hardware-archived

[frank narwhal]

of course, i've looked into smart color changing or tunable white recessed lights, but they cost $30/light, (Philips Hue is $50/light), whereas these cheap ones cost $6/light.

[patent river]

Apparently yes: https://www.sunricher.com/dual-color-constant-voltage-zigbee-led-lighting-device-sr-zg9101fa-cct.html
I'm assuming there are only 3 or 4 wires going from the controller to the light (one or two ground, then one for 6000K and one for 2700K, with the other 3 colour temperatures being combinations of the two)

[frank narwhal]

there are only 3 wires going out in the connector, it's a weird 3 pin connector that looks like a mini xlr

[frank narwhal]

my issue with this is that it needs DC input, and the lights operate on AC. The controller outputs AC as the lights themselves specify that it takes 120VAC input, and so does the controller box

[patent river]

Oh wow. Eww

[frank narwhal]

here's the product link for ref: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BJV5DF7P

[wild meteor]

out of curiosity, which model is it? I think there are 2

[neat nimbus]

I'm unsure on what Android tablet I'll go for, it's either Galaxy Tab A8 or Lenovo Tab M10. Both are cheap on FB Marketplace.

Would Android updates matter for these devices? The Tab M10 are likely 1st or 2nd gen, Tab A8 are somewhat recent. Any recommendations?

[waxen girder]

What's the latest "go to" for motion sensors (inside)? I am currently using some older Xiaomi/Aqara motion sensors but it seems they've been discontinued.

[tough frost]

In Aus there's only the tradfri. I think they're phasing them out. I see on eu site they have a new model

[dull portal]

Hello, I want to buy temperature/humidity sensor with LCD. I see nice sonoff SNZB-02D or Nous E6. Is that the same sensor inside?

[tough frost]

https://www.ikea.com/au/en/p/tradfri-wireless-motion-sensor-smart-white-90370469/

Does anyone have experience with it. Seems terrible and I just want to know if it's known or if I've done something wrong

Mounted about 2m on the wall at the front door

[terse pebble]

I threw those away. To many wrong positive detections

[tough frost]

Yeah right so they are just bad 😮‍💨

No firmware update, configuration, or custom firmware that makes them usable?

[marble anvil]

Is it possible to control the Q-Rad Dimplex heaters with Home Assistant? They have a hub too. Links to products and controls.

https://www.dimplex.co.uk/q-rad

https://www.dimplex.co.uk/product/dimplex-hub

https://www.dimplex.co.uk/dimplexcontrol/home

[patent pier]

2 years later 🙂 yes there should be a physical store at 103 Cherni Vrah Blvd Bulgaria, Sofia 1407

[subtle creek]

silly question, anyone have a powered USB hub they can recommend? I've tried two so far and they both seem to have weird connectivity issues. using rpi4

[sterile flume]

Alright folks. What thermostats are you using and why did you select that setup? Any regrets or things you would do differently?

[subtle creek]

I have an old nest and a new nest. no regrets so far, even prior to HA

got them both from power and gas co. get it for free deals

[sterile flume]

My old thermostat was a nest. No complaints, really, but I'd like something that will play nicely (or nicer than my thermostat did, anyway) with HA.

My goal is to eventually have some sort of sensor (probably aqara) in every room of our two story house and have dampers put in to make each floor a separate zone when we have to replace our AC with dual-stage unit.

[modern kestrel]

So can open plc link with home assistant

[subtle creek]

nicer in terms of?

my only gripe with the nest is when it goes into auto away mode from the motion sensor it doesn't report it's in eco mode. turned out to be better in the end because setting up automations based on better tracking than a simple motion sensor was nicer

[sterile flume]

Similar to what you've described with away mode, being able to use voice control to adjust temperature (I use Alexa, which never seemed to play nice with Nest). I'd also like to avoid Wifi, and looking to use something like the Honeywell T9.

[arctic quarry]

I've tried searching but can't seem to find an answer (might not be using the right search terms), but this is what I'm trying to accomplish:

Always powered Smart Light, that is controlled via app AND/OR physical smart switch.

Want to get a RGB recessed light that can be controlled via HA (change colors and on/off), BUT I also want a physical switch that will turn the light on/off regardless of the last state of the light.
ie; Turn the smart light off via HA, but still able to turn light on with the physical switch. Turn light off with physical switch, still able to turn light back on with HA.

I know I can't attach the light to the LOAD of the switch, since that would kill power based on the state of the switch. Is this the use for "virtual" switches? Has anyone setup a system like this that could point me in the right direction?
I did find the "RunLessWire" solution on the Philips Hue site, but it is crazy expensive for a light switch

[fringe crater]

Some smart switches (like Zooz/Inovelli) have a "smart bulb mode" where it can be used physically, but it does not cut power to the load pin. Sounds like that may be what you're looking for?

[arctic quarry]

Need to look into this, but that sounds promising!

[fringe crater]

Though in that case you're either relying on HA to turn off the bulb, or you're relying on the direct protocol, if you get a zigbee switch and zigbee bulb and pair them.

So there is the possibility that you lose physical control if something's down/not working right, which can be uncomfortable.

Nothing worse than when it's time to go to bed, you push the switch to turn off the lights, and nothing happens 😅

[arctic quarry]

That is exactly what I'm trying to avoid lolol

I mostly want to be able to turn the light off from my phone while in bed, but then still able to turn the light on via the switch when I get up

[steep yoke]

Experience the horror, pulled some stuff out of storage and 3d printed a test bench and here we are… lol

@glacial oracle you should also witness the horror. Thanks you two your your input yesterday.

[wild meteor]

pretty sweet setup though

[still sapphire]

If you set the light to turn on always when it regains power, then if you put it off by app, you can always use a real physical switch to power it down then up again. That means you’d have to sometimes flip the switch twice, but you always can.

[cold moon]

then buy a zigbee bulb + light switch and bind them so the light switch turns on the light bulb no matter what happens whether home assistant is down or up

[still sapphire]

I have a couple of physical switches that are duct taped to on, which is not very elegant, but it does work, and in an emergency, it is easily broken.

[still sapphire]

Still doesn’t cater for what if the zigbee is fully down, but yeah, that’s the easy option. And in my experience losing home assistant happens way more often than losing zigbee entirely, especially short range point to point between a remote and its paired bulb.

[cold moon]

yes it does...

binding ignores the zigbee coordinator and mesh completely

it's just directly talking over zigbee to the other bound devices

[still sapphire]

I know, I didn’t say “when the coordinator is down”.

[cold moon]

well "when zigbee is down" doesnt make sense

[still sapphire]

Your neighbor hates you and starts spamming the 2.4G band with RF interference?

Not very likely, but possible. Less unlikely: the bulb crashes and no longer responds to anything.

If you don’t have a physical switch anywhere, that means flipping breakers. Which is fine, it almost certainly will never happen.

I mean, for me personally, these are not scenarios I consider when selecting my hardware. But it’s always worth thinking through hypotheticals.

[glacial oracle]

That's a bit in the direction of arguing about the power being out and being unable to turn on the lamp

[still sapphire]

Well, that’s a fair question these days, what with solar batteries, generators, UPSes… but for practical purposes, as far as I’ve experienced, the things to really worry about is a) internet down and b) HA stops responding for unknown reasons.

Which is a much easier category of things to solve.

[arctic quarry]

Would you know if any Zigbee switch would be able to bind, or is it a feature I'd need to make sure it had?

[cold moon]

that's a complicated question but the switch i'd suggest (inovelli blue) has all kinds of bind options

https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/guide/usage/binding.html

[gloomy spoke]

the problem is usually that the devices don't support the kind of binding that you want

[arctic quarry]

How so, what is the standard use of binding?

[gloomy spoke]

to have one device control another device

[cold moon]

They have to support the same cluster

[arctic quarry]

completely? As in the switch would control the smart light and only the switch

[cold moon]

It can’t be overridden

[gloomy spoke]

and as an "input", I beleive

[cold moon]

The bind will always trigger so home assistant can’t override it

So that’s a trade off

[glacial oracle]

someone drop the idea of a high availability z2m solution in here

[sweet nexus]

I have a button that I need to push and hold for 3 seconds. I was looking at Switchbot as a button pusher, does anyone know if I can control them with telling them to hold something down?

[tired scaffold]

Hello, I'm trying to move the disk to an USB disk attached via an adapter. The disk is detected in the interface, I can choose it and the process seems to go fine. It takes a while for the pi3 to reboot but when checking the data disk is still the card. On top of that, I get a warning that /dev/sda1 is named "hassos-data" and not the active data disk, so HA might chose the wrong data disk on boot. I have a display connected to the pi3, so I can access directly. Where should I look to understand why the data disk move process is failing? (I'm using a pi3 and am up to date and the PSU does supply the required voltage as I don't get the visual warning on screen)

version 11.4

"resolution info" in the cli returns the following:

os info

os datadisk list

os datadisk move /dev/sda

and then "Home Assistant CLI has been terminated"

well, looks like the disk is dead...

but I wouldn't have known without a display connected, so some kind of messaging in the UI would be usefull in the future

[tough frost]

Hey! I am currently running on an rpi 3b+, how would this go for an upgrade?

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/266400878308?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=705-154756-20017-0&ssspo=s-1l_WCrTWC&sssrc=2047675&ssuid=wXKGEeimSL6&var=566214494881&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

[cold moon]

Great upgrade but if you can get an n100 cpu based mini pc for a good price in au then I’d go with that instead

[tough frost]

What mini PC would have that and I can take a look.

[gentle mulch]

Hunt around a little you might find an m715q with a quad core Ryzen 2400GE

Thats what I run with proxmox, 40gb of ram and it also hosts my dns server, plex, unifi controller etc

beware sometimes the fans dont like to work with proxmox you may have to run a command at startup to tame the fans

turns out lenovo never supported linux on these boxes

I got my 715q for $100 shipped I think (Well, I bought 3 because of the price)

[tough frost]

I just checked eBay and nothing under 300

[tough frost]

That's another question. What os? I heard of people using proxmox but I want to run containers too.

[tough frost]

You can't run a Unix based os on m700?

[gentle mulch]

Proxmox as the hypervisor

then you can run VMs on that

you can run unix but you may need to do a little hackery to make the fan not spin at 100%

[gentle mulch]

where are you located?

[tough frost]

Brisbane Aus

[gentle mulch]

ahhhh

I am in the US tons of 2400ge systems

[tough frost]

I'm looking for < $150. The m700 comes to $120

[gentle mulch]

This is what led me to get the 2400ge

[tough frost]

Yeah so I need to run prox mox, a haos VM, and a Linux VM to run the containers in?

I saw someone suggest casaos

[gentle mulch]

im not familiar with casa OS

plus the system youre looking at I think supports linux better actually so it may be wayyyyy better suited

Im not running docker because I have several services all on the same port and it got irritating

[cold moon]

dont touch this

[cold moon]

proxmox will be your hypervisor (like your OS) and then you'll virtualize your containers and whatever else yea

https://www.derekseaman.com/2023/10/home-assistant-proxmox-ve-8-0-quick-start-guide-2.html this guide pretty much gets you going with hass

https://helper-scripts.com/ these scripts will help if you want to play around with LXCs or have them deploy VMs

[tough frost]

Cause I wanted to run z2m and mqtt broker outside haos in their own containers so they aren't hard tied to ha. Proxmox fine for this?

[cold moon]

no problem

you might as well just switch to hass container instead of haos

i prefer to run all my home assistant stuff together on one device running haos, fully separate from my server / network / cameras

[tough frost]

Well that's why I was looking at an os that I can just run containers in instead of an os with vms

[cold moon]

all split up nicely so only one thing drops

[cold moon]

casaOS is something people play with for fun not something people run for stability

[tough frost]

I ordered the m700 upgrade from what I have and found a discount code to Bering it to 100

[cold moon]

just setup proxmox and a dockerhost VM if you want to run a bunch of containers

that will be fine

i have an m910q

similar spec'd

[tough frost]

Thanks for your help 🙂 I'll look at the links you sent for prox mox and then I'll probably be back when it arrives

[cold moon]

ya man it's really not too bad

you'll like proxmox.

if it ships with windows update the bios with the lenovo updater tool on their site before you flash it to proxmox

that will save you the headache of using rufus later to update the bios

[gentle mulch]

Same

[gentle mulch]

THIS^

@tough frost You may also want to look into running a docker for the Matter Server

[tough frost]

Thanks, wouldn't have thought of this. Ships with win10

[tough frost]

So you're suggesting running prox mox, setting up a Linux VM to run containers in, then container everything in there rather than 2vm, one for containers, one for haos

[devout parrot]

If you just want to run containers go with Debian and run Home Assistant and whatever else you want in Docker.
If you want to run HAOS plus your own self managed containers, you'd install Proxmox, which is an OS optimized for use as a hypervisor, and then on Proxmox, set up one VM for HAOS and then a Debian VM for your Docker stuff.

[mystic dagger]

just got shipping notification my onju voice boards. Ordered them on the 26th of december, can't wait to play with voice.

[mortal spruce]

https://store.minisforum.com/products/pre-sale-minisforum-mc560?variant=43645170024693

Would something like this work as a voice assistant? It’s probably not the best solution, more a case of curiosity.

[winged knoll]

#voice-assistants-archived could better answer that

[brittle sentinel]

can someone explain to me how smart switches like these work: https://moeshouse.com/products/zigbee-smart-dimmer-switch-module-timer?variant=47134032757051

Does this make my existing dumb on/off switch smart (so the on/off switch turns into a toggle switch)?
Does it work with smart bulbs like hue, or only regular dump bulbs?

[winged knoll]

Yes, it fits behind the switch and makes it smart (or between multiple switches and the bulb)

Unless it supports smart bulb/decoupled mode then it needs dumb bulbs

[brittle sentinel]

thanks

[tight arrow]

Are any mini pc brands better than others for home assistant and other dockers?

[glacial oracle]

Not really. Different hardware decides on whether or not something is better, not the badge they put on it

[golden thorn]

dockers
Why is calling docker containers "dockers" a thing?

[glacial oracle]

Some ones may allow for better bios options or come with better cooling solutions

[glacial oracle]

podman container or pods ;D

[golden thorn]

I thought pods was a kubernetes reference.

[wild meteor]

pods at least make sense, imagine they were called... kubernetes

not a big deal but I also wonder where the the term "dockers" came from

[glacial oracle]

could just be generic plurality
I barely hear people reference them as containers

[tight arrow]

Any suggestions on ones to look at?

thanks

[glacial oracle]

Many good solutions have been named here before

Stuff that comes with an N100 probably offers quite some good value for most people's tasks

Alternatively they come in all shapes and hardware configurations you could imagine

[cursive river]

Hey, I recently got a new electricity meter with an optical interface which I would love to use in some way. The issue is that I live in a fairly big house with multiple units and the electricity meter is all the way downstairs in the cellar with lots of concrete and steel doors in the way. There is no way for me to get my wifi signal down there. Does somebody have any idea if there are alternatives to wifi based optical readers? Maybe something that connects to a bridge that uses a different radio protocol? I am based in Germany if that is of importance

Couldn't find anything in the internet and even the manufacturer of my electricity meter couldn't help me

[glacial oracle]

You likely are out of luck

You could probably diy something sending the pulses over some 3xx/4xx mhz RF solution but that may not necessarily work for your location or installation options

[cursive river]

One solution I thought about was installing an electrical outlet directly next to my electricity meter. Then get a powerline adapter to get my internet signal down there. But I have no idea if that is even possible or legal 😆

And that would maybe be a little over the top anyways 😆

[glacial oracle]

Legal it may be if you get the permission from whoever owns the property

But then it may be much simpler just installing a second meter in line in your access panel in your flat

[cursive river]

Might be an idea as well. I'll look into that. Thanks 🙂

[wild meteor]

no chance of running an ethernet cable down there, I'm assuming?

[cursive river]

No

[green summit]

I have a broadlink rm4 mini and love it. I need to control 3 more simple ir devices either by wifi or zigbee and wanted to know if aliexpress has anything that works well so I don’t have to spend $30 each for 3 of them. Also interested if some exist that run off of batteries

[normal hollow]

Do you have a consumer unit in your appartment? if so then a CT sensor on the incoming cable would allow you to pass the current being used out

[dawn sand]

Hello, i'm searching for a small, battery powered "most common sensors" in one solution that's sleek enough to put on the ceiling on every room and isn't "apple prices" expensive and does use a privacy friendly protocol like Zigbee

Sensors that must be included:

• Temperature
• Humidity
• PIR
• MQ-2 or MQ-5 smoke and gas detector

Sensor that would be nice to have but not a must:

• Microphone (For assistant)
• Speaker (For assistant/tts/media)

[winged knoll]

Little to no chance of all that with Zigbee - the bandwidth just isn't there for speakers etc

Probably the only way to get all that is to build your own with ESPHome/Tasmota/whatever

[dawn sand]

i have built 2 with all of these except mic and speaker with D1 Minis (esphome) and breadboards, but they don't look good enough and are prone to wire connections being funky and have to be hardwired or ugly powerbanks (I don't have a 3d printer and won't have one in the near future).

[winged knoll]

Temperature and PIR certainly exists, Develco/Frient do one

See the pinned messages of known working hardware over in #zigbee-archived

[dawn sand]

i also adjusted the requirements because the argument with bandwith makes sense. i'll probably need a seperate device using wifi for that

[winged knoll]

Environment + motion isn't that common, even one that does temp, humidity, and smoke/gas is likely to be hard to find

[wild atlas]

Aeotec makes some multi sensors, temp, humidity, pir, light, but no smoke/gas sensors in those

They're zwave though so privacy centric, but also not the cheapest of sensors

[dawn sand]

damn, that's sad to hear :c isn't there someone on etsy or smth that makes a bunch of them with their 3d printer that i could order assembled or as a kit? I've seen plenty of people posting STL files for their own "multisensors" but i can't find a link of where to buy them. Not even the chinese ripoffs steal the STLs and BOMs and sell them

[dawn sand]

does z-wave need special hardware aswell? I only have a conbee stick, wifi and bluetooth
it says Hardware required: Aeotec Smart Home Hub on their website :/

damn, even their older model costs 50€ (x9 rooms = 450€)

the one i made is like 10 bucks but also looks like this lol

[wild atlas]

Zwave requires it's own USB stick, you don't need to use their hub (they also sell USB sticks that work fine with home assistant)

It's a 900mhz mesh network so it's got good penetration through walls and pretty solid range though

Beats zigbee (at least in my house it does)

[wild atlas]

Grab a protoboard circuit board and wire it up officially!

Circuit board soldering isn't bad with through hole parts, just needs a fine tip iron and a steady hand (or just being braced well)

[dawn sand]

i don't have any and i'm scared of shorting traces tbh. protoboards always look like a fire hazard waiting to happen 😂

[wild atlas]

Well once it works, you could always paint it in brush on electrical tape

Though a few standoffs in a good enclosure is more sane to do

That's what I normally do, standoffs in whatever case I designed for it

Here's my latest chaos that I'm working on for high quality build work

[sleek talon]

I installed haos_rpi5-64-11.4.dev20240108.img on my rpi5 followed the instructions for ssh via 22222, after much looking I found the /mnt/boot/config,txt which doesn't match any docs I have found yet, added the dtoverlay=disable-bt, rebooted once, then shutdown, added the raz 7 pro, booted again, only to find that bluetooth was still enabled, and the raz wasn't working. I know all this is still a WIP for rpi5 but any thoughts?

[winged knoll]

#installation-archived can help there

[sleek talon]

ok thanks

[copper lion]

Anyone familiar with ratgdo and know much about MQTT vs ESPHome? My version says "implementation is possible" but I don't know what that means.

[sleek talon]

I just installed one of 3

my opener is the one with the purple and black buttons, so I'm restricted to the MQTT firmware, which works perfectly

[copper lion]

Okay, mine is purple too, so I'll use MQTT.

[sleek talon]

nothing else will work for yours at the moment, but I read that they are working on ESPHome updates

[copper lion]

So is Home Assistant the MQTT broker?

Or do I need to have one setup separately?

[golden thorn]

No. Depending on the installation method you can install one through HA though.

[copper lion]

I use MQTT to connect Solar Assistant to Home Assistant.

I don't know if it's HA or SA that is hosting the server though.

[sleek talon]

is HomeAssistant connected to an MQTT integration?

[outer knot]

Add-on store

Open your Home Assistant instance and show the add-on store

[golden thorn]

Might be listed here if I linked to the right place.

[sleek talon]

listed under devices & services

[copper lion]

I have this one, which is to my Solar Assistant RaspberryPi.

[sleek talon]

as long as your ratgdo uses the same topic, your solar assistant should see the broadcast messages

and hopefully HomeAssistant will too

if you click on the configure, and then hit re-configure, you can walk through all the settings. If your Discovery Prefix is still set to homeassistant, than I think you should be good

you will also find the address to your boker among those settings which you will need to setup your ratgdo

[copper lion]

I am using Unraid to host Home Assistant. I think I can just install a docker container to host an MQTT broker there specifically for this.

[sleek talon]

I'm no expert, but one broker should be sufficient for many devices

if you already have one, why add another, just one more point of failure

[winged knoll]

You normally only ever want one broker

HA can only talk to one anyway

[copper lion]

Do you know how to discover the topic of the existing server?

[sleek talon]

on that screen you posted, click configure, and then click re-configure

[winged knoll]

MQTT Explorer can help you

[sleek talon]

it will walk you though all the settings

[copper lion]

Oh, I guess I can find it in SA.

Topic prefix and topic the same thing?

[sleek talon]

No, each device might have its own topic prefix, but home assistant has a discovery prefix

for example, I could put each of my 3 ratgdo on 3 different prefix, but they will all use the same discovery prefix

discovery is how HomeAssistant sees it and adds it to your setup

[sleek talon]

perfect, its default

[copper lion]

So this discovery prefix is what I use to connect ratgdo to HA?

[sleek talon]

is that your ratgdo config?

[copper lion]

Yeah.

[sleek talon]

I would change the Topic prefix

[copper lion]

I am thinking that solar_assistant in topic prefix is wrong.

[copper lion]

Yeah, okay I thought so.

[sleek talon]

I used garage

[copper lion]

I have two ratgdos.

Will I want a separate prefix per device?

[sleek talon]

think you can set it to garage/garage1

and the other obviously garage/garage2

[copper lion]

👍

[sleek talon]

these are arbitrary, you could set that to what ever you want

foo/bar will work

the discovery prefix is key

[sleek talon]

perfect

[copper lion]

Then my device name is just ratgdo-garage1

Cool, thanks so much for the help!

Is there any way to ensure that the MQTT is working before taking it to the garage door controller?

[sleek talon]

I'm not sure if - is considered an illegal character, but I know that illegal characters cause issues

no spaces or illegal characters...

[winged knoll]

Topic names must include at least one character and can consist of any UTF-8 characters, except '$,' '*,' '+,' and '#'

[copper lion]

Safer to just switch it to ratgdoGarage1?

That was device name though, not the topic prefix.

[sleek talon]

I'm not 100% sure if it needs to be connected to the opener in order to start reporting, my guess is that it doesn't, but it might report ratgdoGarage1 unknown or something

[winged knoll]

For HA compliance I use _ in topics and stuff

[sleek talon]

the docs say no spaces or illegal characters in the name

[copper lion]

Okay, I'll just swap it to be safe.

[sleek talon]

I'm being nit picky here but why have ratgdo in the name, who cares what brand it is?

[copper lion]

I believe it shows up in the network as the name of the device.

I guess I could just change it in the network though lol

[sleek talon]

lol, OCD

for me

[copper lion]

Ah fuck me lol

I didn't realize when you reset the device name, you have to actually set the password you wanted again too

[sleek talon]

I forgot there even was a password

[copper lion]

Are there any guides for connecting ratgdo to Google Home?

[sleek talon]

Not that I have seen

[compact root]

US / $50 / Prefer ESPHome and Wifi - I'm looking for a temp probe to monitor the water temp of the water our wood boiler heats. Basically if the water is 110°F/43°C or higher, the controller mounted to the unit disables the outdoor unit. That way I'm using wood to generate heat and electricty for only the fan. I'd like to monitor the temp the same place the controller does (probe inserted in top circled area)

[glacial oracle]

You could probably diy something with an esp32 and a ds18b20

[still sapphire]

Ds18b20 come in versions that consist of a metal can with a wire coming out. I haven’t figured out the best way of attaching to a pipe yet.

If you’re wanting to insert a probe — how much room is there? If it’s really small you might need a thermocouple and a thermocouple amplifier.

[compact root]

If you look at the untaped connector on the right, that's how much room there is. As far as I can tell, the current probe is placed against the metal connection (circled area top left) and then taped over with thermal protecting tape. It's not a highly accurate setup because it's measuring the outside of the metal instead of inside the pipes, but it seems to work well enough. I just want to get that same temp reading on HA so I can make decisions about how to use the heat or if it's urgent to go outside and add wood to the firebox.

[compact root]

I'm not at the diy level yet--though I'd like to learn--and am hoping there's a premade solution out there. I'm looking at Inkbird, but not all of their products integrate well with HA.

[rancid apex]

Sensor wanted: Measurement of distance up to 10 m from moving objects.
What is it about: Someone is moving towards the house. Depending on the distance to the house, the light on the house should change color.
What kind of sensor would you use or recommend?

[glacial oracle]

A camera with frigate and different detection zones might do this the best. Theoretically could this also be done by presence sensors which can do zoning stuff but I highly doubt they work good outdoors

[mental abyss]

can I use these NFC tags in HA using HA companion app?

https://www.daraz.pk//products/i308476819-s1641759769.html?spm=a2a0e.cart.0.0.306d7d68JNyQCu&urlFlag=true

[glacial oracle]

Likely any NFC tag would work

[mental abyss]

never used one, so what up the different frequencys? anyone will work with HA on android?

here one with 125Khz https://www.daraz.pk/products/rfid-id-card-proximity-125khz-read-only-contactless-pvc-08mm-thick-for-door-entry-access-control-system-white-i437357970-s2103337702.html?

