Hello,

I'm looking for a keyboard for my alarm using alarmo on home assistant. I found this but it's too expensive : https://frient.com/products/intelligent-keypad/

Do you know similar products ?

Thanks

I'm excited to see this as I'm pretty much only use Z-Wave. Also interesting is they are developing their own dongle

Hello everyone,

When I first installed music assistant, it was recommended to get the beta version, so I did but for some time now, I have 2 music assistant server.

Was wondering if there a reason I should keep both?

! ! !

Hello all, I am moving into a new apartment, and was planning on replacing the thermostats with Z-Wave ones. I currently have a Honeywell T6 Pro Z-Wave in my current apartment, and was planning on picking up a couple more.

When I was at the new place today, I took a look inside of one of the thermostats and saw something I was not expecting. They are all 120VAC line voltage thermostats. The heating and cooling is shared between the building, and whether heating or cooling is on is a whole building schedule. The person in the leasing office that was touring us around the new place when we got our keys said that it switches to heat in october or November.

Attached are a couple of photos of the thermostat and a photo of the vent in the wall (although not sure if that is helpful). The thermostat is a Honeywell T651A. I am not sure of what the actual HVAC equipment looks like.

This obviously throws a hamper in my plans, and now I have to look for alternatives. I am not super familiar with 120VAC HVAC, so I wanted to get some advice from others. I believe it is a heated/chilled water system, and the thermostat simply controls the pump/blower in the wall panel (one of the photos). The fact that there is both heating and cooling is what is confusing me, since all of the 120VAC thermostats I have seen are only for heating. Obviously it all boils down to how the temperature is compared to the set point. If the building switches to cooling (which won't be a problem for about 6 months after it switches I am guessing), the comparison will be backwards.

If anyone is able to point me to any resources on how I can learn about this control system, that would be great. I found the Stelpro KI Z-Wave Thermostat which I think will work, but I am not sure what happens when it switches to cooling in the spring. I prefer Z-Wave since I have found it to be far more reliable (especially in a larger building. This is a 7 floor building with ~15 units on each floor. So there is a lot of 2.4GHz traffic I assume), however if anyone knows of a product that will work for this (if the Stelpro one won't) I'm all ears.

I was accidentally locked out of home again, and I had to call a professional to open the lock.

But if someone was home, they could have just turned the knob of the door from inside. There's a device that can do that? It needs to do 3 full turns and it requires a bit of force to do that (armored door with iron bars that slide in every direction, so it has a big inertia to start)

I saw a ready solution on a store, the iseo x1r, but that costs 1000 euro + another 200 for the gateway (not mandatory but otherwise it uses proprietary Bluetooth protocol and so it can't talk with HA

HACS offers great additions to the functionality of HA, but there are so many options it feels overwhelming. What are your favorite HACS?

I have a Shelly dimmer 2 behind one of the switches in my kitchen running Tasmota. There are two switch inputs on the Dimmer module, so I have it behind a 2 gang wall box with two physical switches. Each switch is connected to one of the switch inputs of the Shelly.

I've set the switches to be independent of each other, so I can potentially use the different switches for different triggers. Switch one is configured as a push button switch and dims my kitchen lights. Switch two does nothing. I desire to have switch2 trigger my dining room lights, so after some digging I discovered that I can use MQTT to make Home Assistant do stuff! Perfect.

But not perfect. I set up an automation to listen for this devices' MQTT topic "tele/lights_kitchen/SENSOR" and when the switch is flipped either up or down, my mosquitto broker hears that topic, and it just toggles my lights! I thought I had it all figured out. But what I didn't notice at first, is that the Shelly Dimmer pings out an MQTT status every so often, even if no switches are flipped. So my dining room lights have been going on and off all afternoon!

There is some data in the payload of the MQTT that I think should be able to fix my issue, but I'm having trouble conceptualizing how.

