Home Assistant beginners

I am a few months into my home assistant journey now, and have played about with cool graphical dashboarding, but finding it tiresome swapping cards/navigating via HA on old tablets. So have gone down the "one dashboard" approach and that seems to work well for me.

I do need to add some stuff for the a Tesla though!

What is the best way to talk to the tesla (mostly just interested in battery % figure) so I can use it to dump excess solar into it when it is at home, and the house batteries are full!
 
Last edited:
I am trying to add it to hacs repository but can’t add the type. Just blank in drop down , can’t do anything

 
Last edited:
For setting up stuff on HA, I'd use a computer just because it's got a bigger screen and information isn't cut off. Failing that, trying to using a browser on your iPad rather than the app. The app is good but I always find it better for control rather than setting things up.
 
I used to have a full on HA setup back in South Africa. It was in the early says of home automation. I had solar, boiler (geyser), lights, garage door, gate, etc all hooked up.

We're moving into our first home next month, and I want to setup a new HA for the house. I'm thinking of going all in on Zigbee stuff which I am lead to believe will be better due to the mesh network - but needs a hub so to speak. Is Zigbee compatible stuff still the way to go?

I used a lot go Sonoff devices which were flashed with custom firmware and some ESP82(?) boards too. But if the wifi went down, so did the home automation functions. Very annoying.

I also have an oldish NUC to run it off from as well.

I'll be wanting to control / monitor whatever I can, really just because why not. :D
 
Priapus said:
I used to have a full on HA setup back in South Africa.
Click to expand...
Wow, another boerie!

If you're running from a NUC then you can get a USB Zigbee coordinator rather than one that bridges from Zigbee to wifi. I'm using a "Sonoff Universal Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus Gateway" (annoying that I can't link it) which is "based on TI CC2652P + CP2102N" whatever that means. It plugs into my NUC's USB port which I'm then passing through to my HA VM running within Proxmox. Sounded scary at first but it was really easy to set up and removes the reliance on wifi.
It's running a number of Sonoff and Aqara devices as well as a Candeo(?) soil moisture sensor. Annoyingly it does NOT see my Tapo T300 leak sensors as apparently they need a proprietary Tapo hub which in turn talks to Zigbee.

Personally I think Zigbee is still the way to go simply because of the huge variety of devices available for it. There are competing wireless standards (matter over thread?) but they always seem to be noticeably more expensive.
Something to consider is that all (or maybe most) plug-in Zigbee devices like bulbs and wall plugs act as relay hubs for your network, so if you're running out of range from your Zigbee hub, you might just need a bulb or something in a strategic spot.
 
Last edited:
The aim for matter over thread is to replace zigbee eventually.

Many zigbee co-ordinators can also to matter over thread but only one at a time.

You can get POE zigbee (and thread) coordinators now which are handy, it means you don’t need the main antenna to be directly connected to the home assistant machine.
 
iamgigglz said:
Wow, another boerie!
Click to expand...

Howzit :D

Thanks for the info, so Zigbee it is then - having a look online there are lots of compatible devices too and the mesh network will work well. We're moving into a 3 bed house (or bungalow as it's called here) so should get good coverage.

b0rn2sk8 said:
The aim for matter over thread is to replace zigbee eventually.

Many zigbee co-ordinators can also to matter over thread but only one at a time.

You can get POE zigbee (and thread) coordinators now which are handy, it means you don’t need the main antenna to be directly connected to the home assistant machine.
Click to expand...

I saw the POE coordinators; however that'd mean I need to buy a POE switch /adaptor. I just have a Sky modem and Unifi Amplifi mesh setup at the moment. The HA instance will go on the NUC I think for starters.
 
Priapus said:
Howzit :D

Thanks for the info, so Zigbee it is then - having a look online there are lots of compatible devices too and the mesh network will work well. We're moving into a 3 bed house (or bungalow as it's called here) so should get good coverage.



I saw the POE coordinators; however that'd mean I need to buy a POE switch /adaptor. I just have a Sky modem and Unifi Amplifi mesh setup at the moment. The HA instance will go on the NUC I think for starters.
Click to expand...

PoE injectors aren't expensive especially when all you need is 802.3af, The UniFi U-POE-AF is available for about £10. I'd personally go for a PoE co-ordinator, being able to position it where you want would be worth the extra cost to me.
 
Weird! I literally just ordered an RTL-SDR stick to grab the broadcasts from my Kalawen weather station remote temp/humdiity sensors!

Have picekd up HA again as I found a really basic use, displaying a family calendar/planner dashboard in the kitchen.

Was trying to convince the wife about this (rather than transcribing everything out of the family google calendar onto a paper calendar) but she was super resistant, until about three weeks ago I freed up a Pi4 and made a little dashboard for myself on an old Fire HD8 which I've got on my desk. So now I've repurposed an old 10" android based photo frame (after finding it in the garage three days after picking up a Fire HD10 for £20!) to be the kitchen based family calendar and looking around for other things to drop into my HA server.

My desk has got my little weather station, so seeing if I can absorb that with the RTl-SDR stick, and the IHD for my smart meters (have already added this, but SMETS1 and shoddily slow DCC updates have made this a bit crap).

Will be looking to see what I can do with my Ring doorbell/cameras too.

Definitely getting more out of HA than I did last time I tried setting it up, having specific targets (and a 'customer') combined with AI to query and rewrite code for me :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom