Bluesheep

joined 2 years ago
[–] Bluesheep 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What’s your cornbread recipe then? I like chilli. I like baked potatoes. Maybe I’ll like cornbread too

[–] Bluesheep 1 points 5 days ago

I’m on book 2 of Jim Butcher’s Cinder Spires series. Loving it, great swashbuckling adventure. Very disappointed he hasn’t written the 3rd one yet.

[–] Bluesheep 2 points 1 month ago

I like these lists, thank you!

[–] Bluesheep 9 points 1 month ago

Two from me:

People took the London tube to the last public hanging - https://londonist.com/london/undergroundtoapublichanging

The University of Oxford (1096) is older than the Aztec empire (1345)

42
Picked up the children (self.dull_mens_club)
submitted 1 month ago by Bluesheep to c/dull_mens_club
 

Picked my son up from sports training. Had to give a couple of other kids a lift home because we share lifts to these things. Dropped them home on the way. It’s not exactly the shortest route but it was fine.

[–] Bluesheep 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Have you ever felt tempted to put a dashboard around the place? Maybe the rest of the family aren't bothered about longer term information etc.

I was thinking things like weather and power usage might help my family. I also thought something that showed who was home would be cool.

[–] Bluesheep 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I've got a decent number of local manual controls, but not all of them. For example, some of my wall switches operate the relay because they are just turning on and off the power. Others I have disabled the relay on because the lights themselves are WW/CW tuneable and HA controls the colour during the day.

I'm wondering about having another look at zigbee groups and commands for the simpler automations in the house. I avoided these because they aren't really visible to HA and I didn't like having two automation 'languages' at the same time.

Overall, how long do you think you could cope without your HA platform before it becomes an issue?

[–] Bluesheep 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I was thinking about matter yesterday, I like the idea of being able to have multiple controllers. My house is half wifi devices and half zigbee. I'd been favouring zigbee recently because I don't want to swamp my network with device packets, but maybe that needs a rethink. At the very least my wifi devices all have esp home configs that could be configured to fall back to defaults.

18
Hardware Recovery Strategies (self.homeassistant)
submitted 2 months ago by Bluesheep to c/homeassistant
 

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.

[–] Bluesheep 2 points 2 months ago

Some cool examples there, I’m going to think about them. I particularly like the walking ones.

I want to love dashboards. I love the idea of a control centre in each room but I just can’t get to the point of winning with them

[–] Bluesheep 1 points 2 months ago

I totally understand mission critical motivations, but I reached a different conclusion from you. I’ve been HA’ing for a long time and everything dies eventually.

Do you have a backup HA green in the cupboard? my wife would murder me if I couldn’t get the house back in 24 hours. I want to use hardware that you can buy literally anywhere so I don’t need to keep a backup.

I’m not there yet, but I havve moved to running HA on a proxmox server and have used my HA backup to recover from a software failure. I’m now thinking about what the same would look like for a hardware failure, either the mini pc or the zigbee dongle.

[–] Bluesheep 1 points 2 months ago

I like this, but I don’t like that rooms are cold unless I hang out in them. I live in an old stone house and I’d rather have a room schedule than a room presence sensor.

I’ve done something similar. I use the excellent scheduler from Niels Faber. I have room radiator TRVs. I have a helper entity that counts the number of radiators that have an open valve, and an automation that triggers when this changes to/from zero. This automation adjusts the central nest thermostat, converting it to more or less a posh switch.

My radiator valves use Better Thermostat and external temperature sensors, and the whole thing keeps my house warm in every room. I need to write a GH blog post about it, but happy to answer questions/share bits of config

21
'Touch points' in HA (self.homeassistant)
submitted 2 months ago by Bluesheep to c/homeassistant
 

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?

[–] Bluesheep 5 points 2 months ago

Big shout out to Adaptive Lighting. Absolutely love this integration

[–] Bluesheep 32 points 3 months ago

I feel like almost everyone with ADHD could have told them that.

 

Two-Thirty!

12
Help building a homebrew NVR (self.homeassistant)
submitted 2 years ago by Bluesheep to c/homeassistant
 

I’ve got a project in mind I’d like to test with the community before going ok deep on.

I’d like to put together a face-recognising NVR closely tied to homeassistant. I’m thinking of using an RPi4 with a coral attached. Then installing docker and including the following:

  • frigate
  • doubletake
  • compreface (unless others recommend a better detector?)

I have an MQTT server in HA but also wondering if it makes sense to have a local MQTT server for the NVR.

As usual, I’m working on the edge of what I know, so any suggestions/comments on things that might trip me up would be warmly welcomed.

 

There is a key to lock it closed, and the same key will lock it either on or off. In keeping with a Victorian Bell/Butler Board but not near it in the house.

I guess it must be some kind of isolator switch, but I know nothing of its history.

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