[glacial oracle]

That's rfid not nfc

NFC is exclusively 13ish MHz while RFID has various additional bands both of higher and lower frequencies available

[mental abyss]

https://www.daraz.pk/products/5-nfc-ntag215-504-i453816585-s2152349074.html?spm=a2a0e.searchlist.sku.14.14d627d7dflhkb&search=1

these are NFC?

thre are different chips too NTAG213 NTAG215 etc etc

[glacial oracle]

Only difference would be how much data those tags can store

Any should be ok for ha as it doesn't store a lot more than a url

Differences are 144b/504b/888byte between those three

Which is enough for a couple hundred chars of data

[mental abyss]

these can be used both ways, i.e use the stickers to read from the phone, or use the card for use with esphome based NFC reader

[glacial oracle]

They both do the same, storing some data. How you access it / having the device know what to do depends on, well, the device knowing

[mental abyss]

I was thinking of making replacement for the zigbee button, this seems to be cheaper solution

[glacial oracle]

A button is very intuitive to use tho
Having to pull out a card or a phone or both is just not as convenient

[mental abyss]

what I want to create is bedside automation, both card and card reader placed on the bedside, just scan the card around sleep time( time being set as a condition for the automation), no phone required

[glacial oracle]

that would still require a card reader, the card and the presence of the card on the reader at times

Having a button is much easier

[mental abyss]

button is more costly

need a zigbee dongle

[winged knoll]

They're not that costly, and you can probably use BLE buttons too in a pinch

[mental abyss]

BLE buttons, did try that but it didn't work out as good

that was before esphome had support for BLE proxies

any good BLE buttons to choose from?

https://devices.esphome.io/devices/ble_itag I used something similar to this

https://flic.io/shop are way too much expensive

[fringe crater]

If you've got esphome there already, why not just wire a physical pushbutton to it?

[mental abyss]

that was the original solution

even used a M5stack C3 in that role

[fringe crater]

so how did we go from there to nfc card reader?

[mental abyss]

number of buttons/number of automations

https://www.daraz.pk//products/i294494337-s1588183573.html?spm=a2a0e.cart.0.0.2f257d68gMgsMf&urlFlag=true these were in cart too

https://www.daraz.pk/products/without-wire-scene-switch-push-button-smart-switch-wall-panel-power-unit-powered-tuya-smart-life-app-re-mote-con-trol-for-smart-home-deviceszigbee-hub-required-black-4-gang-i424000434-s2008702634.html? this was the zigbee solution

[cosmic grove]

Aside from an actual smart scale, are there any smart weight sensors that are HA compatible?

Also curious if there’s a decibel meter that could connect, for setting things like “there is or is not a machine running in the shop”

[glacial oracle]

Nothing that couldn't be diyd

[cursive river]

I looked into this. Do you mean something like the shelly 3EM?

[half leaf]

Why can't I install HAOS on Orange Pi 3b? I am looking for hardware to install Home Assistant on. HA Green no good because no emmc slot, Yellow not possible to buy new locally.

[winged knoll]

Because it's not supported hardware

If you want to port HAOS to that and support it going forwards then I'm sure the dev team would be interested

[kind wind]

These innovelli fan switches use matter/thread and I know they are pre-order right now. Just wondering if anyone would avoid them (based on past experience with Innovelli) if they needed a fan switch that worked well with home assistant? https://inovelli.com/collections/pre-orders/products/smart-fan-switch-3-speed-ceiling-on-off-exhaust?variant=42786398044325

[oak pivot]

Morning Friends. Anyone have a good recommendation on getting started with Zigbee? I don't really know anything about the ecosystem currently. I have HA, with a Zwave stick for my thermostat. I'm assuming it's something similar? Ultimately I need a smart power strip with individually controlled outlets for some lamps in a room. The Kasa people recommend is like a month out for delivery from Amazon.

[cold moon]

people dont recommend kasa...

there is some good info pinned in #zigbee-archived but the gist is the same as zwave basically

https://tubeszb.com/product/cc2652p7-zigbee-to-poe-coordinator-2023/ i prefer a PoE zigbee coordinator over a usb one like most people use

[oak pivot]

I've seen it on five different threads so far, so figured that was a solid choice with the extra intergration I found for Kasa. Good to know.

[oak pivot]

This could be the tipping point to find myself a Managed Switch with POE.

[cold moon]

i'm a sucker for unifi silver myself

[oak pivot]

I have a USG and CloudKey currently, but then just dumb switches beyond that with 1 POE thing for my AP.

[cold moon]

yea prob could get away with a switch 16 lite

or upgrade your ancient usg to a udm-se and see if you can survive on that PoE budget

[oak pivot]

Yeah I would love to check out a Dream Machine. I haven't been able to find one cheap in my area yet. I get all my stuff used/donated so far.

[cold moon]

no such thing as cheap unifi i guess

[kind wind]

would this effectively increase the range? I have a new home with a workshop that is separated from the home. I haven't moved in yet but I'm concered about getting HA to work in the shop area with either zigbee or z wave.

[oak pivot]

Can be found, but takes a while, I got my USG for like $30 and they threw in the cloud key. Got my U6LR off ebay for $80.

[sterile coyote]

https://a.aliexpress.com/_EHjol1B
Is this worth getting? What's the power consumption going to be like? Better than an AMD A10-8700P I guess? Currently using about 0.3kwh per day, would this be less again?

[golden thorn]

These can usually go as low as 6W at idle. For the AMD thing it heavily depends on the mainboard and PSU so it's hard to tell but I'd guess so.

[sterile coyote]

Yeah I use about 14W and it's not that powerful in comparison to the N100. I guess that's decent enough for me to buy? I know it's from AliExpress but it's decent value I think?

[golden thorn]

Yo'll likely not get the money back through lower power usage any time soon. Only you can decide what you need and what is worth it to you. I think it's good value for the money. I'd probably pick one of the variants with a 2280 M.2 slot and additional 2.5" SATA support though.

[sterile coyote]

I mean the money back on the power isn't my plan. I just don't want to use much more and have something much more powerful

[golden thorn]

Yeah it's certainly faster. I'd recommend you pick at least 16G and virtualize.

[patent river]

If you're not in a hurry, the Minisforum S100 (announced at CES, you can find it in a bunch of videos on Youtube) looks interesting.
N100 CPU, 8GB RAM and 256GB storage, and PoE powered.
No idea what it's going to cost though

[sterile coyote]

Yeah would pick the 16gb model for sure. I use docker for most things currently, but I do think I'd consider virtualising

[patent river]

I found this: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Brand-New-original-Mini-Pcs-Mercury_1600968549935.html
But very unclear if it's a legit listing, and the specs are all over the place (says 8GB in some places and 16GB in others)

[sterile coyote]

Ah damn, it doesn't have a UK plug!

[sterile coyote]

Damn! Nice!!

[near shadow]

Hi, is this the right channel for help on external https access ?
feel free to ping me

[normal hollow]

3EM if you have a 3phase supply, else the plain Shelly EM which appears to allow 2 circuits to be monitored, if you wanted to monitor more circuits a emontx4 would work well.

[cursive river]

I would guess I have 3 phases since my oven and stove are connected to a 3 phase outlet. But I will ask an electrician to make sure which one I'd need. Seems like the best solution to me.

[jagged crypt]

it's important to realize that available horsepower and power consumption are not directly linked. Idling on a new CPU may be better power consumption than using a smidge of an older cpu.

[sterile coyote]

Hmm I see, but I do think upgrading from an AMD A10-8700P to a N100 will be better both performance and power? I use around 0.3kwh per day with my AMD laptop

[jagged crypt]

in that case you are jumping up 8 years in technology, and going from a 35w to a 6w cpu, so yes, you should see some difference

the a10 may idle at 6watts though, so you may be going to an idle at 3watt n100

so your delta isn't going to be huge

my i5-6500t lenovo tiny system idles at 15watts, though it has a 35watt cpu

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/2542vs5157/AMD-A10-8700P-vs-Intel-N100

[sterile coyote]

Yeah so it seems like it's definitely worth it in terms of performance? I'm not expecting massive savings on power (not my goal here anyway) but overall seems like I probably will save a tiny amount on power consumption anyway

[jagged crypt]

you have to make that call

the benchmark seems to imply single threaded speed is 2x as fast

what on your home assistant install is slow?

[sterile coyote]

To be honest it's not that slow, I just don't have the ability to run anything with AVX instructions. So for example I can't run frigate

[jagged crypt]

my understanding is frigate is going to suck cpu unless you plan on getting additional co-processor

[sterile coyote]

Yeah thought that, also can't even run Piper or whisper so there that too lol

[storm needle]

Anyone know a good touchscreen display for raspberry pi? I dont want it to have any board or mounts on the back as I plan to put it on a custom stand that requires a flat back?

[rose rain]

Anyone know if this would work for a DIY bed sensor? https://www.amazon.com/Ideal-Security-SK630-Pressure-Triggered/dp/B00GUNX7WY/ref=sr_1_1_sspa

I've seen some Youtube videos on it, but the ones I've seen have two wires and I only see one on this

Or really any suggestions at all for a pressure mat I can use

[jagged crypt]

smartipi case + official 7" touchscreen?

otherwise look for a unit with hdmi+usb touch?

no experience, just first hit for "external touchscreen monitor" https://www.amazon.com/Portable-Touchscreen-1920x1080-Ultra-Slim-Kickstand/dp/B0C3V7TCG8

[night haven]

Hi everyone. I have a question regarding the installation of mmwave sensors. I know placement is important (each sensor has a detection angle and distance) but my issue is electrical outlets and visibility. since in some areas the sockets are inside furniture and in any case if possible I wouldn't want them to be visible, has anyone tried to insert them inside a piece of furniture? Does human detection still occur within certain limits? Or is it not advisable anyway? Or I also have the case that to cover certain environments the maximum 100° or 120° is not enough for me to put them in a corner would mean going over obstacles such as furniture... is this still possible or are there problems? I hope I have explained myself.
Or whatever, positioned inside a plasterboard false ceiling.

[glacial oracle]

You cannot put those behind any object that would cover them

That would significantly reduce their range and accuracy towards it not working at all

I would place them right next to ceiling light fixtures so they do be a bit hidden next to those

[night haven]

However, I have also verified that sudden changes in ambient light can also affect the detection accuracy, so I'm not sure if placing them next to light sources can help

[finite dock]

I just got sent this as a free gift when I ordered a load of TRVs at ITEAD. Does it have any uses or can it be flashed to do anything useful in an HA system?

[still sapphire]

Wouldn’t that, at worst, cause a glitch when the lights come on or turn off? I suppose the worst case there is when the lights turn off because nobody’s there, it detects someone there again, so okay, that would be an issue.

[winged knoll]

Depends on the exact model, ,but some can be turned into a #zigbee-archived coordinator... if that's the WiFi connected one it's better recycled

[finite dock]

It's this one. "Recycled" as in re-purposed or as in tossed out? https://sonoff.tech/product/gateway-and-sensors/zbbridge-p/

I found a page that says it can be flashed with Tasmota with a flashing dongle

Is this something I could attach to my Wifi and Zigbee mesh then use as a watchdog to turn off my boiler demand switch if HA fails?

[still sapphire]

Ideally you — or at least I — would like your HA and your Zigbee coordinator to be connected to Ethernet, not WiFi.

[finite dock]

My current Coordinator is a Sonoff Dongle-P attached to HA by USB

[still sapphire]

Your potential use case sounds interesting. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of it, but it sounds interesting.

[finite dock]

I'm intending to replace my heating thermostat with a demand switch controlled by HA. I'd like to avoid a situation where HA crashes and leaves the boiler burning 24/7. My other thought was to use an ESPHome relay. I understand those can be programmed to reboot if they lose contact with the WiFi or HA for more than 15 minutes. If I put "relay off" as the first command in the boot sequence that would turn the boiler off if the demand switch loses its smarts

I'd rather the heating failed cold and safe than hot and not-safe

Can more than one device in a Zigbee mesh issue commands to another? If the relay is bound to the Coordinator, can something else tell it to turn off or only HA?

[winged knoll]

WiFi connected Zigbee coordinators suck, because they tend to generate their own interference

[winged knoll]

Yes, that's a #zigbee-archived feature called binding

[finite dock]

If the coordinator goes away, like the HA PC PSU fails, does the mesh drop like a rock or would the remaining devices still be able to communicate?

[winged knoll]

#zigbee-archived would know

[finite dock]

Thanks

[cold moon]

to expand and state the obvious.. they also are using fucking wifi as next hop after already going over a low bandwidth meshed wireless protocol..

[finite dock]

I don't deny any of these things. I was just trying to find a use for this thing I got given as a free gift with the purchase of my TRVs

If I can't I'll give it to my friend who expressed a minor interest in smart home stuff

[cold moon]

I wouldn’t give a known bad coordinator to a friend

[finite dock]

Not good enough for him to buy a couple of lightbulbs and switches and get started before plunging into HA?

[winged knoll]

Do you actually like them?

Or do you want to put them off home automation?

[finite dock]

I like the guy

[winged knoll]

Then why not listen to what we're telling you?

[cold moon]

We’ve seen a lot of people wish they never touched that device

[winged knoll]

Or, if you don't want our opinions, just say and we'll walk away 😉

[cold moon]

I might scallop it’s cold and I’m walking the dog

[finite dock]

Fair enough. I didn't see the harm in something to get him tinkering but now I do. Thank you

[winged knoll]

Well, if you'd been reading what was said you'd have seen the harm, but apparently you were just skimming

[drifting grove]

I'm going to move HA from a VM hosted on my NAS to a NUC and had a question - my thoughts were only using it for HA so was just going to image it with HAOS. Is there any benefit of throwing Linux on there and using a docker HA install? I already have two docker servers so I wasn't planning on leveraging it for anything but HA tbh

[glacial oracle]

no likely not then

[drifting grove]

Yeah didn't think so.

