Beginner Questions -- Thermostat and cameras

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Hello everyone! Please bear with the lengthy post, I am completely new to Home Assistant and I would like to get some information from you guys in the community before I dive right in. If there is a better place to ask questions please let me know, I was informed that the Home Assistant community is great so I figured I’d post on here and ask!

So from the top, I am installing Home Assistant on a Ubuntu Server system using a guide I found online. I have a few main goals with Home Assistant, and the main idea here is that I can continue to build onto the system once it is in place, and add/remove/customize items as I see fit.

The first system I have to install is the thermostat, which is the most crucial part of the smart home in my setup. The thermostat in question is the Lennox iComfort S30. It’s basically an Android tablet mounted on the wall that connects via Wi-Fi and is not listed as compatible with Home Assistant in any way, due to its proprietary software. However, it IS compatible with Apple’s HomeKit, and from what I’ve read, HomeKit is compatible with Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/homekit_controller/). So I guess my question here is whether or not I can configure the thermostat via HomeKit on an iPhone connected to the local network, and then pair it to the Home Assistant? Theoretically I would like to remove the iPhone from the system entirely once it is integrated, as I have a separate LAN network for my Home Assistant/automation hardware.

Finally, I have one other thing that I would like to integrate, being some IP cameras that I set up on a few Raspberry Pi’s. I use motionEyeOS on the RPis, and a USB camera on one, and Pi-connector camera on the other. They work perfectly fine on their own, but I cannot find any documentation as to how it could be installed into Home Assistant, other than this GitHub page: https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-motioneye, which claims that local cameras (referring to those connected to the RPis) cannot be used to send images to the Home Assistant software, which would render this entire thing pointless, as the goal here is to have it all managed from one app. There is a streaming URL that is encrypted with a username and password, and it outputs an image that refreshes around 15 times per second, (not 100% sure on that, and it is variable so I could turn it up/down as needed) that I think could be integrated to Home Assistant? For now I am not concerned with motion detection on Home Assistant, because I already have notifications set up in motionEye to send me alerts when motion is detected, but I would like to use some face identification addons in the future.

Finally, the easy parts that I am most excited for is the integration with my home SoundTouch systems – this looks really simple and straightforward, and PERFECT!!

Thank you all in advance for your help! I greatly appreciate it.

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Hey @gts250gamer101 did you begin your Home Assistant journey yet? Usually the HA community is very responsive so I am surprised there isn’t an answer here yet!

So from the top, I am installing Home Assistant on a Ubuntu Server system using a guide I found online.

I assume you suceeded in the installation? If you need further information I have recently written a guide for installing Home Assistant in Docker on Ubuntu.

So I guess my question here is whether or not I can configure the thermostat via HomeKit on an iPhone connected to the local network.

Yes Home Assistant is absolutely compatible with HomeKit and devices connected to it. Check out the official documentation here.

If you want to use HomeKit to control Home Assistant, this is also possible. This allows you to use Siri to control Home Assistant. I wrote a tutorial on how to integrate HomeKit with Home Assistant in this way.

Alternatively why not just build your own custom thermostat system? I wrote a complete guide for custom thermostats suitable for many different types of setup (I see you like long posts :wink: and this guide is around 8000 words!). I also wrote a shorter guide for a more basic single zone system. I even wrote a guide for building additional WiFi temperature sensors. To accompany this you can build your own tablet dashboard and/or use Google calendar to schedule the system!

I have one other thing that I would like to integrate, being some IP cameras that I set up on a few Raspberry Pi’s.

Yes it is certainly possible to stream video from cameras connected to remote Pi’s. You can use MotionEye but personally I prefer V4L2 on the Pi and just stream RTSP to Home Assistant. Check out my tutorial on how to send video from a Remote Pi to Home Assistant. You can even setup facial recognition on these cameras and trigger automations based upon the identity, check out my Facebox tutorial.

These tutorials are a little more advanced and if you are completely new to HA, I would recommend checking out my beginners guides to YAML, scripts and automations.

Hope that helps and welcome to the awesome Home Assistant! :slight_smile:

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Very funny that you should reply to this today – I got a Lenovo ThinkCentre M600T (T signifies ‘tiny’ brand line) that I just wrapped up the install of Ubuntu Server on. I am now fully prepared to jump into Home Assistant tinkering!

I will certainly check out your guide as well, it looks perfect for what I need to do. As for the custom thermostat system, unfortunately our system is quite locked down so I don’t think that would be possible.

Finally, your guide for V4L2 looks quite comprehensive as well, so I will probably use that. Again, thanks for all of the help you’ve provided, I have no doubt that your resources will be quite helpful. They seem very well written and will certainly prove to be a good resource for beginners!

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No problem and thanks for the feedback! I was actually looking through the forums for common questions that I can use for new article topics.

You asked a lot of questions I had already written about so thought it was worth mentioning a few articles. The extra stuff was just to give you an idea of the sort of things that you can do in HA, the list is literally endless!

The only thing I am not sure about is how the link between your thermostat and HomeKit would work, but I assume its compatible as HA is compatible with HomeKit devices. I don’t have any HomeKit devices yet (I only use it the other way, Siri to control HA from my Apple Watch) so I haven’t written about HA to HomeKit devices yet.

Good luck with your build :+1: