Hello,
I trialled Home Assistant just over 6 months ago and encountered errors I could not resolve. Since then my time has been diverted to quite different matters and the interest in Home Assistant has had to take a back seat.
Just over two weeks ago I lost everything on my Raspberry Pi 5, including the backup SD card which, I guess, was corrupted with the same fault that affected the main SD card. Everything on the Pi runs in Docker containers including Eclipse-MQTT, MQTT-Explorer and Zigbee2MQTT. The upshot is that I started over and reinstalled everything with slightly different compose files. Everything now appears to be working without issue.
This post is principally a Thankyou to the developers. Zigbee2MQTT pairs lots of devices that struggled under both SmartThings and Amazon Alexa: the Home Assistant MQTT integration picks up those devices straight away.
I am impressed by so many aspects of Home Assistant; enough to stick with it and hopefully achieve my aim of becoming free from both SmartThings and Amazon Alexa. The latter provides voice control only and it is here that I shall monitor the development of similar functionality in Home Assistant. Local, privacy-centric control of Smart devices has to be the aim for all of us who value the lack of intrusion into our personal data.
I shall maintain the Raspberry Pi 5 / Docker container setup for the next six months. For me it will be a useful learning experience. The Raspberry Pi device functions primarily as an IOT manager with Node-Red and InfluxDb/Grafana already integrated. The aim has always been to collect stats about the home environment including boiler monitoring, room temperatures and humidity, occupancy, external weather… and so on. It is, above all, a test-bed with containers easily and speedily destroyed and rebuilt with new configurations.
To the future, I see me buying a Mini-PC and installing HA OS to manage all the home automation side of things. I need something reliable, with 24/7 uptime that just works day-in, day-out, independent of my Raspberry Pi test-bed.
I’ll make a note to supplement this post in 6 months time to let you know how it all turned out. In the meantime, a big thankyou again to all those who have contributed to an absolutely delightful and amazing piece of software.
Ric