I couldn't think so any added benefit really, portability maybe I guess

[glacial oracle]

you may want to run haos virtualized for easier and faster backups

but besides that it should be plenty fine to just use haos alone

[drifting grove]

Hm, I haven't thought that, good point.

[cold moon]

https://www.derekseaman.com/2023/10/home-assistant-proxmox-ve-8-0-quick-start-guide-2.html this is a popular solution

[drifting grove]

Thanks - I'll check this out

[pallid flint]

does anyone have any recommendations for a multibuttoned device that could be stuck to a headboard to control lights, blinds, fans, and other things. Could be but does not have to be thread, zigbee, or wifi. I am in the US and i dont have a budget.

[outer knot]

Looking for advice about a device to buy? Remember to provide guidance on:

• Which country you're in
• What your budget is
• What protocols you prefer (eg Zigbee, WiFi, Z-Wave)
• Any features you want (such as power monitoring, dimming, etc)

[queen robin]

Can someone with ratgdo help me with editing the yaml file? I’m trying to set up the dry contact controls on a security+ 2 opener for my parents and was told I needed to edit the yaml to use the toggle function. But I cannot figure out how to edit the yaml file. I already flashed it with ESPHome.

[velvet dust]

Does anyone have the SONOFF NSPanel Pro and know if I would be able to access ZigBee devices with HA through it?

[warm prism]

Good morning! Finally have some time so I'm going down the rabbit hole. I'm running HA in a Docker container and, first, I'm wanting to get a few window sensors up and running. Nothing crazy...for now.

One thing I'm unsure of at this point is, I have HA...I have a sensor...shouldn't there be something in the middle? Don't the sensors need a dongle or hub or something to connect to in between HA and the sensor? Or do they just ride on wifi?

I may be over thinking things...🤣

[gloomy spoke]

Depends entirely on the sensor

[warm prism]

Currently have one of these on the way that would be here tomorrow.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01N3CVD4L

[gloomy spoke]

Then, yes, you need a Zigbee coordinator. See the pins in #zigbee-archived and the HA docs for Zigbee

[warm prism]

Sweet...that where MQTT and this thing and all that comes in?

https://itead.cc/product/sonoff-zigbee-3-0-usb-dongle-plus/

[gloomy spoke]

It can

[warm prism]

Cool cool. I know there are LOTS of variables...I'll keep reading. Thanks.

[full dagger]

Would you recommend the SkyConnect over the Sonoff Zigbee dongle for a HA Green setup?

[glacial oracle]

they both have their issues

[full dagger]

Where can I read about these issues?

[glacial oracle]

in #zigbee-archived
some stuff works, some stuff doesnt

either are probably not a bad choice

[full dagger]

Does anyone have familiarity with Aqara contact sensors and some Zigbee solution? SkyConnect, Sonoff Dongle, or Aqara’s own hub (which I hear they are still working on a new one)?

[cold moon]

Sure lots of us use aqara stuff without a hub just a direct connection to a coordinator for home assistant

[full dagger]

Good to know. I’m looking into getting door sensors and I have a HA Green so I am trying to find the best solution to make it all work well together. Thanks!

Also it’s nice to know I don’t have to buy their $70 hub

[tough frost]

Hey wiz or tuya?

Tuya bulb is cheaper but wiz is better?

Is that it?

Just looking for opinions between these two brands

They're the only 2 readily available and I need to pick one. 806lm RGB and tw wiz for 29. Tuya tw 1055lm for 10. I had tuya lights before and was not a fan

[forest pike]

Anyone know of a device that lets me power a raspberry Pi in my ceiling by bringing power to it rather than putting an outlet up there?

[patent river]

PoE hat is the traditional option
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/poe-plus-hat/

[forest pike]

Any way I might be able to use the power up there already? I don't think I can run off the same circuit as the pot lights because it's switched right?

[patent river]

You should by and large avoid wiring random things to lighting circuits if you can avoid it

[forest pike]

Just curious, why? Fire hazard or something?

I'm basically working with my buddy on this. He's doing a heavy remodel and we were thinking we could have speakers installed in some of the rooms. I found a lot of posts about using Logitech media server with raspberry pi clients connected to speakers. Just trying to figure out how to actually power these in ceiling speakers properly now. We'll be pitching it to his electrician at the end of the day anyways but trying to get an understanding first

[barren geyser]

What's the difference between "brining power to it" and bringing power to an outlet?

[forest pike]

We were thinking an outlet in the ceiling would just be more work. Would it be hard to hide? We discussed it before and he didn't want a outlet visible in the ceiling with things like a wall wart plugged into it. Would be better if the electrician could just connect wires to a box that supplied the right power for a raspberry pi

[barren geyser]

I'd suggest you either put the Pi and the outlet in the attic -- or -- find somewhere else and run the speaker wires from there.
You haven't really said what you're powering the speakers themselves with? or do you have something that gets loud enough off a headphone jack on a Pi that you don't need anything to amplify the signal?

[forest pike]

We found some ceiling speakers on AliExpress that come with an amp on the back. Those would need to be powered as well but I'm still trying to confirm with the power cable looks like for those. They have an aux built in.

There's no attic unfortunately. Flat roof. Also some would be on the first floor ceiling

Sounds like you're recommending an outlet still, will talk to my buddy and see if he wants the electrician to install hidden ones

[barren geyser]

🤷‍♂️ I mean you have to have something to convert from AC power to DC power... If you aren't going to use PoE (that moves that conversion to your networking equipment), then you probably need something akin to a wall wart. You could do it with a transformer, but you'd still need to hide that somehow.
And I'm not sure how you're encapsulating the Pi itself, but you need ventilation to cool it and you want to be able to get at it when you need to fix something; so it isn't like you can plaster it inside of a wall.

[barren geyser]

I'm also not a fan of plugging in my digital equipment like a Pi without having a surge protector in front of it. But if you're not concerned about power surges having an impact on it's lifespan, then maybe that's a non-issue.

[forest pike]

All fair points. We will have to think about this further by the looks of it. Than you for your insight

[forest pike]

He has a surge protector built in to the electrical panel in the basement. Said he got it installed when he built his and his wife's gaming PCs

[raw scaffold]

Hey folks, not sure if this is the right channel, but can I use the Philips hue switch without a hub somehow?

[fringe crater]

Believe those work with just straight #zigbee-archived , so you could maybe use that if you have that.

[round bone]

Does it make sense to have electricity near the door lock to lock / unlock the door? Instead of using battery.

[glacial oracle]

yes

[round bone]

Can you give technical details?

[glacial oracle]

about what

[round bone]

How to mount this? normal electricity cabel 230V to (image) ? How close to the door?

maybe you can link smart home lock working with wires instead of battery?

[glacial oracle]

the latch(es) get disengaged for opening a door. as those are mounted on the wall side you just run a wire through to them. various ways to run wires and installation sockets into a wall

[round bone]

Do they need 12V or 24 V, so I have to put device covnerting 230V -> 12V in the wall?

[glacial oracle]

its commonly 12v from what i saw

but that depends on the one you buy

you should check that before

[round bone]

I am finishing house and I seriously don't have time to do deep research and choose lock right now. I will choose later, but want to prepare cables for this.

[glacial oracle]

i tend to believe those converters get put into the distribution panels

[round bone]

I don't know, but having electricity which can kill you connected to the door is too suspiecious for me. I bet it has to be connected not directly.

[glacial oracle]

In the end you will need to do the research about what will work with your door and frame

[round bone]

Actually I can't find any door lock in google which is connected to wires, but maybe I am searching wrong

ok I found something with Hardwired Smart home Locks but still looking

[cold moon]

https://store.ui.com/us/en?category=all-door-access

Magnetic door locks is what you’d probably go for at this point

[round bone]

ok I found 0 locks for outdoor. I think they don't exist. Only batteries.

[glacial oracle]

outdoors?

[round bone]

sorry, I think correct name is front door

as far as I understand https://store.ui.com/us/en?category=all-door-access is for authentication, but doesn't sell wired locks

@glacial oracle are you sure you saw front door locks wired?

[glacial oracle]

Yea these kinds of latches

When energized they don't latch anymore which allows you to just open the door

[round bone]

ah I think I got the how it works. I am looking smart home locks, but I shouldn't. It is just electromagnetic lock activated by electricity.

it is not "smart" in that meaning

this is why I can't find it

[glacial oracle]

It's rather common for multi tennant houses when they have a shared entry

But those don't actually lock the door in a locked way if that's what you meant

[round bone]

yeah, I am not sure if this type of lock is good for front door

there has to be a reason why I have never seen this solution

• for front door

[glacial oracle]

There are the ones you may have seen that turn a key and unlock the door like that but those seem to be battery only for the most part

[round bone]

exactly

only batteries

not for most, but for 100%

at least I ddn't find even 1 lock like this

[glacial oracle]

Those also don't work with every door depending on how many locking points are used

[round bone]

which make sense

yes, unfortunately I have normal lock in front door.

so it will work for me

ok so my final conclusion is: I have to use battery lock or normal regular lock and I have to live with it 🙂

[chilly heart]

Moving the question here since this is a better place for it than general, not trying to spam it everywhere; Hey y'all, my girlfriend and I are looking to get a cat. Of coure I want to get some smart stuff to make life easier. At least a feeder and / or water bowl, I'm unsure what to look at and how to determine if a smart feeder can be added into HA or not. Has anyone here done this before and is able to give me some recomendations and tips or tricks?

Feel free to tag me with a response, I'm not checking Discord all the time and would hate to mis some information on this.

[cold moon]

buy a zigbee coordinator and an aqara pet feeder (i got one and it works great with hass)

[chilly heart]

The c1 feeder you mean? I've been looking at them since I expected them to work with HA. Any other things you'd recommend?

[cold moon]

i havent finished setting it up yet (automated) i just set it up to let me trigger it via homekit for now. ultimately i figure i'll have it feed unless manually fed every so many hours

so using the home assistant automations to accomplish that, not the built in "schedule"

[cold moon]

that's a really open-ended question. what other things do you want?

if the cat(s) go inside/outside you could use a door/window sensor on a pet door or a camera with object detection + trained model (easier than it sounds) to know which cat it was

[chilly heart]

Ultimately I'd want that as well. Automate everything based on time and then forget about it haha

[chilly heart]

We live in an apartment, so outdoors isn't an option. Maybe something to limit water consumption? Though I'm not sure if that's needed. Other than that I'm really not sure what else can be helpful. In the future we're going to get a robot vacuum for the living room, but that's not really cat related.

[cold moon]

right, but if someone manually feeds the cat (via a button or just not via smarts) you want to compensate and remove feeding times then

[chilly heart]

Yep, and I'm not sure how to do that, that'll be a task. But if you just stick to the times and don't manually feed that wouldn't be a problem anyway.

[rose rain]

Anyone having issues with Inovelli fan switches after the Firmware update?

I can turn them on/off in Z2M directly, but HASS says they're unavailable and won't let me control them at all. Very odd

[gloomy spoke]

No problem with mine

Should ask in #zigbee-archived

[rose rain]

Will do, thanks!

[pallid orbit]

hey guys, im building my home and need tips in this phase. Do the cameras nowadays use CAT6 for power and data or do they need more? Do i need cat6 for my laundry, kitchen and bathroom? can i put my server under the roof, on a hot place? what about whole-house sound? Do i need to think on something about the air cooling? Do curtains need cat6?

[winged knoll]

POE cameras use that, yes

And don't put the server in the roof, that's a terrible idea

Put it somewhere that's in the fabric of the house - if you have AC then in an AC cooled space

Curtains will probably end up being Zigbee or similar, but network cabling can open up options - including for wired window sensors

[pallid orbit]

i think courtain will need? 2,5mm cable?

and what about smart locks? do they need cables?

[glacial oracle]

those commonly run on batteries

even tho there are some latch options which do not, those dont actually lock a door in the common sense way

[pallid orbit]

and garage doors?

[glacial oracle]

those use normal grid power

[chilly heart]

Sorry for the ping, but I want to wake this up again. Have you looked into automatic litter boxes? Maybe one that's able to be intergrated into HA?

[cold moon]

ya the litter robot is super popular

it's just expensive

[pallid orbit]

but do they need ethernet cable for HASS integration?

[glacial oracle]

not necessarily, that would as pretty much always depend on what you buy

[chilly heart]

I've heard of those yeah. But I don't quite think I'm ready to pay the price for those lol. Any others you'd recommend?

[glacial oracle]

not sure about how smart those are in general besides being rf controlled i havent seen a lot of different ones yet

wheter or not something will work with homeassistant directly, require additional hardware or doesnt work at all depends on the device

[pallid orbit]

and what do i need to do to prepare the house for alarms?

[glacial oracle]

alarms in what sense?