The payload contains a key:value pair {"Switch2":"ON"} or "OFF". So I'm hoping I can use a change in that value as a toggle. Because it's operating as a 3 way switch, I don't care if the actual value is ON or OFF, I just want to know if it's changed. Do I need some sort of helper that keeps track? This seems like something MQTT would be good at, but I can't find a good example to steal the right config from. I thought maybe I could use two triggers, one for each state, but that makes a huge complicated set of logic that needs to be added, and I really feel like there should be a more elegant way to handle this.

Any assistance?

Just looking for some advice if the idea I have in mind is even feasible.

I have 2 light switches in my kitchen, one for some pendant lights, one for some overhead cannister lights.

I hate the placement of the switches, since the pendant lights which I prefer are far away from the actual doorways into the kitchen. Meanwhile the cannister lights are on the switches near the doors.

I'm looking to do some clever "hackery" to make it so the switches by the doors control the pendant lights, if possible, but I don't want to have to rewire things in the walls/ceilings.

Is there a good solution to this? I was looking at some Shelly switches, but I'm not sure those solve for the problem I wanna solve. I'm willing to swap out switches or wire in things near the lights, but trying to keep things simple as possible.

Hi

I’ve been looking for a retro theme for my home assistant setup preferably like Windows 98 UI and I’m wondering if someone developed one or managed to find similar themes.

Dell Outlet on Ebay has the Latitude 3140 laptop, an excellent Home Assistant platform on sale for $176. A Raspberry Pi 5 or NUC with the hardware needed for these features would cost far more. The same machine is nearly 2x more on the regular Dell Outlet site.

Debian 12 supported out of box - no additional drivers needed Fast N200 Intel processor - ~60% faster than a Raspberry Pi 5 256gb SSD 8GB ram Advanced BIOS options OpenVino support for Frigate BIOS battery management. Can limit charge to 75% for years of battery life 6 hour indicated battery life at 75% charge Very low power usage - ~6 watts when running Home Assistant with several USB devices Fanless and completely silent Built like a tank

Negatives:

Built like a tank. Chunky for a small laptop No integrated Ethernet port Mediocre screen

I bought one of these last year when it was on sale from another vendor and have been really happy with it, especially for the cost.

I'm looking to get a cm3588 to use as a NAS and and for streaming, but I'm curious if home assistant could also be run from such a device and maybe any other usefull programs

I have three different calendars syncing using caldav, one on fastmail and two on icloud. When I open the calendar view it's often the case that one or more of these timeout (all of them are afflicted by this), so it seems that these calendars are not actually stored on the server but polled everytime I want to view them.

Are there any alternative integrations that will periodically sync the calendars and keep them on the server? Or can I self-host an app that does this and will never time out because it's on my local network?

Does anyone know if the 2024.5 Companion App update for iOS removed the ability to control entities from the widget? I've read the release notes but there's no mention of any features being removed.

I could absolutely swear that I had a working widget with most of my lights on it, a solitary button for each light, that I could single tap to toggle said light.

Then, a few months or so back, I noticed the widget didn't seem to be working. The entity icons had change to black, round shadows, and tapping them did nothing.

I deleted the widget, thinking it got corrupted somehow and have never been able to get it back exactly as described above.

Now, it seems that only thing I can do with widgets is use Actions. Some Actions have been auto-created by the Companion App for each scene on my server, and I can obviously create my own Actions, to trigger automations.

But, I don't want to have to frig around with Actions (using input_booleans and automations) to do something as simple as turning a light on or off.

Am I dreaming? Did the iOS widgets never have this ability? Or am I missing something really obvious to configure entities onto a widget?

Thanks in advance for any useful advice.

Not sure why but my mqtt broker I installed from the addons is not working. Any help here should be nice. When I look at the settings the password says "password_not_changed" wuth username "homeassistant".

I currently use Frigate as an NVR for my outside cameras. I would like something that integrates with that. I really just care that it is fully local. I don't want a chance of someone on the internet being able to access a camera in my baby's bedroom.

