill, unlink/link the account and they all reappeared.

I’m a lot happier now HA is on its own machine and plug direct into the router, before there were 4 switches between the router and the NAS it was running on, too much places for things to go wrong.
As the Dell is fanless it can be in the lounge with no noise.
 
Ok now I can ask Google to turn on a specific TV and tell it to set it to Plex and turn the lights down in either the TV room or the lounge (where we have TVs). That's pretty sweet! It also works!

It can remotely shutdown the Plex box if it's not being used after 30mins.
 
Bluecube said:
What you really want is to say "Turn on Plex for films in the lounge" and all that happens at once... :D
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What you REALLY want is just to have a routine attached and yell "Movie time!" at your voice assistant of choice :D

I did it with "bedtime" - set the volume to 20%, all lights in house off except bedside lamp, down to minimum brightness.
 
Freefaller said:
Ok now I can ask Google to turn on a specific TV and tell it to set it to Plex and turn the lights down in either the TV room or the lounge (where we have TVs). That's pretty sweet! It also works!

It can remotely shutdown the Plex box if it's not being used after 30mins.
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Are you paying for that connection thing to google home?
 
LuckyBenski said:
Whack these behind your switches or in the ceiling, job done. Other suppliers and brands are available ;)

https://amzn.eu/d/9cIxHsB

I'd hate to be forced to use some random tech company's idea of a nice faceplate design, and have it not match the rest of the house.
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Is there a solution for these if there's no neutral in the switch and you have spotlights?
or will it be a case of chasing through the celling to find the box for each bank of spotlights and putting it there?
 
2x SONOFF Mini R2's turned up today, going to use these for testing but i'm shocked how small they are.

One is going to be used in a ceiling rose, the other I'm going to test with a positive pressure ventilation system and a humidity sensor.

If these SONOFF modules turn out to be any good I'm going to convert all the ceiling roses in the house to run them, its what my Hue bulbs have been missing!!!!
 
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I've got my Shelly 1PM wired upto my ventilation system. It's handy when sometimes it doesn't ramp down to be able to switch it off without either toggling the breaker or getting up in the loft.
 
I think I may have shared this in the past in another thread, but I'll share it here as it's relevant. Our house has 2-zone heating, upstairs and downstairs. Before moving here I used a Nest thermostat, but wasn't really interested in buying a second one as I wasn't blown away by it, plus I was looking to move away from cloud services. So the end result was having it fully controlled by HA by using Sonoff switches in place of the room thermostats and Aqara temperature sensors, plus the creation of a couple of generic thermostats in HA.

8NbZJ1S.jpg


Added the 5v transformer there too, which is connected to the wiring that went down to the thermostat in the hallway to power my tablet.

cbtS611.jpg


Had this setup for nearly a year now and it has worked flawlessly.
 
Firestar_3x said:
2x SONOFF Mini R2's turned up today, going to use these for testing but i'm shocked how small they are.

One is going to be used in a ceiling rose, the other I'm going to test with a positive pressure ventilation system and a humidity sensor.

If these SONOFF modules turn out to be any good I'm going to convert all the ceiling roses in the house to run them, its what my Hue bulbs have been missing!!!!
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Interesting. Are there any options for wall switches with multiple switches eg 2gang/3gang?
 
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