[pallid orbit]

presence sensor, siren, monitoring

[glacial oracle]

that may depend on what solution you pick up

some go wireless and some require a wired connection

usually second isnt ethernet based but if you just look at it as a bundle of wires, those can be repurposed rather easily

commonly those sensors would run on 12-24v and have not a lot of current

having a lot of individual hard wired windows sensors may however require you to diy a bit around

[forest pike]

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005885107619.html?spm=a2g0n.productlist.0.0.4b5a9af7IIqtqF&browser_id=fe193fb3d8f14707acd9f24a4ceb83ac&aff_trace_key=af040c4be73e4098af7c5943c2cca55f-1705862235890-07929-UneMJZVf&aff_platform=msite&m_page_id=ecmzhgzxnwcawpdb18d2dbd9dab1f2c2c8101392e6&gclid=&pdp_npi=4%40dis!CAD!16.46!0.68!!!85.94!3.53!%402101fb1517058694178808316edc80!12000034700430816!sea!CA!0!AB&algo_pvid=e5b0a487-0ab4-4358-839d-2aaa016650cc&search_p4p_id=202401211236571600133483397000003447971_5

How do I know if devices like these are good or will at least work? The price seems really low...

[winged knoll]

Tuya...

Tuya's Zigbee stuff is better than their WiFi stuff, but that bar is lower then bedrock

Some Tuya Zigbee stuff is good, some is ok, and a lot is utter trash

[forest pike]

Understood.

So this kind of thing is called a module?

[winged knoll]

Yes, and there's many non-Tuya options

Exactly what those are depends on your country

[forest pike]

Is there a recommendations page for this? The more reliable or reputable ones seem pretty expensive (I guess you get what you pay for though)

Were in Canada if it helps

[winged knoll]

Not really, the problem is that everybody wants somebody else to manage one of those, and nobody wants to do that themselves

There's informal lists, which mostly means avoiding (for Zigbee) Sonoff and most Tuya, but considering Xiaomi (Aqara/Mijia) and Moes (which yes, is Tuya, but the good kind)

Country matters a lot as most of the world doesn't use 110V 😉

However, in NA you've also got more options for replacement switches, and #zigbee-archived could guide there

[forest pike]

Excellent thank you

[forest pike]

Oh awesome I just saw moes for decent enough price

[chilly heart]

How can I detect which platform a smart device is using (tuya, zigbee, esphome etc)?

[gloomy spoke]

In what context?

[cold moon]

"detect"?

[chilly heart]

As in, I'm looking at smart devices and I'm not sure whether I can add them in HA and what platform they're using. And I just don't know how to see which item is running on what

[chilly heart]

Yeah detect was a poor choice of words to be fair

[cold moon]

best bet is just ask here for specifics

even if things "work" in home assistant there are varying levels of "work"

for example, you might get a zwave smart light switch that doesnt have smart bulb mode, or has wonky firmware, or just generally is a worse product than another model by another company for the same price

[unique coral]

I have been googling and I am just not finding it.
Ceiling fan, one light switch.
I want to leave the fan on at night, and not have to find a pull chain in the dark in the AM.
Zigbee, Z-Wave or Wifi, whatever.
US
Is $50 enough? how much money does it take?
(Tag me or reply) Thank you!

[bleak helm]

Hello, I have been noticing MQTT messages from my devices are very inconsistent recently. I read that Sonoff Dongle-E built in firmware (6.10.3.0 build 297) is flaky and wondering if I can flash the dongle according to https://dialedin.com.au/blog/sonoff-zbdongle-e-rcp-firmware without having to re-configure all 30 devices again. Took me 2 months for all that. Please let me know the general steps if you have any insight.

[winged knoll]

Hello, I have been noticing MQTT

[ornate cobalt]

Hello. I’ve found this mini pc.. is this good / bad/ over kill for home assistant? Beelink Mini PC AMD Ryzen 7 5700U Up to 4.3GHz 8C/16T, SER5 16GB RAM 1TB SSD Graphics 8core 1900 MHz, M.2 SSD NVME 2280 Mini Computer WiFi 6/BT5.2/HDMI/DP/USB3.2,Gaming/Office..

[earnest rose]

Depends what you’re doing, but probably overkill, yes

[winged knoll]

There is no overkill

I run HA, and a lot more, on a similar performance Ryzen 5

[ornate cobalt]

Oh ok cool I’ll get this as my first one thanks guys

[unique coral]

Something to think about. Use Proxmox on it, and then add HA as a VM.

[hasty ice]

General question: has anyone used an UPS HAT on a rpi to keep HA running (and gathering energy consumption data) during outages? I'm wondering if it would handle several days or just a couple of hours.

[barren panther]

which rpi? the latest rpi5 does consume a lot more power than the rpi4, which in turn also consumes a lot more than the rpi3

that being said, you can find out by checking out how big the battery of the UPS is and how much your rpi consumes per hour

[hasty ice]

I was thinking in using the 4. But for my usage a 3 might even be enought. But I guess I will need to investigate a bit to get concrete numbers. Offgrid usages of HA seem rare.

[barren panther]

well, tbh if you only want to gather data you might want to implement something less heavier than an rpi, I would personally look at ways of perhaps implementing an SQLite db on a rpi zero which gathers data

there might be even better ways to do that but I haven't worked yet with such constricted environments

[glacial oracle]

powering a pi on those hat solutions / from batteries usually give you a couple of hours of runtime

doing the napkin math, something with two ICR18650 style batteries should be able to power it for 3-8h
i wouldnt expect a lot more out of it

[hasty ice]

hummm thanks for the feedback. Might need a bit more research then as I will for sure at least a couple of days in case of power outages.

[glacial oracle]

a larger ups solution like those large mobile power stations or a real ups may be able to power it for some longer time

but those also cost significant money

[gloomy spoke]

Related to HA in some way?

[wise vine]

Not sure if this is the correct channel, but I am having some serious issues setting up my HA VM using Proxmox with iGPU passthrough. When I add the PCI device, the VM fails to launch. When I remove it, it launches fine

[golden thorn]

Any errors or hints in the task log, VM summary or the node's syslog?

[outer knot]

@wise vine Please do not cross post. Read the channel description, post it and wait for folks to respond. Crossposting wastes people's time as they're unaware of the help you're getting elsewhere.

If you don't get any responses after an hour or more, and your message is no longer on screen, it is fine to re-post or post a link to it.

[winged knoll]

#cameras-archived message

[wise vine]

I am a linux and Proxmox noob. How do I go about getting that info?

[golden thorn]

Double click the task at the bottom, open the VM's summary tab and go to node > System > Syslog respectively.

[wise vine]

Last bit of the syslog:

Jan 22 13:18:09 proxmox systemd[7173]: Removed slice app.slice - User Application Slice.
Jan 22 13:18:09 proxmox systemd[7173]: Reached target shutdown.target - Shutdown.
Jan 22 13:18:09 proxmox systemd[7173]: Finished systemd-exit.service - Exit the Session.
Jan 22 13:18:09 proxmox systemd[7173]: Reached target exit.target - Exit the Session.
Jan 22 13:18:09 proxmox (sd-pam)[7174]: pam_unix(systemd-user:session): session closed for user root
Jan 22 13:18:09 proxmox systemd[1]: [e-mail]: Deactivated successfully.
Jan 22 13:18:09 proxmox systemd[1]: Stopped [e-mail] - User Manager for UID 0.
Jan 22 13:18:09 proxmox systemd[1]: Stopping [e-mail] - User Runtime Directory /run/user/0...
Jan 22 13:18:09 proxmox systemd[1]: run-user-0.mount: Deactivated successfully.
Jan 22 13:18:09 proxmox systemd[1]: [e-mail]: Deactivated successfully.
Jan 22 13:18:09 proxmox systemd[1]: Stopped [e-mail] - User Runtime Directory /run/user/0.
Jan 22 13:18:09 proxmox systemd[1]: Removed slice user-0.slice - User Slice of UID 0.
Jan 22 13:18:22 proxmox kernel: kvm_msr_ignored_check: 3 callbacks suppressed
Jan 22 13:18:22 proxmox kernel: kvm: kvm [7014]: ignored rdmsr: 0xc0011029 data 0x0
Jan 22 13:18:23 proxmox pvedaemon[881]: VM 100 qmp command failed - VM 100 qmp command 'guest-ping' failed - got timeout```

[red island]

For anyone that is interested in Door/Window contacts, the Shelly Door/Window 2 takes a minimum of 5 to 10 seconds to report back to HA about a status change. Zigbee equivalents are instant. I guess the Shelly device has to wake up and connect to wifi before the signal is sent. I know this doesn't feel like a big deal but it is quite annoying, my garage doors can be half way up before a notification can be sent. Yawn.

[cold moon]

you hate to see it chat

[thorn tide]

curious if anyone has any experiance with this type of Tuya wall outlet. It has 2 outlets, 2 usb ports and energy monitoring. I have been able to find the relays for the outlets and usb ports based on basic trial and error, but I am struggling with finding the gpio pin for the energy monitoring.

[glacial oracle]

that sounds like something a wifi device would do

[glacial oracle]

it likely is part of an ic

[thorn tide]

any recommendations of how to find out without ripping it apart? I was hoping some form of a scanner existed to auto search components on each gpio pin

[glacial oracle]

well you can usually check the serial number of the tuya module, see if you can find a datasheet and hope that its on there

[jagged crypt]

How much is your time worth to you? 🙂

(ignore if you are deriving joy from doing the reverse engineering)

[tall hare]

I found this zigbee smart plugs i was wondering if has anyone work with it? https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0BPY5D1KC

[gloomy spoke]

I have a bunch of them

[cold moon]

they are highly suggested here

[gloomy spoke]

they do report energy readings quite often and don't appear to have a way to moderate that

[cold moon]

you hate to see it

[quasi sorrel]

I added a BT usb stick to my rp4 to use it's external antenna. Now I would like to disable the onboard bluetooth for the raspberry. How can I do that?

[tough frost]

Hi just received my m700 that I'm trying to install proxmox on for ha.

I can't for the life of me get it to boot menu?

Tried F12, f2, and enter spam on startup. It just kind of hangs. If I do nothing then it boots to windows no worries

Anyone know anything about the m700

I used the windows tool to update the bios before trying to install proxmox

[golden thorn]

F12 should open the boot menu. You can also just change the boot order in the BIOS. Kind of?

[thin oxide]

Hi,
Anyone use Aqara H1 switches in decoupled mode? 99% time mine work perfectly with automations I have in HA via Zigbee. But if I restart HA or Zigbee2Mqtt the automations stop working unless I go around each switch and press the button a couple of times to almost "wake up" the device and HA will start receiving the action messages again. Anyone else experienced this or have a solution?

[tight arrow]

Any suggestions on a mini pc that is powerful enough to run home assistant and retro/modern games?

There are to many to choose from now

[golden thorn]

And as such there will me equally as many suggestions.

[tough frost]

Yeah... I can't get to the menu. I have tried F1 and F12 spam on boot

[sharp bone]

I have a Home Assistant Green, and i have a Ender 3 Neo 3d printer.
Can i connect my 3d printer via usb to my HA Green?
Will that do something and give me information/details?
Also with the help of octoprint?

[glacial oracle]

Likely this won't do a whole lot

Octoprint runs standalone for the most part

There is a dockerized version on which you probably have to pass the usb connection through but that could be a bit tricky on haos

The integration is for an existing octoprint instance as far as I can tell

[tough frost]

No one is online atm wiht m700 experience 😦

[glacial oracle]

You could try telling windows that you want to the boot menu

[sand hemlock]

Hi, I have a simple question about using a door cam (thinking about getting the Imou DB61i 2K) and recording movement with HA.

I'm using an RPi 4 with HA right now, currently it's not logging anything so an SD card is okay for the system to run off, but I understand an SSD would be a better choice if I want to start logging things like power usage, temperature data and video feeds from my camera security system and my door cam.

Is HA well suited to make recordings whenever the motion sensor of my doorbell is triggered? And would 1 external SSD be sufficient for this type of task?

Also, can an external SSD be USB-powered through an RPi 4?

[winged knoll]

You can power an SSD, but use a powered USB hub to save yourself pain

[sand hemlock]

Yes, so this powered hub would go into the Pi and then the SSD goes into the powered hub. I have to evaluate if I have enough power sockets in that special corner of my room ^_^ haha

[winged knoll]

HA isn't really an NVR though, a dedicated solution is better - #cameras-archived can talk all abot that

[sand hemlock]

Yeah, right now I use my NAS to record everything. But the NAS has HDDs and no SSDs. It also doesn't have a caching disk like some NASes offer.

[winged knoll]

(it has limited record capability)

[sand hemlock]

So I was thinking to reduce stress on my NAS, to move this part of home security to the HA instance

[winged knoll]

Recording the occasional video won't stress an HDD

[sand hemlock]

No, but there's a lot of foot traffic in front of my home, so 200+ triggers per day will add some stress I figured

Dutch streets are narrow and busy. In the city there are no lawns or gardens around the houses 🙂

[winged knoll]

Not that much

Even a full stream is likely 10 Mb/s

[sand hemlock]

Thanks for the hints, I'll ask around in the camera topic to hear if anyone has used a doorcam with HA! 🙂

[winged knoll]

Lots of people have 😉

[full dagger]

https://www.amazon.com/Aqara-MCCGQ11LM-Window-Sensor-White/dp/B07D37VDM3/

The description of this sensor highlights the importance of having an aqara hub, but as long as I have Zigbee support in my HA system, it should be fine, right? No need for Aqara hub?

[gloomy elbow]

Correct, I have a number of those #zigbee-archived devices on my Z2M network

[winged knoll]

FY, for Amazon (and most sites) everything after the ? is usually just tracking crap

The first part (Aqara-MCCGQ11LM-Window-Sensor-White) can usually also be removed, along with ref= onwards

Resulting in https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D37VDM3/

[full dagger]

That’s a good point. I was going to edit and shorten it but I forgot lol

[full dagger]

Thanks for the reply. At like $17 these look super good! Any cons I should know about?

