homeassistant

I've made a python server script that can send serial commands to a connected usb serial device. I use this to control my retrotink 4k using a raspberrypi zero w, but it is generic enough that you could control other devices. In the readme, it shows how to setup a restful command.

As Home Assistant continues to grow and evolve, so does our commitment to making it more inclusive, accessible, and aligned with the diverse needs of our community. To that end, we’re launching an annual survey—and we hope you’ll participate!

We could keep assuming our community’s wants and needs, but we’d rather base our decisions on data-driven insights 😉. With this survey, we aim to better understand not just how you use Home Assistant, but also who you are as a person, a smart home user, and a member of our community.

First and foremost, the survey is entirely anonymous, and you can skip any question you don’t want to answer. For sensitive questions (e.g., gender), we provide options like “prefer not to say” or open text fields.

Normally I wouldn't spread word of a survey, but considering Fenick has suggested the Home Assistant community use BlueSky over Mastodon, I thought it might be a good idea to reaffirm to them that the Fediverse has a voice. I also wrote in Lemmy in "Other" responses where applicable.

It's a fairly long survey; they estimate 20 minutes, I think it took me around 15 after skipping a few questions.

In my house I have 3 circuits of floor heating elements, each is connected to single phase (230V) 16A fuse and on one of them I have Heatit Z-TRM3 connected via z-wave to my home assistant. Others are manually controlled dumb thermostats.

That thing works, but at least the particular one I got causes a lot of interference to the z-wave network, so I'm a bit hesistant to add any more of those.

Features I must have:

• Option for a floor temperature sensor. Each thermostat has separate pipe going to the floor and the floor sensor is easy enough to replace, but it is a must have option
• Air temperature sensor. 2/3 of the heating elements are in a concrete slab and that means that measured temperature of the slab very slowly affects the air temperature, so I need both. ESP32 or equivalent as a separate sensor might be a decent workaround, but I'd rather have both on a single unit.
• Obviously the 230V 16A capability as that's what they're wired on and even if I don't have 3kW elements on the floor it's what's needed to meet the code
• Manual controls on the device itself. Should my raspberry pi running home assistant kick the bucket or some other major issue with the automations happens, I still need an option to control the device. And that's a strict requirement, no bluetooth apps on the phone or anything, I must have manual buttons or some other way to control the thing without home assistant or any other smart device.
• And addition to previous one: No cloud requirement. Allowing the device to the internet for a setup is fine, but in the long run it must be happy in a isolated network without internet connectivity

For the communication I don't really care. I currently have only wifi/z-wave as an option, but if there's something on zigbee which ticks all the boxes I can invest in a usb-dongle or a hub.

Price is obviously a concern, but it's hard to set any strict boundaries. I won't throw a 1000€ for a thermostat, but anything even remotely reasonable goes.

What are your suggestions for a situation like this?

How many of you have a @homeassistant controlled #Christmas ornament?!

This awesome #ESPHome device from Apollo Automation can work standalone by pressing a button on the ornament, or you can flash the firmware with ESPHome capable firmware so you can control it with Home Assistant. Now I can automate the ornament turning on and off, change the colors, and even play built-in songs or even upload my own!

Better yet? 100% of profit goes to #charity !

https://apolloautomation.com/products/apollo-h-1-annual-holiday-ornament

It could be the thing that makes Home Assistant suddenly interesting for many ""normies"".

Hello 👋

I have Shinobi running with 6 cameras connected, 2 are unifi things and 4 are Reolink Duo 2 PoE.

The 2 unifi cameras record on motion fine, but the Reolink cameras dont seem to record much at all.

Has anyone used the Reolink Duo 2 with Shinobi and do you have them recording motion only?

Hey guys,

I've absolutely had it with my Ring camera and doorbell, ive started using a network wide VPN and they are just too unreliable and expensive to continue - let alone actively blocking IPs from VPNs which I didnt know about and think is ridiculous.

I have looked in to Reolink cameras because I've seen someone talking about them before on lemmy, question is:

Have any of you used Reolink cameras and NVR in your setup and how well does it integrate / whats your opinion on the cameras themselves?

I want to dip my toes into the smart home world and decided that I want to use homeassistant and primarily use devices based on zigbee, as I do not want to overload my wifi with a bunch of devices.

