Okay, so I’m another Homeseer Refugee looking for a replacement for a trust and venerable software package that has just lost my confidence and lost its way. I’ve been a HS user FOREVER, almost 16 years in total… I know there are probably refugees that have come aboard that are from HS1 or HS2 days, but 16 years might as well be 160 in home automation years.
After holding out as long as possible on HS3 due to the number of plug-ins I relied on in HS3 having ZERO ongoing support and no good path of support on HS4. So instead of dealing with the pain of a HS4 transition I started in I’ve started my migration to HA with the subtly of a wrecking ball…
Honestly I was a bit too eager and started at a sprint and really didn’t think thru all the decisions I was making, which has lead to a couple of lost weeks of time and a precipitous dip in the Partner Approval Index. The responsible part of me said take baby steps. The Freudian Id part of me however won out and I barreled down the road of a complete rebuild of EVERYTHING from scratch all at once without for thought of consequence or the destruction of the reliable systems I have built in my house over the past decade plus. In short I pulled the plug completely on everything HS before my HA install had its first diaper change.
Needless to say it hasn’t been pretty.
So this brings me to today… Last night I decided to wipe everything and start again. I began my journey with HAOS and decided that was a correct decision, but my deployment method was suboptimal. I had purchased a Beelink U59 Mini PC W11 Intel N5105 for my planned migration to HS4 but since HA was now my path, I did a bare metal install of HAOS on the Beelink… Not a bad decision, but when you are moving fast and breaking things it is far far too obtuse and with all the mistakes I’ve made I had no way to get back to a good point.
So I am now down the Proxmox rabbit hole and I’ve rolled out Proxmox on my Beelink and will be deploying a pair of smaller Beelink GK35 Pro’s as my ZWave JS UI and Zigbee2MQTT clients to service all areas of the home running Proxmox and the corresponding Zwave and Zigbee LXC found on Proxmox Helper Scripts.
This hopefully insulates me from my first series of mistakes, not understanding how fast making a series of changes on Zwave JS UI or Zigbee2MQTT within the namespace of the clients and then making other changes on HA can royally screw you.
On my HS setup I had been running a pair of ZNET devices remotely with almost zero issue for years. I found having 2 separate networks (one for upstairs and one for downstairs + a few basement devices) gave me great performance and I wanted to try and duplicate this with HA. MQTT of course is the best way to do it, but BOY is it a massive change and it royally bit me managing clients in different spaces which quickly got out of sync.
All of this is the long way to say, I’m in search of all the help the community can provide and hope after all this rambling there is still an audience to answer a few questions or offer any feedback on my next steps.
- Zwave JS UI and Zigbee2MQTT - I had no problem getting these up and running in Dockers on a pair of RPi4s I had at the house, however I didn’t want to totally rely on the RPi SD card as this was a weak point of my previous weak point in my ZNET setup. I instead procured a set of Argon ONE M2 cases and SSDs to place my RPi4s in for use as my remote clients.
Setup was to be Portainer + ZWave + Zigbee containers on both clients, one upstairs and one downstairs for a similar architecture of my HS system. With Zooz 700 and Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 dongles as my wireless devices. After getting past how fiddly it is to get a RPi to reliably address the correct USB device I felt pretty good. But even with Portainer reliable backups and remote management was going to be a chore, not to mention how loud the Argon ONE cases turned out to be, even when I tried to throttle the fan.
So I decided to procure a pair of Beelink GK35s that hopefully will address all the weakness of the RPi4 solution and be quite, while allowing an easy management platform via Proxmox with access, backups and the like. And with the pre-built LXCs ready for deployment I think this will simplify things a bit for me.
Any feedback from users running multiple ZWave and Zigbee networks in the same house would be welcome… Again I know this is unique and probably a bit much for a users first foray into HA and MQTT with all the pitfalls that can lay ahead, but I’m not a neophyte to tacking hard problems or home automation, just a newb to these particular implementation topic.
- Direct TCP / IP Control - A critical part of my HS system that was going to be an issue was integration with my older QMotion shade control. The plug-in I had been using was no longer supported and there was no easy transition path to HS4.
During the initial setup of HA and before the great wipe last night, I was unable to really figure out how to get HA to make a call to my shade controller. The controller itself is a serial device connected to Ethernet by an old Lantronix box to do the TCP/IP to Serial conversion. I need to send C-escaped hex commands to the Lantronix via IP and port.
# SHADE 25%
\x01\x07\x00\x05\x01\x01\x0B\x00\xF6
# SHADE 50%
\x01\x07\x00\x05\x01\x01\x09\x00\xF4
# SHADE 75%
\x01\x07\x00\x05\x01\x01\x07\x00\xFA
# SHADE DOWN
\x01\x07\x00\x05\x01\x01\x02\x00\xFF
# SHADE UP
\x01\x07\x00\x05\x01\x01\x01\x00\xFC
I’d love to be able to send these to the shade, I’m happy to start simply with up and down (i.e. open and close) but for the life of me I have no idea where to begin to make this work in HA. The commands must be C-escaped and sent to a IP and Port (192.168.0.100 : 5001 for example). Any help here would be welcome!
- SNMP Control / Monitoring - Another critical part of my HS system has been SNMP control and monitoring for a number of Tripplite and IPPower products. I’m struggling a bit here with the yaml config and any pointers would be welcome, on HS I have to call individual .bat files to run commands for ON or OFF or CYCLE and then monitor the results with a different plug-in.
Ideally with HA I’d be able to integrate this into a single automation with trigger_ids and a condensed YAML. Any pointers would be welcome.
# CURRENT CODE ON HS
#SNMP SETUP FOR IPPOWER OUTLET 2 - ON
finesnmpset 192.168.0.100 public 1.3.6.1.4.1.92.58.2.2.0 integer 1
# 2 closest to the end of the string is outlet number
# integer 1 is ON
#SNMP SETUP FOR IPPOWER OUTLET 3 - ON
finesnmpset 192.168.0.100 public 1.3.6.1.4.1.92.58.2.3.0 integer 0
# 3 closest to the end of the string is outlet number
# integer 1 is OFF
#SNMP SETUP FOR TRIPPLITE OUTLET 8 - ON
finesnmpset 192.168.0.100 tripplite 1.3.6.1.4.1.850.100.1.10.2.1.4.8 integer 2
# 8 at end of string is outlet number
# integer 2 is ON (1 = Off, 2 = On, 3 = Cycle)
#SNMP SETUP FOR TRIPPLITE OUTLET 10 - CYCLE
finesnmpset 192.168.0.100 tripplite 1.3.6.1.4.1.850.100.1.10.2.1.4.10 integer 3
# 8 at end of string is outlet number
# integer 3 is CYCLE (1 = Off, 2 = On, 3 = Cycle)
HA YAML - Do I send integer 1 (or 2 or 3) as the payload?
switch:
- platform: snmp
name: SNMP v1 switch
host: 192.168.0.100
community: tripplite
baseoid: 1.3.6.1.4.1.850.100.1.10.2.1.4.8
payload_on: "integer 2"
payload_off: "integer 1"
I think that is enough for today… Would love feedback on any or all and look forward to being a productive part of this community!