this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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Alternative to Home Assistant for ESPHome Devices (self.selfhosted)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by TCB13 to c/selfhosted
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Hello,

My IoT/Home Automation needs are centered around custom built ESPHome devices and I currently have them all connected to a HA instance and things work fine.

Now, I like HA's interface and all the sugar candy, however I don't like the massive amounts of resources it requires and the fact that the storage usage keeps growing and it is essentially a huge, albeit successful, docker clusterfuck.

Is there any alternative dashboard that just does this:

  1. Specifically made for ESPHome devices - no other devices required;
  2. Single daemon or something PHP/Python/Node that you can setup manually with a few systemd units;
  3. Connects to the ESPHome devices, logs the data and shows a dashboard with it;
  4. Runs offline, doesn't go into 24234 GitHub repositories all the time and whatnot.

Obviously that I'm expecting more manual configuration, I'm okay with having to edit a config file somewhere to add a device, change the dashboard layout etc. I also don't need the ESPHome part that builds and deploys configurations to devices as I can do that locally on my computer.

Thank you.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I went with the virtual appliance when I installed Home Assistant several years ago, turned out to be a great decision looking at how it's architected. I only self-host the database separately, which i've found easier to manage.

the fact that the storage usage keeps growing

There should be a setting to reduce how long Home Assistant retains data for - I removed the limit on mine, however its possible that on newer versions they've changed the default

Hope you find a solution though - I think node red (capable of doing dashboards on its own) with something else is going to get you part way there.

[–] TCB13 -1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

I've been doing this. I'm running HA under LXD (VM) and it works.

$ lxc info havm
Name: havm
Status: RUNNING
Type: virtual-machine
Architecture: x86_64
PID: 541921
Created: 2023/12/05 14:14 WET
Last Used: 2024/01/28 13:35 WET

While it works great and it was very easy to get the VM running I would rather move to something lighter like a container. About the storage I just see it growing everyday and from what I read it should be keeping for 10 days however it keeps growing. Almost 10GB for a web interface and logs from a couple of sensors, wtf?

I would be very happy with HA, really no need to move other stuff as long as things were a bit less opaque than a ready to go VM that runs 32434 daemons and containers inside it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Curious, you might want to look into what's generating your data first. It's easy to generate data, it's harder to only keep the data that's useful.

[–] TCB13 -1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

And how do I go about that?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

One logs into the VM and starts checking the files of course. Go from there.

[–] TCB13 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

FYI the DB isn't even that big and the total space is growing at around 100MB every 2 days.

I just don't get it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Curious, you might want to look into what is generating your data then first. It's very easy to generate data, it's a lot harder to only generate and keep useful data.