[gloomy elbow]

Buy them from AliExpress, wait 10 days for shipping and get them at half the price 😉

[winged knoll]

Also, if you can get the E1 (or T1) versions they're a lot better

[gloomy elbow]

And you can't stick them on magnets, just in case you were planning to

[full dagger]

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000606515029.html

Youre telling me these are the exact same thing?

[gloomy elbow]

Yup

[full dagger]

Gotta love mass produced chinese products

[winged knoll]

Look for https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/devices/MCCGQ14LM.html

Those are the E1 version, and worth the upgrade

(Zigbee 3.0, so better behaved)

[full dagger]

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805984081472.html

Do these match that specification? It looks like they are E1 according to the description

[winged knoll]

Maybe... maybe not

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/1005005260567227.html

[full dagger]

I would guess not just since I see $9/unit vs $15/unit

[naive flicker]

anyone here who could maybe help me out with a smart kettle and cloud tuya? 🙂

[outer knot]

Don't ask to ask, just ask your question. Then people can answer when they're around.

When you do ask a question, try to provide as much background detail as possible. Ask yourself these questions first so that others don't have to:

1. What version of the Home Assistant are you running? (remember, last isn't a version)
2. What exactly are you trying to do that won't work?
3. Is the problem uniform or erratic?
4. What's the exact error message?
5. When did it arise?
6. What exactly don't you "get"?
7. Can you share sample code, ideally with line errors where the error occurs?

[naive flicker]

Few weeks ago i purchased a smart kettle from lidl, it worked perfectly with tuya cloud, yesterday i unplugged it from the power and plugged it back in. now when i start the heating process, the LEDs turn on like they are supposed to, but the heating proces doesnt start. i can start the heating proces from the smart life app no problem and can monitor the temperature from HA, also stop the process from HA. so there seems to be a connection and I can manage the device, but the heating doesnt start..

[naive flicker]

for the sake of it i just setup local tuya and i have the same result.. leds turn on, process starts but it doesnt heat.. when i stop the process leds turn of and i hear 3 beeps (which is normal behavior)

[full dagger]

How much does 3.0 matter when it comes to other Aqara devices?

[winged knoll]

3.0 > 1.2 😉

It matters, it really makes a difference

#zigbee-archived can tell you all about it, but the short version is that 3.0 devices are more likely to be well behaved than 1.2 devices

[full dagger]

Good to know. I’ll have to look into all the specs

[cold moon]

it depends. during some sales you can get the 1.2 door/window sensors for 4 for $20. i have like 6 of them so far and i'm really happy with them, even using one on my mailbox pretty far from the closest light bulb repeater. i'd rather have 4 of those than $20 for 1 of the zigbee 3.0 of that specific model imo

[full dagger]

Yeah that makes sense, but something like a door sensor to me is going to be long term and so I want to go for the most up to date version. Other things like motion sensors I don't care too much about it, but I would prefer it being up to spec.

[cold moon]

for the motion sensors i def would

for the door/window i cant even find the new gen on alie

or couldnt last time i looked

[chilly cradle]

with a Dell Optiplex i5-7500T, should it be idling in the 35-40% CPU usage range?

[golden thorn]

Probably not but as always, it depends.
Follow this but use c rather than m to see CPU usage: <#general-archived message>
That memory is quite overkill. You should virtualize 🙂

[chilly cradle]

Yeah, I happened to have 2x16GB Ripjaw DDR4 laying around so I threw it in. I was thinking about setting it up that way when moving over from the Pi but I wasn't quite ready for the challenge. I have to keep everything working or the wife doesnt like the automation

Where is HA Supervisor?

[outer knot]

User profile

Open your Home Assistant instance and show your Home Assistant user's profile

[golden thorn]

Enable advanced mode in your profile☝️then visit the addon's main (Info) page and see the toggle.

[chilly cradle]

Ive had advanced mode on

[golden thorn]

https://my.home-assistant.io/redirect/supervisor_addon/?addon=a0d7b954_glances

https://i.imgur.com/uHwYqdT.png

[chilly cradle]

Thank you. Checking it out now

[golden thorn]

Good ol' coredns

#general-archived message

Are you blocking specific DNS servers?

[chilly cradle]

Nope, dont think so...

[golden thorn]

This issue is not uncommon: https://www.google.com/search?q=coredns+cpu+homeassistant
The command in the link should fix it. I have to apply the same for my test VM but I happen to block direct access to public DNS servers.
Still, this should not happen.
Maybe I should tell you how to use it. You can use one of the SSH addons. I recommend the advanced one.

[chilly cradle]

Thank you @golden thorn !

[chilly cradle]

Is there a benefit to virtualizing if I am just using HA and Frigate?

[golden thorn]

<#hardware-archived message>

[chilly cradle]

Thank you. I know we are getting farther away from hardware so I wont go too much farther down the rabbit hole in this room... The one thing that would keep me from doing it currently is that I dont want to have to reconfigure a bunch of stuff. Would I be able to restart on a VM (Proxmox is what I hear everyone using) then just load up my backup and have it right where I left off?

[golden thorn]

Yes, I expect this to work. We can also thread this so it doesn't pollute the channel.

[chilly cradle]

Ok, thank you. I will probably just buy a new SSD that way if I blow it up or hate it, I can just swap drives back out.

[sour nacelle]

Anybody here using a custom controller for newer daikin climate devices? i found one called faikin on amazon that does not need the daikin cloud. it should have its own wifi and can be controlled by mytt https://www.amazon.de/Faikin-Alternative-Daikin-WiFi-Controller/dp/B0C2ZYXNYQ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8&coliid=I3RS46U59GV0TV&colid=1KJU2AA9Z9WA4

[pliant forum]

I use Proxmox. There’s a premade script by tteck you can use to install Home Assistant on it super easily.

[jagged crypt]

you can either use the script or read it to figure out what it's doing, whichever you want to do 🙂

And yes the concept of just starting up another proxmox elsewhere, and migrating over. If you have hardware sticks (zigbee controller, etc), you'll have to adjust your proxmox config (easy) to map the hw into the guest HA install.

[golden thorn]

Suggesting such scripts to beginners is a bad idea imo. In my opinion you should use them to help you, not overcome the inability to do it.
Let them learn their way around PVE first.

[pliant forum]

You run one command in the shell and it guides you through it..? I understand that you should learn what you’re doing but as a whole I don’t think scripts are a bad idea. They’re all on GitHub and it’s a trustworthy source.

I took that the wrong way.. yes I agree with you that they should learn their way around Proxmox lol. The edit helped 😂

[golden thorn]

Yeah sorry, I'm bad with getting all I want to say out with the first try.

[chilly cradle]

New drive will be here tomorrow. The simple script is tempting but I do look forward to properly learning what I'm doing

[cold moon]

https://tenor.com/uYTT.gif

[cold moon]

honestly i like the idea of playing with (trusted) scripts/templates first as long as they go back and virtualize and play later

that way they get to experience a reason to actually set it up properly

plus worst case they have a stable proxmox setup using trusted scripts to do a simple task.. and easier to troubleshoot than bare metal haos

[golden thorn]

I admit I use convenience scripts too (get.docker.com for example) but the PVE scripts make a lot of choices for you. VMs/CTs have a lot of knobs and I feel someone who uses PVE should be familiar with them and how their app is installed/configured. I'm sure the existence of these scripts have caused more people to be interested in PVE so it's not a bad thing they exist.

[tight arrow]

How are you finding it? I'm thinking of getting one

[chilly cradle]

How did I find what? My cpu usage? Settings > System > Hardware. However I do prefer the app the the others guided me through now.

If you are wondering about the computer, eBay “mff OptiPlex”. They’re a ton of used for sale for under $100 (when I bought mine 18 months ago)

[golden thorn]

They probably meant whether you like the hardware. At least that's how I read it.

[chilly cradle]

If that’s the case, I love the optiplex! I would have to reboot my pi every few days for unknown reasons. I automated it to restart but would still poop out on occasion. The optiplex has been 100% reliable. The only times HA has been down has purely been an Error 40

Not to mention I have a habit of over the top upgrading so the optiplex is more fun on that way too since I can’t get 32gb RAM on my pi.

My only desire would he to remove the wifi card for lorawan to my optiplex since it already runs on Ethernet. If that could be arranged (with my rather minimal coding knowledge) I’d call it perfect for my house.

[patent river]

I'd be curious to know if something like this could be adapted: https://www.waveshare.com/sx1302-868m-lorawan-gateway.htm
I found plenty of client LoRa cards in M.2, but zero host cards. Amazon will sell you a highly suspicious M.2 E key to Mini PCIe adapter but who knows if it passes through all the pins you need: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B089YS7M2Z

Gotta say though, pretty happy with my standalone PoE LoRa gateway. Talks MQTT natively, so it was a cinch to get talking to HA

[chilly cradle]

I have had issues with both mqtt and mosquitto. My mailbox is on TTN (on separate pi) > datacake > email. I haven’t been able to connect up Lora to HA.

[patent river]

Using one of these
https://www.milesight.com/iot/product/lorawan-gateway/ug65

Mostly environmental sensors, but I do have one digital io box that is configured as switches and buttons and operated by Lora downlink commands

Although while the relay is a class C device so it's almost instant, I've also implemented downlink commands for the class a devices so I can change reporting rate of sensors on the fly

[tough frost]

Hey! this is a debian/proxmox issue. Am I able to get support here?

[golden thorn]

Maybe.

[tough frost]

I am trying to install a driver for the wifi usb adapter. I know people will say not to use wifi but I have to at the moment
I have downloaded NW392 Linux v4.3.0.4 from https://www.simplecom.com.au/simplecom-nw392-usb-wireless-n-wifi-adapter-802-11n-300mbps-5dbi-antenna.html
I have put it on a usb and mounted it to my debian. I open it up, run ./install.sh and then it errors

Authentication requested [root] for make driver:
make ARCH=x86_64 CROSS_COMPILE= -C /lib/modules/6.5.11-4-pve/build M=/root/usb/RTL8188 8192EUS_linux_v4.3.0.4_11485.20140519/driver/rtl8188EUS_linux_v4.3.0.4_11485.20140519  modules
make[1]: *** /lib/modules/6.5.11-4-pve/build: No such file or directory.  Stop.
make: *** [Makefile:1318: modules] Error 2
##################################################
Compile make driver error: 2
Please check error Mesg
##################################################

[golden thorn]

You don't have permission to access /simplecom-nw392-usb-wireless-n-wifi-adapter-802-11n-300mbps-5dbi-antenna.html on this server.
Cool. Did you install a tool chain to build things (build-essential) and kernel headers?

[tough frost]

uh, I have not

[golden thorn]

Anyways, this appears to be a RTL8192EU so you can simply install firmware-realtek: https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/firmware-realtek
Also give this a read: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/WLAN

[tough frost]

what package manager do you recommend

[golden thorn]

apt? 🤔

If you need further help with installing the package create a thread. I don't want to get yelled at for going too far off-topic 😄

[hard tinsel]

Hey folks, wondering if anyone has any suggestions for wall mounted tablets? I'm currently sick to death of the fire tablets and want to evict them. What I want is:

• Available in the UK
• Has root and lineageos or similar
• 10 inch display or higher with decent >1080p resolution
• Has Qi charging

[tough frost]

ProxMox WLAN install

[tight arrow]

I'm wondering about the mains as I've got a couple of hundred in CEX vouchers and they have these in stock

What USB ZigBee adapter did you pair it with?

[chilly heart]

@cold moon sorry to bother you again mate. We're actually now looking at two cats instead of one. Which is going to make the feeder situation a little harder lol. Ideally I'd want a double feeder. I've been looking at the PetLiBro devices and seems like they use or used Tuya. Do you know anything about them?

[chilly heart]

I'm also looking at some other hardware to implement into our home. Specifically light switches. I have some criteria;
-Needs to be standalone from the smart bulbs. So I want to be able to control the light from HA and from the switch without that interfering.
-1 and 2 gang
-Prefferably a dimmer function
-EU model (Since there's a difference in EU en US as far as I know?)

I've been looking around, but can't quite seem to find what I want ot

[winged knoll]

EU and US have quite different electrical standards 😄

There's a lot of Zigbee dimmers and dimmer modules

https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/#s=dimmer - just don't buy Tuya (or Sonoff)

[glacial oracle]

sadly the amount of good looking equipment on the eu side of the sea severely lacks good options

You may be tempted to smartify and existing switch but be aware that this may need the space of a dual in-wall receptacle

[chilly heart]

Yea we've noticed that as well sadly, I might just go with a aqara H1 and then not have the dimming function. Though I don't know how that'll work with the first criteria I've made. Do you know that by chance?

[chilly cradle]

I have a Phoscon ConBee II. I also have SkyConnect but along with many others, I couldnt get it to work properly with many devices so I switched back to ConBee and it works perfect 100% of the time. I added a 90° adapter to the rear usb so it looks like another antenna instead of the 6" cord adapter hanging off like a skin tag.

The cheap little adapter really made a big difference in aesthetics. I don't have a dedicated server area so I need everything to blend in to the bg to keep wife approval up.

