homeassistant

For those of us still impatiently waiting, what is your experience so far with “Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition”?

—- I ordered just 2 hours in but the vendor I used sold out in 21 minutes. I just found out I also missed the restock, so hopefully some time next month.

I was trying to get it to pause Pi-hole on request. I'm using Home Assistant Cloud (Nabu Casa) for speech to text, and have also got OpenAI plugged into it for if it doesn't recognise a command. The screen shot is from the debug logs that I eventually found after struggling to work out why it wasn't running my automation.

I'm using the new Home Assistant Voice Preview. Don't get me wrong, overall very happy with it for the price point, but for some reason the cloud speech recognition (I believe powered by Google) is very good at understanding me until I start trying to talk about ad blocking.

I have an early 2000s house and they went wild with a) the sheer number of wall switches and b) the number of 3-way switches. I want to replace a good number of them while accepting my wife's requirement that they look and function as dumb paddle switches when necessary.

I've looked around and these seem to be the best at fitting all of my requirements but Mama Mia, the price 😭 😭 😭 😭

https://www.amazon.com/Inovelli-2-1-Smart-Switch-Dimmer/dp/B0BG329SH3

Anyone have some suggestions?

I bought several Sonoff mini4r to add some automation to my lights, and wanted to post a short review:

Pros:

• price is excellent. Got 5 for <$50 cad.
• Size is amazing, itsy Bitsy.
• Build quality feels good.
• Should be easy to flash, if my soldering skills were better, with exposed pads.
• Connected to my home wifi quick and easy.
• SonoffLAN easily picked them up, with full control.
• Detached relay mode works great, with switch fallback if wifi goes down.
• quick response time, under a second.

Cons:

• only rated for 10-12 amps, means I can't install this on switch controlled outlets.
• wish it had headers for flashing.
• wifi only, wish there was a ZigBee model.

In the end, I'm likely to buy more, and some Shelly units for where I need 16-20 amp relays.

When I first started setting up my home automation, I decided on Zigbee, and I very much dove in head-first. I set up dozens of Zigbee devices, and some worked a lot better than others. I have a fairly stable Zigbee network with well over 100 devices, but many of those have been replaced over time. To save others the wasted time and money, I wanted to give a short breakdown of what I've noticed across brands.

• SONOFF: My Zigbee controller is made by SONOFF, and it works well. As far as their motion sensors, not so much (I even made a post about how bad they were about a year ago). Their motion sensors give such unreliable results that they're borderline useless. Their plugs work generally okay, although they do drop off my network occasionally. Overall, they really wouldn't be my first choice.

• Aquara: They make some very slick-looking devices, but they're horrible. Magnetic door sensors frequently just get stuck in an open or closed state, or just drop off the network completely. I used two of their leak sensors. One is still working well; the other just spontaneously decided to stop responding completely. I have a few of their pushbuttons; it took me at least a dozen tries to pair them, but they seem to work well after that. Overall, Aquara devices either quit responding or drop off the network more frequently than any other brand; I will never buy another Aquara device.

• DOGAIN: I bought several of their plugs. So far, not a single issue. I assume they're a white-label brand, so I don't know who actually makes the hardware, but I have no complaints so far.

• MHCOZY: Another white-label brand. I've purchased several of their relay switches. I haven't had a single problem with any of them, and I'm using quite a few.

• Haozee: Probably another white-label brand. I have several of their mmWave sensors. Occasionally they get stuck in a "detected" state, but rarely. They have never dropped off my network. I'd buy more.

• Phillips (Hue): They're exceptionally expensive, but for a reason. I have a lot of their smart bulbs, and a few outdoor motion sensors. They all work flawlessly. Don't use the Hue app or a Hue bridge, though, unless you want to be locked into their app; just pair your device with a third-party Zigbee controller.

• Leviton: I have replaced every single in-wall switch in my home with a Leviton smart switch or smart dimmer. They're a well-known brand, so I would expect their products to work well, and they do. My only complaint is that occasionally one of the switches will drop and refuse to communicate unless I power it off (with a breaker); this is rare, though, and normally corresponds with a power outage.

• Thirdreality: I saved Thirdreality for last because I have absolutely no complaints at all. They are my go-to for Zigbee devices. I have many of their temperature sensors, plugs, magnetic door sensors, motion sensors, soil moisture sensors, etc. I have never had a device drop off my network or stop working correctly. I have dozens of their devices, and my only issue was a climate sensor that got stuck at 99% humidity after I accidentally sprayed water into the case. That's my fault.

So, in general, if I was to re-build my Zigbee network from the ground up, I'd go for Thirdreality devices first. If they didn't make what I need, I'd go for Phillips Hue, and if I still couldn't find what I need, then that's what the list above is for.

I'm hoping to see some replies to this; what are your experiences with different Zigbee devices? Any brands you either trust or would never buy from?

Edit: As others have mentioned, your Zigbee integration (also also possibly your controller) may make a difference in reliability. I am using ZHA and a SONOFF controller. Your experience may be different.

Does anyone have any experience or recommendations for a physical remote control that can be used with HomeAssistant? I'm hoping to find a multi-button zigbee or wifi device that HA can recognize and allow me to configure buttons to HA automations.

I'm already using a couple single button devices that can be configured to perform different actions on single press, double press, and long press, but would love a single device with multiple buttons for some locations.

Until recently I had been using an EZVIZ DB1C doorbell. I researched before I got it, and it worked immediately when bought. Then the company started playing dirty pool. Over the next two firmware updates (WIth nothing in the notes beyond "bugfixes and imrprovements") they stripped out the ability to use a local RTSP stream then they stripped out the ability to use their Windows-only software to even re-enable any functionality. Then they jerked me around for over a month before they finally copped to what the company had done.

And of course there's no way back to a working firmware.

I know people have mentioned Reolink and Amcrest before, but those models are no longer available.

Is there anything in the way of wired, mechanical-bell compatible doorbell cameras that work with HomeAssistant?

I'm so sick of companies that sell you one thing, then strip out the functionality that made it useful, shoving you into their cloud/app shit or leaving you stranded on whatever firmware the thing came with.

GRR

I've been toying with the idea to implementing HA for a couple of years.

I have no fewer than 10 "smart device" apps on my phone and the privacy implications make me sick. I've been a Google Home and it's been a sad experience.

Over the holidays, I got Proxmox working on an old laptop and ordered a ZigBee stick and some sensors.

Installing HA using helper scripts was dummy easy and the laptop is performing solidly. Got hung up on network setup and z2m but pulled through with some Google-fu.

Did I have to do some tinkering? Yes. Can I control all - literally ALL - my smart devices on one customizable dashboard? F*** YEAH!

I am looking forward to accomplishing more, unplugging from the cloud, learning a lot, and hopefully making some life tasks less annoying.

Thank you to this community for the awesome work, conversation, and inspiration!

I've been using HA for a while; having my home just "do things" for me without asking is fantastic. My lights turn on to exactly the levels I want when I enter a room, my grass and my plants get watered automatically, heating and cooling happens only when it needs to. There are lots of benefits. Plus, it's just a fun hobby.

One thing I didn't expect, though, is all the interesting things you can learn when you have sensors monitoring different aspects of you home or the environment.

• I can always tell when someone is playing games or streaming video (provided they're transcoding the video) from one of my servers. There's a very significant spike in temperature in my server room, not to mention the increased power draw.
• I have mmWave sensors in an out-building that randomly trigger at night, even though there's nobody there. Mice, maybe?
• Outdoor temperatures always go up when it's raining. It's always felt this way, but now it's confirmed.
• My electrical system always drops in voltage around 8AM. Power usage in my house remains constant, so maybe more demand on the grid when people are getting ready for work?
• I have a few different animals that like to visit my property. They set off my motion sensors, and my cameras catch them on video. Sometimes I give them names.
• A single person is enough to raise the temperature in an enclosed room. Spikes in temperature and humidity correspond with motion sensors being triggered.
• Watering a lawn takes a lot more water than you might expect. I didn't realize just how much until I saw exactly how many gallons I was using. Fortunately, I irrigate with stored rain water, but it would make me think twice about wasting city water to maintain a lawn.
• Traditional tank-style water heaters waste a lot of heat. My utility closet with my water heater is always several degrees hotter than the surrounding space.

