I am tinkering with whole bunch small microcontroller type of projects and wanted an UI to unite them together… Home Assistant seemed to be a good fit.
I have decided for Home Assistant Core install because I despise the lack of control (and ultimately false sense of security) of a docker installation. Part of my day job is untangling dev stupidity and utter disregard for security when it comes to docker deployment. I digress.
The struggles and confusion…
Installation was a breeze, except the instruction lacking a systemd unit.
Configuration on other hand was a bit of a pain. The documentation is all over the place.
I started with basic SNMP stuff (because it should be Simple right?), messages like these:
ERROR (MainThread) [homeassistant.components.snmp.sensor] Please check the details in the configuration file
These are of no help to any one (not even a line number!)… As far as I can ascertain everything works.
I am still confused on how to properly apply configuration.yaml without actually invoking restart. There is a small chance that I would get following after a restart:
WARNING (Recorder) [homeassistant.components.recorder.util] The system could not validate that the sqlite3 database at //home/homeassistant/.homeassistant/home-assistant_v2.db was shutdown cleanly
It doesn’t actually start, and it cannot repair corrupted sqllite. So rm I go… Once I have real data I might look into moving off the toy “db”. Not sure if homeassistant supports mysql.
Another oddity is that one cannot exclude a module from default_config! Why I want to exclude module one would ask? I needed to kill zeroconf, ssdp and dhcp modules because one of them was spamming upstream DNS reslover with PTR records It was causing issues with DNS lookups on other machines. Homeassistant basically DoS-ed my home connection.
The solution to disabling modules is to disable default_config and list explicitly all the other modules, thus shooting myself in the foot in future.
I found bizarre that the UI had Mikrotik integration, but it was completely useless, not only it would list devices by MAC, but there was no real things (like bandwidth) I could poll from the data gathered.
Meanwhile there was no UI element for the SNMP integration. Probably one of the simpler things you could do.
I dread the time when I would get to real test: how I am going to POST a jpeg image into home assistant form a microcontroller? Will I have to write a Flask API? I will find out later…
Another question is if it is possible to have a file per device, with all its sensors, numbers and automation?
