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] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I run nodered within Homeassistant in a vm on one of my nucs, I do all of my actual automation in there and homeassistant is just an IO layer for zigbee and bluetooth stuff.

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

I started out that way, but I've moved to doing most of it in HA directly since they massively improves the UI. I still use NR for complicated stuff though. I've recently started using Pyscript for modbus integrations too.

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

The UI is definitely better than it used to be, but nodered can do some more powerful stuff like pulling the html of a devices web ui and parsing data straight from the page when there's no API to use for example. I used to do that for a solar inverter at my last house.

Now I use it to control my AV switcher that distributes video through the house, it has no native homeassistant integration and only supports things like control4 and RTI so I implemented my own control using their REST API and hooked it all up to buttons and selectors in homeassistant. works great.

Also my home theatre receiver has a homeassistant integration but its terrible, so again, I've manually implemented the tcp controls in nodered.

[–] ikidd 2 points 10 months ago

pulling the html of a devices web ui

I've done something similiar in NR to scrape the CUPS webpage on my desktop and turn on a tasmota plug for the printer when it sees a job waiting in the queue. I wouldn't even try to do that in HA directly. But I wouldn't be surprised if there's an integration somewhere that would do it.