What have you discovered as a result of your home automation? While the things I mentioned might not be particular useful, they're definitely interesting, at least to me.

Hi all,

I'm in the UK and I would like to replace my old switches that turn on/off the lights in the corridor. There are two switches and they are working as a two way switches (3 wires connected to each of them). I would like to replace them with two smart switches that ideally don't require additional apps to set up and ideally no need to connect to any cloud services. Any advice is welcome.

Thanks,

Hi all! I have a HA server in my LAN and all my IoT devices are in a separate VLAN. In this way to insert all the devices I have to configure them all manually using MQTT commands. Since I'm fed up about this method, I've added a second NIC to the HA VM (Proxmox) that is in the IoT VLAN. When I enter the terminal I see that HA has 2 IPs, one for each network and I thought that all the Shelly (they use the same MQTT broker that uses HA, they're not configured for cloud connection and ColoT is enabled) devices would appear in HA, but...they don't. How do you think that I can troubleshoot this problem?

This was a bit of a crazy release because it requires people to update adapter firmware and also add

  adapter: ember
  rtscts: false

To your configuration.yaml. Needless to say there's a bunch that have run into issues as a result.

The problem I try to solve Looking for a temperature sensor using Bluetooth that can report to Home Assistant through my phone when out and about and preferably (but not necessarily) report through my ESPhome BT-proxies at home.

Background I have a 3 year old son with type 1 diabetes. As a result I always have to carry insulin, a temperature sensitive medication. The vials are stored long term in the door of my fridge together with a ZigBee sensor monitoring the temperature of the insulin. If it freezes the Insulin denatures and won’t have any relevant effect if used. The vial that I carry with me will last for around a month as long as it stays above 0 °C (and under around 25-30 °C). My son uses a CGM/pump-based system, creating a BAN that also involves his smartphone. This means that phone is always near the vial and could record temperature (and send telemetry data) continuously, even away from home. I want to use a temperature sensor to identify spoiled medication due to thermal conditions even when my son leaves our home.

My current (imperfect) solution I currently deploy a solution where I use a Meshtastic node with a BME280 sensor. It reports through the mesh to a node at home. This node uses MQTT to talk to Home Assistant. The problem with this system (although nice being totally independent from the Internet) is limited coverage of the surroundings as well as very infrequent telemetry reporting to not overload the common mesh in my city.

Is there an easier solution? Preferably one that uses the smartphones bluetooth (BLE?) and reports back over the Internet.

Hi, all. I recently received two Zooz Zen51 dry contact relays, and installed one of them in an outdoor flood light fixture with a motion sensor. I thought I'd share my thoughts on the device in case anyone else is thinking about it. Note, I'm in the US and only familiar with US electrical wiring.

1. I didn't notice until after I installed it that the recommended temperature is 32-100 F (0-38 C), and it's marked for "indoor use only". Well, it's safely in an electrical box with a gasket and won't get wet, so I'm too worried about the latter thing, but I am curious if I'll have issues with temperature with it. It's supposed to get really cold here in a few days, so we'll see then!

2. Size - it's pretty small, but won't fit in every box, especially smaller switch boxes. There was plenty of room in the box behind the motion sensor light, but that's not surprising.

3. It gives HA a control to turn the light on and off via a switch entity, which is what I expected.

4. I was surprised that the "switch" function (in my case, the motion sensor is the switch, but it could also be a regular light switch) status is not reported, unlike the Shelly 1 I have. Instead, there's an event that is fired when the motion sensor turns on or off. So I can't (directly - I could program a template sensor) see what the current status of the motion sensor is (i.e., is it calling for light or not?).

5. Pairing - the directions are a little sloppy on this point. To start the pairing mode, you have to hit the button on the device VERY quickly three times. The slowly blinking green light is the normal operating mode. This is clear when you look up the HA directions on their website, but it's not really in the directions that come with it. The directions that come with it imply it'll automatically connect once you hit the pairing mode in HA. (I installed Zooz's smoke detector sensor a few weeks ago and had the same gripe then...but I forgot when I went to install the Zen51.)

(Note this also means you want to pair before you reassemble everything!)

6. There are a bunch of configuration options that can do interesting things. For example I could have it automatically shut off the light after a few seconds or minutes. Or I could "reverse" the operation of the motion sensor - turn off the light when it senses motion, and turn it on otherwise. (I can't think of a use case for that latter situation, but the possibility exists, and I'm sure someone can find a use for it.)

7. Configuration is very easy through HA. Go to the device, click configure, then ...configure it. Most options are explained well, but a few aren't clear enough to use without looking it up. For an example of the latter, the "Auto timer unit" setting lets you choose seconds or minutes for the automatic turn off/turn on features...but it doesn't say whether "1" is minutes or seconds. But this is a minor issue; once you have it configured once, you'll probably not need to worry about it again.

8. The configuration option "External switch type" was interesting. I set mine to "Toggle switch"...then discovered, the next morning, that the light was on all night. In that mode, any state change of the connected switch (either on to off, or off to on) prompts a flip in the on/off status of the device. So what happened was that I had the light shut off when I went to bed, then the motion sensor turned off, and the Zen51 interpreted that as me wanting the light to come on.

"Toggle switch with fixed actions" was what I actually wanted (and is the default). Motion sensor comes on: light comes on. Motion sensor tells the light to turn off: light turns off if it's on.

I haven't tried the other three modes - Momentary Switch (seems self-explanatory), Split 3-way, and Garage door mode momentary (also seems self-explanatory). Split 3-way lets you use the Zen51 when there's a 3-way switch setup (two switches controlling one light, usually).

9. Without any special actions in HA, the light works normally. But I now have the ability to turn it on for reasons other than motion, or turn it off manually when triggered by motion (i.e., I trigger it while walking the dog, then go to bed - my "bedtime" scene will turn it off, if it's still on at that point). I'm planning an "all outdoor lights on" mode that will turn on, well, all outdoor lights, and this will fit right into that plan.

10. The other reason I wanted to install this was to provide a point that is closer to the detached garage in the hopes that the Z-wave switch I installed there would now be able to connect to the network. No go on that front, though. :( It should act as a relay but that switch might still be too far away. I might pull that other Z-wave switch back out and put a standard light switch in, and use the second Zen51 to control a different set of lights in the garage (it's a long story as to why I'd do this).

11. The secure pairing failed. I didn't retry it, so I don't know if that was a fluke or something more; it did connect in insecure mode. Unfortunately to retry it, I would have had to exclude the device, then re-include it, and I was running short on daylight to finish this installation.

That's all I have, I hope that helps someone who is thinking about these.

I recently started using AutoBackup and every now and then, after it runs, zigbee2mqtt isn't running anymore and needs to be manually restarted. "Start on boot" and "Watchdog" are both enabled for z2m. Has anyone else experienced this?

I suppose I could add a step on to the backup automation to explicitly restart z2m, but I feel like that would just be a bandaid for a problem better fixed somewhere else. I just don't know where that might be.

What companies are currently creating #ESPHome devices that you have bought and used? @homeassistant #homeassistant

Examples:

Apollo Automation (https://apolloautomation.com/)

Elevated Sensors (https://www.elevatedsensors.com/)

Hey everyone.