[runic tinsel]

I’ve ended up putting the hue wall switch modules behind my switches in the end and permanently connecting the leads to the smart bulbs. I have the Schneider modular light switches where you can replace toggles with momentary and use that for dimming. The smart and the non-smart look the same but it’s expensive

[inner sphinx]

Hello

I'm currently searching for a battery powered LCD/E-Ink Clock for my Bathroom. It would be great when a temperature/humidity sensor is included which is sending its data to home assistant.

I already found this xiaomi clock, but the time should be drifting a lot, without a connection to the phone app

https://www.mi.com/global/product/xiaomi-temperature-and-humidity-monitor-clock/

Any recommendations?

[gloomy elbow]

I don't have noticable time drift with those clocks, maybe a minute or so between spring/summer changes. There is a cool tool though that lets you reset them from the browser: https://saso5.github.io/LYWSD02-clock-sync/

Whoops, link corrected

[inner sphinx]

That seems to be okay.
Thank you for the link 👍

The display is working out of the box with home assistant, right? Does it also work with esphome Bluetooth proxy?

How long do the battery last?

[gloomy elbow]

Yes, it does for both. And the battery last about 18 months I think?

[inner sphinx]

Thank you. That sounds like a great solution.

Have a great day/evening 🙂

[chilly cradle]

Hey, I am getting proxmox added to my optiplex. I have an M.2 NVME and a 2.5" SSD. I am following Home Automation Guys advice and putting Proxmox on one and the programs on the other. Any though on which I should put on which drive?

[golden thorn]

I'd use the NVMe for the VMs and the other as boot and OS disk.

[jagged crypt]

you should put everything on nvme, and backup to the 2.5 🙂

[golden thorn]

Not a bad option either. Can you tell us more about those disks @chilly cradle?

[chilly cradle]

They are both Crucial 1TB

[golden thorn]

1TB just for OS would be a bit wasteful. Panzer's suggestion might be a good option here. I'd use a PBS VM and let it store its backups on the slower/inferior disk in this case.

[chilly cradle]

No worries, its not reading my NVME at all anyways....

[mint sun]

Hello, I'd like to get into home automation, but I'm having trouble finding good resources on which devices I should be getting. It seems like many functionality details are omitted by the retailers about the devices. And even so, searching for one that ticks all the boxes and comparing their parameters seems difficult.
In particular, I am currently looking for a zigbee-based power monitoring smart plug in the EU or FR standard, ideally one that would come pre-calibrated and that could be flashed with Tasmota. Any tips on where I could look?

[ancient musk]

Will the new matter Kasa light switches be able to be used in a way where 1 press turns the smart light bulbs on, then another turns them off? Without physically killing the power to them?

[gentle saddle]

Hi All, im sure this has been asked before, but I just wanted to be specific about our use case. Im looking for a mesh wifi system, we have Ethernet to each side of the house that can be used as backhaul, but then the seperate garage needs wifi backhaul. We dont need router capability as I have Edgerouter X. Thoughts on options including is it worth integating to HA?

[gleaming tapir]

Saw your question over in automations on the Aqara switch, it looks like it can operate in decoupled mode, assuming this is the one you have: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/devices/WS-USC01.html

[ancient musk]

This is exactly the one I have!

[gleaming tapir]

You may need to use Zigbee2MQTT to change the mode; not sure if it’s possible with ZHA

[ancient musk]

Figuring out how to do this will be another thing 😅

[gleaming tapir]

I assume that means you are running zha?

[ancient musk]

I’m doing it through the MQTT/Mosquito way. Should I do zha?

[gleaming tapir]

If you are getting it into mqtt I assume you are using zigbee2mqtt then?

[chilly cradle]

I failed pretty mixerably my first attempt at getting mqtt to work. I dont quite know what I was doing wrong. I am hoping to get that worked on in the near future.

[spring pasture]

I am looking at the hardware recommendation page and can't find like a zigbee hub, I am running HA on a VM ontop of synology NAS, so looking for like a zigbee hub over wifi or ethernet if that exists

[winged knoll]

#zigbee-archived can help there, but don't buy any WiFi connected ones

[spring pasture]

oh, I haven't se the zibee chat, thanks about that 🙂

[unique coral]

I have a Alexa that is at least 5 years old and home assistant.

Does matter work with all of this?
I have wifi and ZigBee and Z-Wave.

I probably just don't really understand matter. Is there a simple answer or a link?
Google says Alexa does matter. Does home assistant? Or do I need another dongle, somehow?

Limited-time deal: TP-Link‘s 1st Matter Smart Light Switch: Voice Control w/Siri, Alexa & Google Assistant | UL Certified | Timer & Schedule | Easy Guided Install | Neutral Wire Required | Single Pole | Tapo S505 https://a.co/d/1BkhPqf

[winged knoll]

Read the pins in the #matter-archived channel

[unique coral]

Sweet! That's what I needed.

Short version is that... There isn't a short version! I need to read more. Thank you

[glad rain]

Hi guys, my work is throwing these away,

Do you think they are worth saving as a small home assitant server?

I think I have 13 in total I am unsure if I should let them go or keep them to sell?

They took RAM and Storage 🥲 its SODIMM DDR3 so its not that expensive to source out

its either N3700 or the J3710 unsure which since I never used the PC's

[patent river]

Putting the serial number into their support site says Pentium J3710, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD.
So you didn't miss out on much, so far as those go.

[glad rain]

So you think I should let them go?

Not worth the hassle?

[patent river]

https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/us/en/products/desktops-and-all-in-ones/thinkcentre-m-series-desktops/thinkcentre-m600/10g9/10g9s03800/s4cx6401

Depends how much RAM you can put in them. Intel's site says 8GB max, but there's a lot of stuff from that generation that says that, but works fine with more.

[glad rain]

On their site they are selling 8GB

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/14qz9rv/can_lenovo_thinkcentre_m600_cpu_n3700_or_j3710/

Aw 8GB is max

https://picsur.tumba.dev/i/0b5d4c5c-a4da-4b83-aa05-1e5ee5164607.png

[patent river]

I agree with the comment that if they're not DDR4 they're probably too old to bother with

[glad rain]

I mean I am running mine on 6GB DDR4

but yeah its virtualized and I can allocate more anyway

[wild atlas]

I mean if you want to build a small lab, could be fun to play with clustering on little low power units

[winged knoll]

Performance of those is about 150% that of a Pi4

[next iron]

geekbench has comparative benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/22166302?baseline=1360737
The pi5 is about 2x those m600s though.

[sterile flume]

Is it just my imagine, or is there less availability of non-wifi switches and such now compared to like 2020?

[glacial oracle]

in variety or in stuff being available for you to purchase now

[glad rain]

Have people used pi4 to run HA?

Or does it need to be more powerful (host device)

[winged knoll]

People have used a Pi Zero, and performance is terrible

Pi3 is about the lowest spec you want to go

Pi4 is ok, not awesome, but ok (at least on an SSD)

[glad rain]

Also is geekbench universal?

Because if that is the case this just blows my mind that a phone can do this lol

[winged knoll]

Not universal, but close enough

[sterile flume]

I suppose the latter. I need to start over with my switches and I guess I'm not thrilled with the availability on Zigbee or Z-Wave at the moment, and thread seems to still be unavailable.

[chilly heart]

I have a little bit of a dillema again, I want to transfer to door sensors for some automations. But the doors here aren't flush with the frames. So I guess I'm basically screwed? Or is there some way to still make it work?

[golden thorn]

I use buffers like this. Doesn''t look pretty but works.

[chilly heart]

That might be the route I'd need to go for, or try to mount them differently on the frame

[gloomy elbow]

The sensor on my washing machine door doesn't touch, but it's close enough that the sensor reports closed when the door is closed—it might be worth experimenting

[patent river]

The magnetic sensors I use say 20-30mm in their spec sheet. Probably a bit less than that in reality, but 15mm is probably about accurate

[gloomy elbow]

Also, stronger magnets might just do the trick for you, and those come in very small sizes so are easy to hide

[ancient musk]

I got it into Zigbee2MQTT and under action it states, "null"

[golden thorn]

Might be this: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/guide/faq/#why-is-the-action-property-always-empty

[gloomy elbow]

And if you press it, what do you see?

[chilly heart]

Thanks for the tips guys, I'll take a look around to see what I'll come up with to fix it!

[ancient musk]

When I manually press the button nothing happens, I have it set to "decoupled" mode

I haven't made an automation yet which could be the problem?

[gleaming tapir]

Did you read the link that Impact posted? I don’t think you have a problem that needs solving.

[ancient musk]

Yeah I did. Sorry I’m really new at this

[quasi sorrel]

Does someone know if/how I can disable the onboard BLE on a raspi4?

[glacial oracle]

You could check if you can do that through the raspiconfig

[winged knoll]

And if you use HAOS #bluetooth-archived may know

[quasi sorrel]

I can neither execute the command on the terminal addon, nor connecting to port 22 or 22222

[mild galleon]

I have a 120 LED light bar, with 7.2v lithium battery in it. Unfortunately, the control board is fried, two large resistors let all the smoke out. I was thinking about using an ESP32 (and any extra parts) to drive the LEDs. Is that a possibility? If so, any links to some projects like that would be highly appreciated. I don't even care if only 60 or 30 of the LEDs are in use, that would be fine, just as a reuse project, and learn some stuff. Any links or help appreciated

[glacial oracle]

That sounds like haos then

[winged knoll]

#diy-archived can better help there, if you share pics of the board

[mild galleon]

Thanks for the link, will post something there.

[unique coral]

hey ya'll Sorry, I just dont know what i dont know

• I think the short question is. Is there a light switch that can controll a ceiling light, and tons of other lamps, like a nightstand lamp. etc.
• The longer question is, I have a ceiling fan and light with only one switch (have to use pull chains) maybe there is a wall powered light switch that can turn on
  A. Fan only
  B. Fan and light

https://www.amazon.com/Z-Wave-Network-Scene-Controller-Required/dp/B09B6S4TSL/ref

Is the above a good one, or what I am asking, is there a better one?

[wild atlas]

Zooz makes good gear, I have some of their sensors and switches around my house and they work well

That's what I would've recommended based on your question would be one of those zwave scene controllers

[tired bridge]

The knockoffs are here

[unique coral]

Bring me up to speed

[unique coral]

Thank you so much for responding.
Just to make sure.
Put some smart bulbs in the fan light and then one button is "Fan only " and the other button is "fan and light"
And obviously since power is needed, I could not have "light no fan"

Unless I did some chain pulling

[wild atlas]

HRM, that could get odd too, since smart bulbs prefer being always powered, but in this case you can't since that would power the fan

You might be able to get away with some delay in the automation to wait for the lights to connect, then turn them on

Would be much easier if the fan and lights were separate switches, even if they were in the same Wallplate for connections

[sterile flume]

The fan and lights could also be wired to always receive power and using only the scenes to turn the lights on or off, right? Realistically, how often do people actually change the ceiling fan settings?

[wild atlas]

Might be able to put a small Shelly or something in the fan too to control fan on/off

Then leave it all always powered and just control the smart devices

[cold moon]

https://digiblur.com/2021/07/08/itead-sonoff-ifan04-l-they-listened/

[unique coral]

I gatta read ALL this thing later... but it starts off fantastically! nice find, thanks

and I saw that on Amazon, but I could not tell how it worked, so I moved on

[wild atlas]

Something's funny with their html though, my browser shows random chunks of it in the middle of the website

[unique coral]

Yeah, honestly, I'd be fine with the ceiling fan always on, same speed!
But I need to toggle the light

[devout parrot]

I was gonna mention the ifan. It's probably the best option for automating a pull chain, one wall switch fan.

[acoustic ice]

I respect your view that using scripts might be seen as a crutch for beginners. It's true that different learners prefer various approaches, and what works for one may not work for another. While you emphasize the importance of letting beginners navigate PVE independently, others might find scripts helpful in overcoming initial hurdles. It's a matter of personal preference and learning style.

[cold moon]

that's basically what i said lol

[acoustic ice]

Really?

[tall ermine]

Can anyone help me with a setup to be able to stabilize not keep getting DC from different devices and no flickering lights from Sensors to use locally while I’m using a ZBDONGLE-E
I have tried Aqara Motion Sensor P1 and have issues with them, and cannot understand why when it seems to have top reviews. I have not installed it by their hubs and maybe I have set it up incorrectly or is there a Fault with them. I know I'm asking a lot here! 🙂

[winged knoll]

#zigbee-archived can help with Zigbee, at least if you explain the actual problems

[forest pike]

anyone know if a device like this can control just regular old RGB LED strips as well?

[glacial oracle]

what would be regular old led strips. There are quite a few different ones out there

[chilly cradle]

I had some issues with high CPU usage the other day but this seems to be different but I did still try using the code. does anyone know what could be causing the high usage while HA is idling?

[golden thorn]

Open the VM's VNC console, enter login then run top -o %CPU to see the culprit. Another way would be this: <#hardware-archived message>
If the issue is coredns then follow the last link's discussion for a fix and background on it.

[golden thorn]

I also gave it praise a few posts below 😉

[golden thorn]

How did I completely miss that I linked you to our own conversation? 😮

[chilly cradle]

Yeah, that was me. On Wednesday, I changed HA to VM/proxmox instead of HAOS so everything is a little different now

[golden thorn]

That does not look like the system's top though. Mine is red and shows different things.