Smart plugs seem to be most interesting to me as I would like to have accurate power measurements for my homelab and applicances. The keyword is accurate here. There seems to be some science showing that the accuracy of smart plugs can vary a lot. I have read that devices that are flashed with the tasmota firmware can actually be calibrated. Unfortunately this firmware is only available for wifi devices.

So my questions are:

• Are there zigbee smartplugs that are known to be very accurate or can be calibrated to be very accurated?
• Is preferring zigbee over wifi actually a good Idea? I mean both use 2.4 GHz, which is known to be crowded. When will wifi smart home devices become a problem?
• Is a calibrated tasmota smart plug more accurated than a typical zigbee plug?
• Is this inaccuracy reported in the paper even relevant for non-scientific use?

After over a decade of seasonal use, my outdoor holiday lights controller didn't wake up when I brought it down from the attic this weekend. I knew I wanted to replace it with something that worked with Home Assistant, but wasn't sure what to go with. I have had a lot of luck lately with some Zigbee devices around the house, and I love having Home Assistant be in charge rather than some other cloud integration. However there didn't seem to be much to choose from Zigbee wise.

Somehow I ended up looking at a Matter enabled device, specifically the TP-Link - Tapo Smart Wi-Fi Outdoor Plug with Matter. I am really pleased with how adding it to Home Assisant worked! I have the Home Assistant Yellow, so I have all of the hardware needed for that. Once I realized I needed my phone on the 2.4 GHz WiFi to provision the TP-Link device, it was smooth as it could be. I never installed a TP-Link app, nor created an account in their cloud.

The Matter dream might be alive after all?!

Hi, I'm in the market for a zigbee dimmer (no neutral). There is a rotary one from Candeo that technically is what I need, but honestly it looks a bit ugly.

Anyone has a "soft button" switch to recommend? By soft button I mean something that:

• if pressed once (short press) it turns on/off
• with long press it increase/decrease power

Even better if it's a 2-gang one.
Thanks everyone!

Hello,

I don't have any 'smart' items in my house (or home assistant currently) but I want to set this up but I have questions about compatibility with hardware before I purchase. They have a integration page does that mean all of those hardware devices work? Or do some work better than others? According to a person on Reddit they recommend https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/ I'm just curious if anything has changed in the past year. Or if anyone here has a list of recommendations. I plan to start with some lights and a thermostat.

Cheers and thanks.

I had a bit of a scare this week. My setup is HAOS running on Proxmox. I have a Sonoff USB Zigbee gateway. (also a coral for Frigate, and a USB SSD attached to Proxmox)

Friday night, the server stops for no reason. I dig it out from the cupboard and I can hear the fan short cycling. I disconnect everything and take it to a screen so I can see what's happening - it boots fine, WTH?

Must be a USB thing. Add them back one by one and when I connect the gateway back problem is back. Now I get worried. Switch USB port and remap to HAOS and boom! back up and running. Panic over, cold house (radiators are zigbee) and angry wife and children avoided.

All of which has lead me to consider that my HA set up is really 'Mission Critical' and I need some recovery strategies beyond a daily backup. I think the gateway can be swapped but I'm not sure if the key to the zigbee mesh is hardware encoded or software.

This is the question - What are your recovery strategies? Do they include hardware or just software? I'm thinking maybe I need a second dongle and a couple of low powered machines in the Proxmox cluster. I won't be able to get my homely back up immediately, but if I can get HA running again on a different node with a backup dongle I'd be OK.

Hello everyone

I have some tapo camera and recently tried to switch from using tapo control (hacs) to Frigate but I'm missing some function like privacy mode and many others, I have added onvif integration but it doesn't bring what i need to completely delete tapo control. Is there other way to fetch functions locally ?

I have 4 RGB+C+W zigbee bulbs like this one:

However after adding it to home assistant, they only show up as c+w bulbs:

What am I doing wrong? How can I get it to detect it as RGB+C+W?

The UK is currently experiencing some prolonged windy weather and my all-renewable energy provider offers dynamic pricing. That means cheap energy and even negative-cost energy. This is where my HA instance shines and saves me a fortune on my power bill. Thanks again to the HA devs for this incredible project.

