Isn’t a simple USB battery sufficient as UPS for a Raspberry Pi? I got a Xiami one which stores 16000 mah, so more than enough to keep the pi running for a long time.
only if you can load it during using it. and a lot off them can not do both at the same time.
good idea, I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll have to give that a try. I’ve had some problems with them getting really hot though. so I’ll have to monitor it.
Just wanted to share… A little while back I bought a USB battery pack to serve as a UPS for my HASS-pi3. I was sad when it did not work but 2 days ago I figured I would give it another go.
Originally I connected the pi to the 2.4A and discovered that during an outage it did not work. When I retried the other day I noticed that the red LED did not light up and of course when I disconnected the mains, it died. For giggles I tried the 2.1A port and voila, I now had the red LED back. I disconnected the mains and ‘watched’ it for an hour and it continued to operate just fine. (Took some googling to find out about the LED)
I have the pi3 with a usb dongle for a combo keyboard/mouse, usb Zwave, usb-to-serial for CM11a, and HDMI cord connected (but the monitor stays off). [I will probably reinstall at some point without a GUI interface in hopes of reducing processing load.]
You can just disable the GUI in from the command line raspi-config. Turn on the GUI again if you need it. Reboot to make the change.
Ok, I asked this in another thread, because I forgot about this one, and this seems popular now 
So I’ll ask it here too.
Which light switches should I go with? ZWave or something else? Belkin WeMo? (They are using wifi, right?)
Most of all I’m concerned about their quality, I don’t want them to burn or something like that. I know that some cheap switches cause shortage and fire sometimes. And yeah, ZWave or other smart switches are not cheap, but I still want to find out which are the most reliable, and also easy to setup. Though reliability is in the first place.
And an update. I still did not setup HASS yet, as I don’t have anything to automate Did not get to that part of renovation yet, but it will be really soon.
But I do have raspberry pi 3 up and running now, and I also was lucky to get my hands on unused PC, which is actually quite cool, with i7-2700K and 8gigs of ram. A am planning to use it as NAS and home server already, and it’s already running ubuntu, samba sharing, webmin, plex media server and other cool stuff. I will also put my voice assistant server on this machine, since some commands are very slow on Pi. Like parsing web pages trying to find some books or movies to download, and other stuff. Even chat-bot part gets slow on responses on Raspberry Pi, once the database grows big.
So, I remember that jbardi advised to run hass on a separate machine. Well, I actually think it’s a good idea. Even though I think that my NAS machine is beast enough to run HASS without problem, along with other services, there is still a problem of occasional rebooting, which may be required for NAS, along with the fact that I would probably turn it off at night or when it’s not needed, to save some power.
I also bought an external 13000mAh battery with solar panel, which should work great as UPS for Pi I think. I just hope that it will not be hard to integrate HASS running on separate machine with my DIY NAS server services like plex and voice assistant, but I saw that HASS has a nice networked python api, so that should not be a problem. I imagine that it should be possible to run a command from Python voice assistnat on my NAS, and send this command to HASS, from what I saw it was just a few lines of code… We’ll see.
I can’t speak to the quality aspect yet, I haven’t had my switches long enough. While cost is an object for me, it’s not the deciding factor. I’ve standardized on the GE switches. Others have had good luck with the leviton switches. Looking at the comments about both, they seem very similar. I believe both have the typical documentation that really doesn’t answer all your questions 
, and I think both require that you have a neutral in the boxes where you place switches.
I am standardizing on Z-Wave devices and standard WI-FI devices if I have to. To me, it seems like there is more offered for home automation type solutions in Z-Wave. I personally feel like this will be the path that Home Automation goes. I think the other protocols like ZigBee, have to many proprietary variations that don’t play well with each other. It was also confusing trying to figure out what areas of the house had Z-Wave coverage vs Zigbee coverage, since devices only typically serve as repeaters for the same type of devices (Z-Wave devices extend Z-Wave networks, and Zigbee devices extend Zigbee networks (sometimes) ).
With all that said, it will come down to which use, availability and cost. Everyone is different and every house is different.
How do you find light switches?
Is it correct that with ZWave light switches you can toggle lights with regular switch AND with internet commands (apps+HA)?
Maybe have a look at unRaid as OS for your NAS. It would fit your requirements rather nicely and has docker support and a very active community that provide dockers for most if not all the tasks you mentioned.
There are two formats for the GE switches. One looks like the traditional toggle switch, but is a momentary contact switch that returns to the middle after you flip it. The other is a paddle switch but it has the same idea, it’s a momentary contact switch that you press and let go and it turns the light on returning to normal. Both can be controlled manually or through your iphone/android device, or HA.
Sorry for my English, I didn’t mean the look of the switch, but it’s functionality.
Better say, the Zwave switch system is it wife/grandmother proof?
I experience problems in my house with Hue bulbs. Half family is now asking me to turn on/off their lights :)!!!
The behaviour of not using a physical switch is very hard to fight, and also using WiFI/Zigbee-Hue switch is not resolving (I would need to put a Philips Hue dimmer switch in the place of each standard switch …)
So far I put 9 hue bulbs in 3 rooms, I have other 5 rooms/places where to put “intelligent” lights, and wonder if I should go the Zwave route: something that blends better with current/usual behaviour of a physical switch (plus adding Alexa/GH/smartphone functionality).
I hope I am clear
I have that exact problem at my house. The GE switches are enough like normal switches that they were not a problem.
Hi, thanks for advice, but I already researched and tried a lot of NAS solutions, and most of them don’t fit my requirements. It’s not going to be just NAS, it’s a little home work server, that has to be able to run stuff like SVN and a lot of other custom servers, so I’d rather go with just some full-featured OS like Ubuntu (which I already have there, and it’s working as NAS and media server already) or even Windows, if the need arises. I’m working with gamedev, and might have to run some dedicated servers for testing purposes.
You can also use the Osram Dimmer Switch it mounts over top of your wall switch keeping it in the on position https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0196M620Y/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_bXcazb9TTN112
@jbardi,I am new here, but this post is the most insightful one I have read so far
Some questions please
How do you access this from your phone? I assume you set up a private DDNS, but am not clear past that. If it matters my router is OpenWrt\LEDE.
[quote=“jbardi, post:3, topic:4522”]
The problem with the cloud based systems, is that you are reliant on them always being online. If your internet goes out in a storm, your house is suddenly no longer able to be controlled, and you are dead in the water, not counting the annoying delay you get from cloud based devices, as nearly every command has to leave your house, go through their servers and then back down to your house to turn something on, which is rather silly.
[/quote] a good point! I have been reluctant to adopt any of these cloud based systems from a security perspective. I do not wish to share any of my usage info, I am concerned about hackers accessing their proprietary DDNS info as a shortcut to my network, (think denail of service bots) and especially for cameras, do not wish to pay to host my data
[quote=“jbardi, post:3, topic:4522”]
with the added bonus of being able to control things through an Amazon Echo in each room as well as Siri on our iPhones and iPads.
[/quote]How do you do this and security again,do these device not open one up to security risks.
I am a bit nervous having had my Synology NAS broken into a cople years back. I had FTP enabled, no DDNS and I was the only user. I can see in it’s logs that someone “knocks” on the door once or twice a month.
Others have commented about issues with discovering devices after reboot. Can someone please elaborate on what and why? Does a proper shutdown of a the OS avoid this (if there is such an option)?? Are there concerns about DB corruption here?
Is there a (water) leak sensor?