homeassistant

Hi,

Is there anyone using Amcrest IP4M-1041B with Home Assistant? I've a few questions about software and integration.

1. From what I hear, this camera can be setup 100% offline, connected via cable to any computer and by using a built in WebUI the camera has, is this true?

2. It offers pan, tilt or zoom. Does it work really good with HA? Can it be operated without any Amcrest software / internet connection?

3. The features above allow you to set preset locations, can that be done on HA / WebUI / without the Amcrest app as well?

4. Does it really operate all features offline and is it reliable? Eg. motion detection works as expected / doesn't miss events?

5. What's your overall experience with the camera? Does it compare to let's say a TP-Link tapo?

Thank you.

I'm looking to replace a few in-wall light switches for lights that are not easily replaced with smart bulbs. I currently use Home Assistant with z2m for all my smart lights and switches, so zigbee switches would be preferred. Does anyone have recommendations for smart in-wall switches?

Hey guys. Im running Home Assistant in docker container for few years and I'm super happy with it. The only way I access my server when not home is wireguard VPN. I noticed that I'm still receiving notifications even when not connected to VPN. I wonder how is that possible?

I don't have sub for HA Cloud or Nabu Casa. I also don't own a domain, using duckdns for wireguard connection and reverse proxy (npm). I thought I have 100% local setup, but I guess there is a Google or HA server in between. I don't want to disable the feature, I just want to know where is my data being sent

Thx

Looking for a solution on how to determine when to close and open skylight blinds. I can just do hours of the day but would like it to be a bit more intelligent.

Anyone looked at using something like the math used for solar panels? I was thinking that when max solar power was generated in the summer that is when they are closed to keep heat out.

Ideas?

They've improved the Everything Presence Lite.

I missed it in the release notes, but there's a breaking change in the ota component in ESPHome 2024.6.0. I figured I'd save folks some time and share the fix here.

If your OTA config looks like this;

...

ota:
  password: "*************"
  num_tries: 3
  safe_mode: on

...

Now you'll need to add a platform key to start a list, and either comment out the other option or move them to a new component.

...

ota:
  - platform: esphome
    password: "*************"
  #num_tries: 3
  #safe_mode: on

...

edit: Here's the PR introducing this change https://github.com/esphome/esphome/pull/6459

No major question here, just thought you might find this interesting. It's an example of the kind of (off-the-wall) things you can do with HA that aren't immediately obvious. When I was starting out with HA, I enjoyed reading these examples, because it gave me ideas for my own setup. And, I wrote many automations that should really be scripts, so hopefully this will help someone avoid that and recognize the power of scripts early.

At home, my laptop from work sits (closed) on a stand under the monitors. I have a docking station for it, but the docking station doesn't have a power button to start the laptop (the official Dell docking stations have a power button, but other brand of docking stations don't). So, since I got that stand a few weeks ago, I've been pulling the laptop out and opening juuuuuuust enough that I could reach the power button, then closing it and sliding it back into the stand. There had to be a better way that didn't involve buying an expensive Dell docking station.

The docking station power is on a Sonoff S31 outlet (flashed with Tasmota, not that that's important here) that is remotely controllable. Long ago, I set up HA automations that turned on the S31 when the laptop was detected on the network, and shut off the S31 after the laptop dropped off the network at the end of the day (leaving in a time delay so it didn't shut off if there was a momentary network glitch). So, I'd boot the laptop, and a moment later the docking station would kick on and connect the mouse and monitors to it. And the end of the day, I shut down the laptop, and a few minutes later the docking station shuts off automatically.

I recently discovered the Wake on LAN integration. So, after setting that up, I wrote a script that turns on the S31, waits a while*, then triggers the Wake-on-LAN for the laptop...and it boots up! With HA, I can start the boot process while I'm still relaxing in the living room before starting work; in theory I'll go into the office and it'll be ready for me to log in.

Heck, if HA knew for certain it was a workday, it could boot the laptop for me.....hmmm. Maybe something to think about for the future.

*How long? Well, 30 seconds seems to be too short; the laptop doesn't respond to the WoL command after just 30 seconds with power applied. It did work this morning when I waited several minutes to try it again. I just changed the delay to 1 minute and will see how that works tomorrow.

I also added a repeat loop (starting after that 1 minute timer) with three components:

• A condition that looks for the laptop being "Away" on the network. (If it is "Home" on the network, the condition will end the script.)
• If it is, then it tries the WoL command again.
• Then waits 30 seconds and repeat.

The repeat loop counter is set to 3, for a total of 4 attempts to start the laptop. I'll check the traces and see when it starts working, and set the initial delay accordingly, so that in general it shouldn't need the repeat loop.

If people want, I can post (sanitized) YAML. But I do like explaining the process rather than just posting code.

It's been written by a self_admitted noob at integrations, but it effortlessly pulls in all data from my Sleep As Android alarm clock and even introduced me to features of the app I didn't know existed, and I've been using it for years.

By following his instructions (I skipped the watch bit) Home Assistant now know when I'm sleeping and awake.

I've been considering some kind of bed load esp board for a while but now I don't have to. I know when I fell asleep last night and even when I was snoring.

More importantly, Home Assistant knows these things and I can now have a more reliable Good Night automation that knows when I'm sleeping, even when I get kicked out of bed and have to sofa sleep.

HACS has a problem with hitting the GitHub rate limit when you first install it. It’s not really that big of a deal. You usually just need to wait an hour for the local database to populate.

It used to be optional to link your GitHub to HACS to bypass the rate limiting but now it seems the installation requires it.

I’m not a fan of this as somebody who uses Homeassistant for its privacy values and am kind of frustrated HACS removed the ability to install without a GitHub API key.

Is there a manual way to override the API linking process?

Working on the @homeassistant setup this weekend now that the pantry is getting closer to being finished.

Trying to setup an automation to run the robot vacuum in the utility room every third time the litter box goes off. Cannot seem to get the zones working though.

Any thoughts?
#homeassistant #smarthome #homeautomation

Based on https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt/releases/tag/1.38.0

I don't have yet any preferences. Cheap, easy to set up, secure. What do you use and can recommend?

Summary:

This video is about creating better smart home automations. The video introduces 6 heuristics that the creator uses to evaluate automations. These heuristics are:

• Insider Knowledge: Automations should not require users to have any special knowledge to use them.
• Anti-ambiguous: Automations should be clear and easy to understand what they do.
• Failsafe: Automations should not cause any harm or negative consequences.
• All or Nothing: Automations should allow users to easily opt in or out of the experience.
• Accessibility: Automations should be usable by everyone in the household.
• Learnable: Automations should be easy for users to learn and understand how to use them.

The creator argues that automations should be designed to be used by everyone in the household, not just the person who created them. The video uses the example of an automation that dims the lights and closes the blinds when a TV is turned on. This automation would be inconvenient if someone wanted to watch TV during the day, and it would violate the All or Nothing heuristic.

The creator proposes a solution to this problem by adding a toggle switch that allows users to enable or disable the automation. The automation also includes a voice message that announces what actions can be taken. This solution satisfies all of the heuristics and makes the automation more user-friendly.

The video concludes by asking viewers for their feedback on the heuristics and whether they can think of any other important heuristics that should be considered.

I woke up this morning at 6 am with IBS cramps. I tried to go back to bed but I'd woken fully up so by half 7 I was sat at my PC with a brew for some uninterrupted tinkering.

My espresence has been a bit finicky since ai set it up. I've been moving the nodes around to find better positions with slight improvements but nothing making it properly stable.

Well this morning was even worse than usual. I'm sat in my front room with my sensor flitting between the floor above and below me but never on the floor I'm on.

I moved the sensors again. I played with dwell time. I changed "wait until" up. I even dived into the rabbit hole of tuning the base stations by increasing rssi and absorbsion, which actually seemed to do the best at improving it.

So at this point my phone has been sitting on the desk for a few hours while I fine tune all this, when my wife comes down the stairs. Her beacon is firmly set to "frontroom" when she sits down but mine is bouncing around the house. Odd.

Then I finally figured it out!

The damn phone is sat on a wireless charging stand on my desk. This must be interfering with my Bluetooth!

I take my phone off the stand and voila, it's in a stable place in espresence.

So that's how I wasted 2 hours this morning.

I say wasted, I did manage to get it more stable on the charging stand before I realised, and this seems to have helped it's stability when it's off the stand. In fact, all my messing about this morning has made espresence correctly report my location ever since.

I’m solidly leaning towards a Schlage Connect Lock due to its local only Zwave capabilities (which has the benefit of also extending battery life). I was strongly considering the Aqara U100 for its many features, but based on what I’ve seen I can foresee it being a nightmare to get working locally with home assistant and the need for a phone app makes me fear for long term support.

I use the Schlage Encode for other houses and love the way it looks and how easy it is to setup and use. I really wish they would make a Zwave version with the same hardware.

So before I jump in and buy the Schlage Connect, is there anybody who has experience with either of the locks I’ve mentioned? Feel free to chime in if you have a different lock that you think beats out these.

I'm trying to automate my dumb roomba. For this I ideally need a couple of buttons. I'm lost at how to add another button, that would have a different name and a different sent byte.

Additional question - to get info from the roomba (charging, battery, etc.) I need to send a similar byte series and then receive two unsigned bytes. I have no idea how to do that.

Roomba documentation: https://efcms.engr.utk.edu/ef230-2021-01/projects/roomba-s/create_2_Open_Interface_Spec.pdf

Since my air fryer notification I've bought 2 more Esp32 Dev boards from The Greal Mall of China- AliExpress. A couple days later I'd read about MMwave sensors and purchased a couple of those too.

A week later and they land a day after each other. I got home today and found 2 MMwave sensors on the kitchen table.

I had half an hour before I had to pick the kids up so I tried to wire and flash it.

The first problem was the writing. I'm 40 now but always had awesome vision, so shit like this just shows me how much it's actually deteriorated. I had to get my phone out and zoom in to work out where to plug in my wires.

I managed to plug shit in and flash the basic firmware on the board, and managed to add some basic code I'd found for my board when I searched using it's full AliExpress name.

I left with a sensor running in HA happy it was that easy. But...

I did some digging, because all I was getting in HA was an occupancy On status, no variance or info.

I found that when I just searched for the sensor without HLK at the beginning or whatever was at the end, there was loads of info. I found a GitHub full of code for my sensor and happily added it to my esp32.

First I had an issue OTA flashing with some password issue, so I flashed it over USB and it worked, I had new sensors in HA! The problem was that they were unresponsive.

I'd positioned it at this point and figured the Dupont wires I used had probably come loose. When I unplugged and replugged it all, success

This thing is awesome. It could see me at my computer and I must have been only just visible to it, I was sat kinda beside it, must have amazing peripheral vision.

Since I've got it going it's detected occupancy throughout. I was watching it pick up my wife just watching TV, unlike my aqara ZigBee one.

My worry is that it'll take a while fine tuning it to filter out the cats. I'm hoping to use it with my espresence setup to make sofa-sleeping more chill. I don't want lights popping on and off when I'm snoring and my wife gets up, but I do want the lights off when we're both in bed.

I need to fine tune the espresence though, or rely on it less. It seems like it's more like Room Assistant than I thought and I flit around the house in Bluetooth Land. I've managed to improve it by moving the sensors and turning my HA beacon to High from Medium and up to Low Latency.

I can set up another MMwave sensor but I'm gonna move my front room aqara to the bedroom and see if I need any.

I might try a pressure sensor for the bed next, or maybe see if I can run a Squeezebox node from it.

"Hur Hur that's what a timer on your phone is for dude"

Yeah but this was a smart plug that was going dusty in a drawer!

Anyway it's not the notification that makes my brain tickle in that special way, but the fact that my HA takes note of who was in the kitchen when the air fryer was started and only notifies the floor with that person on when it's done.

Now I've worked that logic out with a silly Air Fryer notification I can reuse it in all my other automations.

It was a long running project, but I finally did it. I built what I'm calling a smart mailbox that communicates the presence of mail locally with Home Assistant via ESPHome.

Parts:

• Pine plank roughly the width of my mailbox
• Treated pine plank for mounting
• Thin sheet of perspex or similar transparent plastic
• 2x VCNL4010 proximity sensor
• ESP32 dev board with antenna
• Bigger antenna
• Prototype board
• 2.54mm pitch JST connectors
• 2.54mm pitch pin header sockets
• 18650 battery
• 18650 Type-C charging module
• Battery holder
• 2x 5V 1.5W solar panels
• MCP1700-3302E LDO regulator
• 100uF electrolytic capacitor
• 100nF ceramic capacitor
• Resistors... I think I ended up using a 1 MOhm and a 330 kOhm
• Weatherproof junction box
• Nylon screw spacers
• Cable glands
• 12mm waterproof button
• Various cables and wires
• Paint and polyurethane spray to weatherproof the wood

Tools:

• Soldering iron
• Router for cutting grooves in wood
• Drill and hole saw bits
• Various files and sandpaper

For a start, I followed this guide to get me started on the power delivery portion, but I ended up using much higher valued resistors since I found that I was losing more battery charge through the voltage divider than I was from the ESP32 or proximity sensors.

Once I'd tested the concept with the parts just laying in a jumble on the table, it was time to get to work.

I started by cutting a plank of pine to fit my mailbox, chamfering the ends to make space for the metal joins. I routed out some spaces for the tops of the bolts that hold the mailbox down.

Measured out where the sensors should go, along with a surrounding space to screw down some little perspex windows to cover them. The idea I wanted was for the mail to be able to slide over the sensors without getting caught on them, as well as to protect them from dust.