Just got a new water cooler and the jug sits at the bottom. I want to track how full the bottle is and I have a spare esp32.

I was thinking about using the weight of the water jug but I'm not sure yet.

There is also a low water led but it seems to be lit all the time. Possible defect? The manual says it turns on when the water is low.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/16531247

> I have tried to follow several tutorial to setup using either ip or nmtui: > - https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-use-bridged-networking-with-libvirt-and-kvm > - https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/setup-network-bridge-VM > > However, the bridge inherits the MAC address of host after enslaving the host hardware enp1s0.... This causes my router to give both the host and the bridge the same ip address, making the ha instance inaccessible. > > The red hat tutorial clearly show that the bridge and the host have different IP, so I was wondering if I am doing something wrong. > > --- > > alternatively, I can set the home assistant vm to run in NAT and port forward from host, but I have several device that communicate over different ports. So it would be annoying to forward all these ports. Not to mention, many appliances don't have documentation about the ports they use. > > I can also potentially use virtualbox, but it is not well supported on silverblue, especially with secureboot enabled.

Has anybody on here had an experiment with the supermarket tags?

My understanding is that you get a bunch of the tags, somehow get a base-station/transceiver working with them, and push data as images.

I'd love to hear from anyone who's had a go. I quite fancy having some little displays around the house with useful info for the room.

I got myself an ESP32 with an integrated e-ink display. This little project shows when the next bus to the city leaves, and the current time. I get the live bus data from Skyss through the Entur integration in Home Assistant. Might have to get a few more of these to tinker with.

I have all the usual Home Assistant stuff, including a Goodnight Routine.

I also have 3 cats, one of which has only known the house with automation.

Now these cats seem to have a hierarchy, and the Top Cat sleeps in the bedroom with us. This is now the Cat that only knows automation.

So when I say "Hey Google, Goodnight" she meows, she's genuinely excited.

Now a lot of the time my Wife falls asleep on the sofa while I watch TV or game, and I have to wake her up to go to bed. It's "Goodnight" then wake up the wife.

Last night I had a brainwave. What if I can get the cat to do it? She wakes my wife up at 4am by cleaning her face already, maybe I can get her to wake her up on the sofa too.

So last night I did the usual "Hey Google, Goodnight" then started saying "Goodnight" to the cat, then softly calling my wife, "Wifey, goodnight, goodnight" until she woke up.

When she woke up the cat put her front paws on the sofa and sniffed my wife's face and meowed.

So I plan on waking the Wifey up this way in the future in the hope that the cat will cotton on, and instead of just meowing in excitement, actively participate in the going to bed process.

Thereby giving me a Biomech automation.

She's an intelligent kitty so I have confidence it'll work. Today she (indoor cat) managed to get out while I gave a delivery guy directions and she sat outside in the garden meowing to be let back in, and another of my cats was inside the door meowing too.

Based on https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt/releases/tag/1.39.1

For the record, this seemingly broke my presence sensors somewhat.

This might be tangential to HomeAssistant but Im currently thinking about a household renovation and one thing I am considering is wiring.

I have some POE devices along with many other that run with a 12v DC supply.

I'm lookin at putting in a relatively straightforward 12v battery UPS with a small solar panel to charge. I probably only have space for 1500W of panels so putting in a whole grid tied solution is overkill. Primarily this is to provide backup as we sometimes lose power.

Networking wise I think I will put RJ45 into each room as we are concrete reinforced construction and so signal quality is an issue.

My query was how feasible it is to run both standard PEO devices and 12v devices (1-2w) all over POE.

I thought the alternative would be to run separate 12v cables with USB connectors at the end into each room as well as Rj45

Is anyone else doing this in their home?

I'm finding it really difficult to tell whether a particular air conditioner is supported by Home Assistant, since all the ones I've seen in stores don't seem compatible. I mean, I'm probably wrong in that, I'm sure that with enough work anything will work, but I didn't see any integrations with Midea air conditioners, for example.

