• 19 Posts
  • 133 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle
  • I’m gonna assume you’re not using Home Assistant yet.

    There is an app for Home Assistant but from your comment I’m assuming you’re talking about something like Smart Life.

    Home Assistant takes all these different companies and creates a central hub for them all. So we have Hue bulbs and Nest cameras all talking to each other via Home Assistant.

    If you’re already using Home Assistant then disregard and have look into PIR and Mm Wave sensor.

    I’ve moved up a level and recently made a bed sensor.


  • I’ve had the opposite experience with the cube, but I use Zigbee2MQTT so I’m maybe that made the difference.

    It’s a fantastic concept and I think everyone should buy one just because it’s so cool and so fucking useless at the same time.

    So you have turn like a knob function, then changing sides, a knock knock, a slide and a drop sensor.

    I programmed the drop sensor to toggle my room lights then showed a bunch of 40+ year old kids, who had great fun for a full 5 minutes playing epileptic catch.

    The problem is that it has all these functions, but you only know what they are because you spent the time programming them. So it’s fucking useless to anyone else, and by the time you’ve set the thing down you’ve forgotten what you set it to do yourself.

    I’ve had the turn like a knob set to brighten and dim my lights, then decided it should control the volume on the speaker when it’s playing music too, which lead to a little project in node red. But nobody else in the house even knows that’s what it does.

    I should stop this wall of text, get one, it’s useless!



  • I think I’m a step behind you. I use Uptime Kuma for monitoring and it worked really well. Just have it running on a pi separate from my main machine.

    I worked out how to get it sending me emails when things are down and up, and now my email inbox is a fucking hot mess of notifications.

    So I’ve just this weekend integrated it into Home Assistant and set it to notify me when things are down for 5 minutes or more.

    My next step was going to be finding some way of integrating Portainer into Home Assistant so I can restart stopped containers, and maybe Proxmox so I can reboot VMs from HA. Not sure it’s possible yet though.

    Ultimately I want to have HA send me a notification with actionable buttons with “reboot container” and “reboot VM” which, when pressed, will sort the issue out.

    However this will not help when one of my drives goes down. They’re HDDs plugged in by USB3 which isn’t great and my server is behind the coat rack so sometimes the kids just throw their coats on and it falls onto my server, which then heats up and goes silly.










  • I got a cheap Nest E thermostat on eBay from a charity shop seller. It cost me like £15.

    Replaced my dumb one with it, then hooked it into HA and made a sensor from all my motion sensors and door sensors which all have temperature gauges in them.

    Conglomerated those sensors into one that tracks the average (making sure to only have so many per floor so as not to skew the data to one part of the house) then made a sensor called “Is it cold enough to have the Heating on?” which acts as a simple switch with a lower and upper limit.

    Now my heating only comes on when I need it to based off the temperature of the whole house instead of that one place the dumb thermostat was based.

    The display unit for it died after less than a year, replaced that for another £20 on eBay and synced the new unit to the Thermostat on the wall.

    So for less than £50 and some smarts I’ve upgraded my heating, and saved money on the bills (since it only comes on when we need it to rather than based on the temperature of one location).

    I’m not particularly recommending Nest since I have no experience with other manufacturers, but I managed to do it all on the cheap and I’m quite pleased with the results







  • It does. I use Mosquito but I believe HA has a built in one too. Mosquito was easy enough to set up though.

    Honestly MQTT is like the nervous system of my HA setup. I started using it with Tasmota when I Tasmotised all my cheap WiFi bulbs, then opted for Zigbee2mqtt for my ZigBee setup.

    But I also have things like my bedside clock (an old phone running WallPanel), my doorway tablet (a Nexus 7 running Fully Kiosk Browser), my PC and even my alarm clock app on my phone, all running through MQTT.

    I even had Tasker on my phone communicating with HA via MQTT before I gave up on that. It’s really useful