Routed out the dents and cleaned them up with a chisel and sandpaper. Cut the perspex to shape for a test fit.

On the other side, I routed out a notch for the cable to access the sensors.

I had originally planned to just solder wires into the sensors, but then I realised JST connectors would fit perfectly into the sensors. This meant I had to widen the holes somewhat, which I did with a small chisel and file.

I got a bit lazy with making screw holes to hold down the perspex, so they're not in as neat a place as I'd like. If I did this again I'd measure properly for their placement. Still, with countersinking they hold down the perspex well and nothing sticks up for mail to get caught on.

I also got started on making a housing for the solar panels. I used the router to carve out a 1-2mm area for them to sit in, and a much deeper ditch linking the two terminals, which you'll see in a later picture. For now, here's how they look sitting in it.

Wiring up the prototype board was next. Again, see the article I linked above for how this works. I used pin headers to allow the ESP32 dev board to be slotted in and out, just in case I ever needed to take it out for replacement or reprogramming. Also the JSTs on the prototype board are for connecting the battery (top left), connecting the solar panels (bottom left), providing power to the sensors (bottom right) and clock and data lines for the sensors (top right). Since the sensors are both using the same I2C bus address and cannot be configured otherwise, I had to run two clock and data lines, but if I'd found sensors that could have different addresses I could have just used one of each. I didn't take a photo of the board at this stage, but I later added another header to connect a button to reset the ESP32 from the outside.

I also made the data and power cable for the sensor board.

The solar panel housing and 'sensor plate' were both painted and treated with polyurethane spray to protect them from rain and humidity.

And the panels themselves were sealed in with a tonne of silicone. It made a real mess, but I'm confident no water is going to get in there.

I drilled holes in the weatherproof box to fix the cable glands and the weatherproof button. In the case of the solar panel wire, I had opted to buy speaker wire since I figured it would be easier to run in the channel between the two solar panels, being flat. But that also made it not really fit the cable glands that great. I ended up stripping some of the outer sheath off some 2 wire power cable I had, and wrapping that around the part of the speaker wire that gets clamped in the glands, just to make a reasonable seal. These all were on the side I decided I would mount at the bottom, so water wouldn't be able to easily fall into the box.

Final test fit. I later used epoxy glue to glue down the nylon headers and the battery holder inside the box. This means the prototype board can also be easily removed, as can the ESP32 dev board and the battery, but the battery holder cannot. Let's hope I never have to get that thing out.

The mailbox itself also needed a hole in the bottom for the sensor cable to come out. After drilling a hole and filing it into a square shape, I cut some rubber grommet strip to size and fitted it around the hole, with some marine silicone adhesive to protect the sharp metal edges from water and to hold the grommet strip in place.

I'd drilled some holes in the brick wall my mailbox sits upon for masonry anchors, and this piece of treated pine got the last of my polyurethane spray, just in case.

Using a two pieces of the leftover perspex glued together, I made an internal mount for the antenna, figuring it would be best to not have the thing either floating around freely inside the box or sticking out the side where people could potentially break it off.

Finally, after weeks of off and on work, it was ready to install.

The ESPHome coding used my VCNL4010 component, and if anyone is interested I can share it but it's kinda a large file. I had originally planned to just use Arduino IDE and talk directly to MQTT, in order to keep things simple and just use the Adafruit VCNL4010 library, but in the end elected to use ESPHome. For, among other things, its support for over the air updates.

This is surely common knowledge for some of you but I thought I'd share a story, as this just made me cringe

I never understood the point in the option to "run actions in parallel" I thought if I had a list of actions to complete, HA makes it through them almost instantly, and with the varying latency of each action they wouldn't complete at the same time anyways.

Then I tested my smoke alarm notification that I have had running for over a year.

It went-

If: list of smoke alarms detects smoke Then: Turn on the lamp next to my bed, then Send a notification to my phone.

I had made an error when setting up the lamp entity. (I made it full brightness on both scales, can only use one) this stopped the automation before the notification went out to my phone.

If it's important that the automation makes it to the end, run in parallel!

Talk about a false sense of security

I've got some decent window blinds at my house (tilt as well as roll-up and -down), but I didn't want to shell out another couple hundred per-window to make them "smart", let alone being tied to a cloud service that could spontaneous combust any day now...

I've done numerous searches, but have not found anything decent that I could use to retrofit to add any sort of automation to these blinds. The best I could find were purpose-built and/or roller shades.

Is anyone here aware of any projects or products that can be added to a set of blinds to locally automate any of their features? I'm running latest stable Home Assistant in a container, with HACS, if that helps.

TIA!