[chilly cradle]

I took your comment into consideration and finally went for it since I wanted to add Frigate and Coral to my setup

[golden thorn]

I'm wondering why your top looks so different. I'm running 11.4 as well in that screenshot.
I don't see anything here but the load is a bit high. Try pressing SHIFT+P and Shift+M to sort by CPU/memory and SHIFT+C to see full command paths while top is open.
I assume VT-x/Virtualization is enabled in the BIOS/UEFI?

Wait a second, did you run that on the PVE node? The memory leads me to believe that. Slow morning.
You need to use the HAOS VM > Console tab or the upper right button to run commands in the VM itself. node > Shell is the host's shell.

[chilly cradle]

This is where I am running the command

[golden thorn]

Yeah that's the node's (host system) Shell. I updated my post above with some info how to run it in the VM.

[chilly cradle]

Hmm... Im not figuring it out.

[chilly cradle]

Hmmm.. "login" got me there

aha. coredns again. So Im guessing if I run that code in this terminal window, it will now work? That would have been what I was doing wrong before.

oh, I was also taking shots in the dark before. Thanks @impact!

[golden thorn]

We should stick to the thread to not pollute the channel. I always forget.
There's dedicated proxmox discord servers too where I'm active but feel free to ask here as well.
And yeah, the command is likely the same fix here.

[vagrant vessel]

Anyone know of a dimmable 3 way light switch that is confirmed to work with transitions in HA?

[tough frost]

Any recommendations for a high lumen output zigbee light?

Want to put one in the back yard, currently have 1521lm. Thinking the 1600 hue ones but looking for recommendations in aus

[jagged crypt]

I use the white hue one a 1600lm in the kitchen. If you remove the color options they are reasonable.

$15 usd from amazon

not sure what availability/cost in AUS

no availability looking at amazon.com.au

[tough frost]

I have 1100 white ambience through most of the house

just want a brighter one for the back yard for entertaining (small patio area and grassed area)

[patent river]

https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B09T41ZN8T/

Not to spoil the surprise, but t'ain't $15, that's for sure

Few bucks cheaper at Bunnings though: https://www.bunnings.com.au/_p0358365

[tough frost]

Yeah very expensive which is mainly why I was looking for suggestions instead

[young cairn]

Hey friends, I followed blakadder's guide to enable ADB and update WebView on my NSPanel Pro. I ran the Xposed Framework installer script and then rebooted the device (via adb reboot). It's now been in the "Sonoff" boot screen trying to boot for well over 30 minutes... That's not normal, is it? Is there anything I can do at this point to "reset" or "retry"? I'm worried that cutting the power at this point will brick the device (if it isn't bricked already...). The device isn't connected to WiFi, so I can't connect to it via ADB. Help please 😦

[oblique harbor]

is there a smart bulb that works with the docker container version of home assistant (homeassistant core) with no additional hardware required (excluding the bulb of course)

[golden thorn]

Why would the docker version not work?

[oblique harbor]

alot of bulbs (I think including zigbee devices) require homeassistant integrations

addons that aren't supported in core

I don't know much about homeassistant I just recently installed it but I found out I can't add addons as you need to OS version to do that

I also don't have any matter or zigbee hubs/adaptors so the bulb has to support wifi

[golden thorn]

Addons are not integrations. Which addons do bulbs require?

[outer knot]

An add-on is a Docker container with tweaks to allow it to be configured in the Supervisor UI. It is only available in the Supervised installs (#330990055533576204 and #330944238910963714) since if you've used any other install method you're able to install software already.

[tender aurora]

i have a photocell that has an output using a minijack connector (TRS). i have measured between the sleeve and the tip and i measure constant 11.93V, no matter what happens. if i measure between the sleeve and the ring, i have 3.3V when no one passes, but if i break the photocell then the voltage just increases

[tall ermine]

Maybe see my link save me from repeating myself on this issue thanks https://community.home-assistant.io/t/automation-flickers-lights-after-3-mins-and-occupancy-does-not-work/679541

[tender aurora]

is this something i can hook up to esphome?

[soft terrace]

Hope this isnt the wrong place to ask but anyone know how i would wire a shelly dimmer 2 if i installed it inside a ceiling lamp? got 2 wires so no ground.

[tired bridge]

Any ideas why i'm getting such different temps from sensors in the same area?

[glacial oracle]

Two of them are differently enclosed

They also may be not calibrated / variances between sensor units

[golden thorn]

There's probably also potential for "self"-heating.

[glacial oracle]

They may also behave differently on different power supplies and cable lengths

[tired bridge]

same psu
same cable
the one not enclosed is for reference, and it's number two
but still 2 deg hotter than the weather station i have

[glacial oracle]

This looks like a DHT sensor

Depending on which you got they aren't that accurate

If this by any chance is a dht11 then you are looking at an accuracy of +-2* to be in spec

Which figuring the indoor weather station probably isn't dead accurate either could reasonably explain your results

[tired bridge]

thanks!

[hidden badger]

Any germans here like to order the hardware mod for the nest mini from pcbway?

[glacial oracle]

I might

But the min quantity makes it kinda expensive for trying it on a single unit

[chilly heart]

I'm looking at the aqara smart light switches, how do they work along side smart bulbs? I'd like to be able to both use the light switch to control the light but also use HA to turn on or off the lights via te GUI.

Anddd, for the aqara door sensors, do I really need the aqara hub?

[glacial oracle]

You probably need to pick a light switch with neutral connection and see if they support smart bulb mode. But the availability of those may severely depend on your region

[chilly heart]

Yeah I was afraid it could become a problem, or atleast a search for something that does what I want. Do you have any idea of a switch that meets those requirements?

[winged knoll]

As always, your country matters for that kind of recommendation

[chilly heart]

I'm EU based, The Netherlands to be specific

[glacial oracle]

The aquara one with neutral can do the switch detachment you would use for smart bulbs if their page is right about this

I saw some resold ones on Amazon for around 50 bucks

If you have massive in wall space behind those switches you could also use one of those external relays to smartify any switch

[chilly heart]

They're around 35 euros here with neutral sensors

The aqara ones

But about the hub, I'm going to get some more aqara stuff (presence sensors, door sensors etc). Is it a must to get a aqara hub for them to work correctly with HA? I'm running on a pi so I'd assume I need it lol

[winged knoll]

For #zigbee-archived devices you don't need a hub, just a suitable coordinator and #zigbee-archived stack - see the pins there

[chilly heart]

The latest aqara door and window sensor (the 2 in 1) are matter based right? Will that change anything about needing a hub or not?

[winged knoll]

Well, if they're #thread-archived you'll need a Thread Border Router - see the pins over there

For those are are WiFi then see the pins in #matter-archived - but no, no hub

Almost never do you want or need a hub with HA

[chilly heart]

Well I'd have it figure out what that is lol, thanks for your information once again

[chilly heart]

To continue the above topic, I've been doing some research and would like some input from you guys. I don't have a zigbee stick and would most likely need that eventually. Alongside with a thread border router. I've laid my eyes on the zemismart hub. Which supposedly does zigbee and is a thread border router. Does anyone here have some experience with this device?

Or would I be better off with getting the HA SkyConnect?

[glacial oracle]

We don't recommend using hubs, they may or may not work at all with ha

Sky connect has some trouble with multiprotocol thread currently so this may also not be the best purchase for now

Check out the sites on zha/z2m about which solutions would be recommended

[sudden minnow]

Unless you NEED Tread now, I would still go with the SkyConnect. I finally settled one on a while ago, I have SonOff and Conbee sticks in my "failed" Smart Home box. Things have been better, but I only use the standard firmware with Zigbee.

[plain pawn]

👋 currently I have maybe 15 kasa light switches. They work pretty well except a) maybe 1 in 100 when I physically click on or off it doesn't change and 2) I'm afraid to upgrade their firmware because TP-Link has been pretty anti FOSS integration

We're moving and my choice is to either double down and get maybe 15 more or go with another brand

What are the front runner alternatives to the TP-Link kasa for wall switches these days?

[outer knot]

Looking for advice about a device to buy? Remember to provide guidance on:

• Which country you're in
• What your budget is
• What protocols you prefer (eg Zigbee, WiFi, Z-Wave)
• Any features you want (such as power monitoring, dimming, etc)

[chilly heart]

Well, I want to implement some more sensors and stuff into the house. So I need some sort of solution for it. But everyone is saying something different and I'm kind of at a loss of what to do lol

I am EU based, and price isn't really it problem. I just need some sort of "guideline" on what would be the best option to implement

[plain pawn]

I live in the US. I don't have a specific protocol because my setup supports zwave xigbee and wifi. I want wall switches that have on/off , dimming, and 3 way switches (not all on 1 switch) but across the 30 or so switches I need these are the features I want

[kind ginkgo]

Trying to create a present for a 3 year old and want to have "press button and something happens". So I thought to buy a numpad as an input-device. Would HA recognize each input individually? Or is it a case of "it depends" where it varies between different brands? Maybe depends on connection type? (Cord, Bluetooth,2,4Ghz)

[cold moon]

Do you have zwave

[kind ginkgo]

Nope, I have Zigbee.

[winged knoll]

Then yes, with the right device

#zigbee-archived has a pinned message detailing known working hardware

You may also want to look at the Aqara Cube

[cold moon]

Cube is an interesting idea

[winged knoll]

Plus #tags-archived have done awesome stuff with "cards" to be put on a reader

[cold moon]

I have multiple of them and like the cubes

[winged knoll]

Cube + sticker == child friendly

[kind ginkgo]

There are buttons to buy, but the ones I have found are 1,2 or 3 tap which is not ideal for a 3 year old. Thought if I had an USB-connected device if HA would pick it up. The cube sounds good! 😄

[cold moon]

Well with a cube it knows what face it’s on and what face it goes to

So you could really go wild with automations

[kind ginkgo]

I was going to modify the numpad with pictures, but the cube sounds alot better. 🙂

[cold moon]

Buy the new gen T1 cube btw

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/zigbee2mqtt-xiaomi-cube-controller/393203

That’s the non t1 model linked, he has a blueprint for the t1 as well

[kind ginkgo]

Was just searching for the cube and the original is just sold by sites I feel a bit iffy about. So was going for the new one anyways. Thanks!

[winged knoll]

AliExpress is fine

[gritty nymph]

Hi to all. I have just started looking into home assistant.
So far installed HA in a docker container on my Linux laptop but not sure where to go next.
I have no smart stuff yet. Would like to control lighting but currently I have standard switches on the wall. Monitoring temperature in the greenhouse or even in different rooms would be useful.
Got any suggestions?

[outer knot]

Looking for advice about a device to buy? Remember to provide guidance on:

• Which country you're in
• What your budget is
• What protocols you prefer (eg Zigbee, WiFi, Z-Wave)
• Any features you want (such as power monitoring, dimming, etc)

[winged knoll]

Budget and country matters

Probably you want #zigbee-archived - cheap, easily available, mostly works well (with some exceptions, but they're well known)

[gritty nymph]

In UK, budget don't like spending too much but would like it to work. Obviously I will need some sensors and actuators. I have heard of Zigbee before but never had a need

[winged knoll]

Then Zigbee is cheaper than Z-Wave, and as long as you don't live in flats (or maybe a terrace house with lots of other wifi around) you'll be fine

Zigbee (and Thread) share the same frequency band as wifi and bluetooth

Oh, and as long as you're not in a traditional brick house - Zigbee can suffer from range problems there, depending on the nature of the brick

[gritty nymph]

I live in a 1960s bungalow where I do have range issues with virgin media WiFi. I suspect that there is too much iron in the bricks, but happy to add some wiring to connect items

[winged knoll]

None of the wireless protocols (Z-Wave, Thread, Zigbee) support wired backhaul

That said, they're all mesh networks, so you should be fine

[gritty nymph]

Sounds like I need to do some more research as to what is available and what I need.
Many thanks for your help so far. I am sure I will be back again soon with some more questions

[winged knoll]

For a decent mesh you can't go wrong with Innr plugs, and Amazon (UK) often have them on discount in twin packs - that's how I've bought all of mine

[ocean geode]

How would you guys enclose this mess to make it cat prove and/or just visually more pleasing ?

[cold moon]

it needs to be relocated

especially if that "router" is also providing wifi

[high cobalt]

Hello, I want to have speakers across my house to play announcements, music, alarms, etc.. what do you guys recommend?

preferably ceiling mounted, local, and of course compatible with HA

Sonos systems are too expensive, are there any alternatives? or is there a way to install regular ceiling mounted speakers and make those be able to connect to HA?

[ocean geode]

yes it is, but to be fair my flat is very small and the host is in the absolute center of it. i have had no trouble with connection whatsoever, i might place the usb bridge it a bit higher up and away but i mainly want something to hide all of it

[cold moon]

Project box but then you have a big ugly project box on the wall you paid $50 for

[tall ermine]

Maybe Build a little stand for it to have a plant on top that cats hate 🙂 Just add a few hinges to have a lid open it from what evers the best side to get back into it if needed.

[twilit relic]

Is there an HA compatible touch/capacitance sensor out there?

(Touch yes/no)

[kindred kiln]

Any recommendations on multi-location light switches (that don't have an on/off position)?

Home Depot and other locations have some good looking options, however the price ($120+) per switch makes it difficult to justify.

I'm not sure we need wifi or other smart connectivity features for simple switches but very open to it.