All my windows in my house slide sideways, so most of the in-wall air-conditioners won't work, and I rent the place, so I can't make large alterations. This pretty much limits me to portable ACs, which don't tend to have much smart home functionality.

Any help would be appreciated, as I'm pretty new to using Home Assistant in general, and I'm still trying to figure out how things work. I only bought my Home Assistant Yellow last year, and I don't yet have any smart appliances to connect it to.

UPDATE: well, I've belatedly realised I've left out a key piece of information. I need to buy a pair of locks - one for a regular wooden entrance door, and one for a security screen door in front of it.

Turns out hardly anyone (reputable) makes a decent smart lock for screen doors, except the Yale Unity range, but those aren't Z-Wave compatible.

Guess we're sticking with keys for a while longer...

---

Hey folks - the time's come for me to consider diving into smart locks.

I've been running HA for many years now, and have resisted the urge so far, but a few recent incidents have me thinking smart locks are the next upgrade I need to think of.

My requirements, equal in priority, are:

• Must be usable via HA (automating my locks is the primary reason I'm considering this move)
• Key lock backup (I'm petrified of flat batteries stopping me from entering)
• Ability for HA to report on battery level (see above)
• Local network only (prefer IP, but will consider Z-Wave - anything that calls home in the cloud is a hard no)
• Code and/or fingerprint entry (unique code per person, at least 6 codes)

I say "consider Z-Wave" as I don't currently utilise any Z-Wave devices. The main reason for this is that I run HA (Home Assistant) on a (heh!) HA (high availability) Proxmox setup, and I hadn't sat down to think through how that would work with a Z-Wave USB hub across two nodes.

But, after some cursory research, it seems there's enough options out there that will let me control Z-Wave remotely via MQTT, so I can use one of my RasPis to host a Z-Wave hub just fine.

There's been plenty of positive comments on other posts regarding Schlage's locks, so I'll probably start my research there. But I'm very keen to hear of anyone's experiences with any smart lock brands - good or bad - to help guide my research.

While I'm at it, I'm open to recommendations on a Z-Wave hub. I have zero Z-Wave experience, but I gather it's reasonably straightforward to use. Simple enough requirements:

• Usable on a RasPi running Rasbian
• Decent enough range - has to reach the smart locks through a couple of internal walls, from the garage to the front door (about 6m/20ft)

Cheers in advance for any advice offered!

Windows and macOS have similar clients (Hass.Agent for Windows and Home Assistant for macOS).

I've found these kinds of clients useful because I can remotely wake-up or sleep computers, track how long they are turned on for, and automatically pause my lights and music when my webcam turns on.

I still get updates for things I have installed, but I haven't seen any new integrations or themes added in some time.

I hope I can explain this correctly; I am only somewhat familiar with docker.

I have a script that I run after Home Assistant OS updates; it updates the alpine operating system with some extra packages and creates three symlinks in /usr/local/bin for three scripts in /config/shell_scripts. Up until now, it's run perfectly when I run it manually over ssh.

Then I decided to create an automation to run it automatically after an HAOS update, and while the package updates work, the script says those symlinks exist already so it doesn't create them; they do not exist, HAOS deletes them after an update (and Core updates might too, but I usually update them together so never checked).

After a lot of frustration, I logged into Home Assistant with root on the 22222 port and found it's checking and finding the previously created symlinks from earlier HAOS updates inside /mnt/data/docker/overlay2/../usr/local/bin and /var/lib/docker/overlay2/../usr/local/bin. At least, that's my guess; googling docker and overlays has been a trip.

So my question: how do I structure the script so that the symlink check is within the docker container's version of /usr/local/bin so it will create the symlink?

I get the answer is probably super obvious, but I am not seeing it. The only other thing I can think to do is export /homeassistant/shell_scripts to PATH but while that works over ssh, I haven't tested that running as a shell script service and I really want to automate this process.

Screenshot of full script attached; here's the short version I'm using for testing. This has been checked with and without variables for paths.

``` #!/bin/bash

variables

bin_home="/usr/local/bin" shell_home="/homeassistant/shell_scripts"

add packages

pkgs="coreutils figlet iproute2 iw jq procps-ng sed util-linux wireless-tools" apk add $pkgs echo "Packages Updated"

ln -s "$shell_home/lib_comp" "$bin_home/lib_comp" ln -s "$shell_home/ipa_status" "$bin_home/ipa_status" ln -s "$shell_home/ssh_text" "$bin_home/ssh_text"

echo "Done" ```

I'd like to use my smartphone WiFi SSID to determine if I'm home or not. When I'm home the alarm (kinda, just notifications from some sensors) needs to be shut off and a light needs to be turned on. Since the sensors update can be forced at maximum 1 minute (but I'd prefer to leave it at 15 minutes to preserve battery) and since 1 minute is too much, is there a way to send an intent to HA companion app to send a sensors update? I would use Tasker to send the intent.

I've a VLAN dedicated to IoT devices and, of course, HA can't discover them. Is it possible have them discovered by HA via MQTT? Create them manually it's a pita because they're a lot and I would have to create sensors/switches + battery level + RSSI Thanks!

I love playing with my HA and associated devices. I suspect that most of you reading this get a bit of a jolt every time you add and incorporate a new sensor, camera, integration and get to play with it.

I have all the door/window sensors and locks/covers, every angle of my exterior covered with cameras, alarm, network devices, appliances, sprinklers, household devices covered.

Any ideas for a new thing I can play with?

So I'd like to have a video doorbell set up so that it communicates locally with my HA, raising an event when the button is pressed, allowing me to watch its audio and video stream live, and speak back to whoever is at the door. Ideally either from the browser or my phone, when I'm at home or not.

I don't care about motion sensing or AI or even NVR functions really. What software do I need? Should I bother going through the process of setting up Frigate or is there something simpler that would do the job?

Sorry if this is a newb question; I'm coming in cold. I've had HAOS running on an RPi4 for months, but I haven't invested in any smart devices to connect yet.

I'd like to start with some (ideally open source) smart gauges just to check the temp out front and back. Any recommendations?

Thanks!

I have been using the BlueIris NVR integration (from HACS) for quite some time, and it works great for triggering BI from HA. I've trying to do the opposite now: Fire off automations in HA whenever BI detects motion on one of my cameras.

I've never used MQTT before, so I'm learning as I go, but I think I have most of my setup configured properly. I've installed Mosquitto and the MQTT integration in HA. I've configured BI to connect to HA, and running "Test" in the "Edit MQTT Server" menu in BI shows a good connection and no errors. I've set my cameras to post an MQTT event when the alert is triggered (and I've verified that the alerts are in fact being triggered).

Nothing happens in HA, though. The "Motion" sensor for my camera in HA stays at "Clear." In fact, the history shows no change at all, ever.

I have the events in BI set up as follows: On Alert: MQTT Topic - BlueIris/&CAM/Status and Payload - { "type": "&TYPE", "trigger": "ON" } On Reset: Exactly the same, but change ON to OFF.

I've tried change the MQTT autodiscovery header in HA from "homeassistant" to "BlueIris," and it made no difference. The Mosquitto logs show a login from HA, so I feel like I'm close, but I'm not sure where else to look.

Edit: I installed MQTT explorer, and I've verified that the messages are making it to Mosquitto, and they appear to be correctly formatted.

UPDATE: I set the MQTT integration to listen to the MQTT messages coming from BI, and sure enough, they were coming through just fine. For some reason, the BI integration just wasn't seeing them. Digging through the system logs, I saw some errors "creating a binary sensor" coming from the BI integration. The only thing I can think is that because I didn't have MQTT set up when I first installed the BI integration, something went wrong with the config (although I had already rebooted the system several times). I re-downloaded the BI integration and re-installed it, and now everything works perfectly.