For the curious, I'm using bottlecapdave's excellent Home Assistant Octopus Energy integration via HACS.

I was reading the HA roadmap and thinking about the points where everyone (else) interacts with my HA environment. I’ve wanted displays/dashboards for a long time but mostly have either battery powered buttons or smart wall switches. These are good in that I can automate them but with two teenage children we have a lot of variability.

Tell me how everyone else uses HA in your house. Do they love it? Do they see only that buttons ‘do things’? Do they read dashboards and crave data?

But it's not working, where did I mess up?

Currently {{ (states.switch | rejectattr('attributes.light.lamp_left', 'defined') | selectattr('state', 'eq', 'on') | list | count)+(states.switch | rejectattr('attributes.light.lamp_right', 'defined') | selectattr('state', 'eq', 'on') | list | count)+(states.switch | rejectattr('attributes.light.hall', 'defined') | selectattr('state', 'eq', 'on') | list | count)+(states.switch | rejectattr('attributes.switch.bedroom', 'defined') | selectattr('state', 'eq', 'on') | list | count)+(states.switch | rejectattr('attributes.switch.kitchen', 'defined') | selectattr('state', 'eq', 'on') | list | count)+(states.switch | rejectattr('attributes.switch.lounge', 'defined') | selectattr('state', 'eq', 'on') | list | count)+(states.switch | rejectattr('attributes.switch.bath_left', 'defined') | selectattr('state', 'eq', 'on') | list | count)+(states.switch | rejectattr('attributes.switch.bath_right', 'defined') | selectattr('state', 'eq', 'on') | list | count) }}
  lights are on!

I found a blog, https://www.devwithimagination.com/2023/01/21/counting-sensors-in-home-assistant/ , which pointed me in the right direction and subsequently I ended up with this working code

Currently {{ (states.light | selectattr('entity_id', 'in', ['light.0xa4c138643f553454', 'light.0xa4c138d8db3aa654', 'light.0xa4c138df3493b345', 'light.frontroom_lamp']) | selectattr('state', 'eq', 'on') | list | count)+(states.switch | selectattr('entity_id', 'in', ['switch.0xa4c1382764f5a877', 'switch.0xa4c1387c75807865', 'switch.0xa4c138a638208375', 'switch.0xa4c138bfbbe76454_left', 'switch.0xa4c138bfbbe76454_right']) | selectattr('state', 'eq', 'on') | list | count) }}
  lights are on!

Pardon a WLED question in the Home Assistant community, but I was unable to find a WLED community in the fediverse.

Regardless, I have this 720 LED/meter FCOB strip, which is 24v strip & I'm trying to figure out what to configure the "LED voltage (Max. current for a single LED):"

Since it's a 20IC per meter & they claim 21watts per meter that comes out to ~1w per IC. But I'm unsure how that converts to mA like WLED is asking for.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated 🤠

I just learned that the Eve Energy smart plugs transmit energy consumption information via Matter. I didn't think energy consumption information was supported in Matter yet, but it is.

This makes them incredible to use with the Home Assistant Energy dashboard.

Even tho I was hesitant for a while, I took the leap to using the Matter beta Home Assistant integration and no issues so far.

Is it possibile to create an IP whitelist? I get constantly banned by different HA servers (home, office, etc.) from my smartphone and everytime I need to edit the ip_bans.yaml file and restart HA.

I've had 6 LiFX BR30 lights on the front of my house since 2019. At first, they were pretty decent. One would fall off the network every other month, or so, but that wasn't much of a pain. Lately, multiple lights will drop off the Wi-Fi every week. I'm at the point where I will either replace them, or install smart switches to just turn them off/on like normal lights. Looking around, I don't see much in this size that are rated for outdoor use and support multiple colors. The current ones are set to Ukraine colors since the invasion, and I also change them for holidays. Ideally, I'd like to find something supporting zigbee, thread, or z-wave - pretty much in that order.

Hi all!
I have 4 HA servers in different locations (home, officer etc.) and using the 3 fingers to change server every time is a pain in the ass. Is there any way to open the app directly to a specified server? I've had a look at the widget, but I couldn't find anything. Thanks!