I have my homeassistant setup. Something I'm looking to do is a simple alarm clock, slowly turning up my LED strip, and gradually say turning on music in 1% increments. But I really haven't had much luck coming up with a not silly $100 + system to, just have a music player that hass can control. I have a basic bottom line tablet in our bedroom set up as a home assistant dashboard. we have a paid spotify account.

But I'm kind of losing my head trying to wrap around exactly what or how to actually get a controllable system. that can be set up in my bedroom without any costly additions to my bedroom. We have plenty of bluetooth speakers, but to my knowledge all of them require actually turning them on manually if they weren't playing music before. Which kind of negates their value for an alarm clock.

After a recent update to ESPHome, my ATOM Echos no longer show a wake word in Home Assistant and the wake word field isn't even editable:

And indeed they aren't responding to me speaking the wake word.

Has anyone encountered this? Does anyone know of a fix or has a suggestion?

Hi everyone!

I’ve had my Hassio Yellow for a while and I am really happy with it – and because feck Philips and their spy-app.

However, I haven’t set up remote access yet because it seems really daunting and I’m worried I’ll make a mess. I am not bad with tech, but I’m not a computer engineer – and reading some Hassio texts makes me feel like I should, and I get easily overwhelmed…

I found the TOR add-on and I was considering that – but it mentions VPN, which I use, and to which my Hassio is connected.

My questions are:

• Do I need to install the add-on if I use VPN?
• If not, how do I set up remote access with my VPN?
• Should I stop using VPN if I set up TOR remote access?

Thank you all in advance.

Hey all,

A couple of weeks ago I posted my 3D printable pegboard organizers, and today I’m releasing the Only Sensor line of home automation sensors.

Fully free and open, complete with wiring diagrams, cases, component bill of materials, and instructions for assembly.

You source and build them yourself, with acquisition costs ranging from $2-$35 to build, and options for:

• mmWave presence
• PIR motion detection
• Temperature
• Humidity
• LUX
• PM <10µm AQI
• PM <2.5µm AQI
• PM <1µm AQI
• NOX
• VOC

All integrate with Home Assistant via ESPHome.

All the details can be found at: https://nowsci.com/only-sensor/

It's Christmas and I'm not at work but my bloody alarm clock automation was set up wrong so my alarm went off at 6.30am and my body wouldn't let me get back off to sleep.

So I made a coffee and sat down at my PC and went "What project am I sorting out now?" which is a typical thought when I'm out of bed before everyone else.

Today I knew my Wife wanted me to get the house tidy for Xmas so what better time to get my head around ToDo lists?

Incidentally I have just made a bed sensor so at some point I hit "Deploy" in Node Red and all my lights got brighter, which was odd because I wasn't tinkering with them, but it turned out my Wife had just gotten out of bed and that turned off the night lights.

So I've made separate ToDo lists for each of us and made specific Lovelace pages for each of them. At certain times of the day Node Red will check if there's jobs outstanding on the list and send an actionable notification if you're home. The notification has a button that will open the Lovelace page with your list on.

I've then added a check of the number of jobs in the list and if they increase you get a notification. If they hit zero you get a congratulations notification.

Turns out it was a great project to set up. I've been adding jobs to the kids lists all day, they've been knocking them down again. Wife has added jobs to my list. Happy Wife happy Life eh?

So hopefully going forward there will be less conflict in the house over housework as they jobs will all be handed out with this method.

I've yet to set up recurring jobs like washing up or changing the cat litters, but theoretically I can add these automatically.

I've since taken what I've learned from this project and applied it to my shopping list. I've managed to import my Google Keep shopping list into HA and can now get actionable notification when I hit the supermarket, and still use Google Assistant to add items.

What do you use Todo lists to do? Is there some cool tricks I'm missing?

This looks like a viable competitor to the recently announced HA Voice Preview hardware. Looks like it's sold out at this point but there will be more coming. More microphones, presence detection and a builtin amplifier to run fairly substantial speakers.

https://futureproofhomes.net/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=product_shelf

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/23317790

Just rings for now, going to expand functionality later to handle authentication for unlocking the door and maybe other things lol