Going to next level of Aquarium Automation...who's with me?

Aw crap… Electrics + Salt Water accidents are no fun. I’ll simply offer, I know from experience how that hurts. :wink:

Having just the Seneye data feed pulled into HA is already a WIN, in my experience. Much like my Kalkwasser dosing alarm trigger - which sends me a notification if the AutoTop-Up Kalkwasser pump runs for more than an hour, I can create notification alarms based on Seneye data - like a pH “Flatline” alarm… if the pH goes to flat line for more than 12 hours and doesn’t fluctuate, I get an alarm to check that the Seneye Windows App isn’t borked, again. I could even further automate the reboot of Windows, but that’s where I draw the line and choose to save that time/energy for Pure Pi integration of the Seneye. :wink:

One of the things I want to do with the Guide is use that opportunity to do a full blown hardware-rebuild of one of my Pi’s - the old original Pi I started this with is going to get an upgrade to a Pi3B+, and rather than being the “Frankenstein” prototype build, it’ll be a bit better polished build in the final ending. At least that’s my hope / idea / goal at this time.

Good luck with your initial build and keep us posted how it goes!!

BTW, this is exactly how I wired my GPIO “buttons / float sensors” …

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Just bookmarking this bit of info here for later reference:

If you are using the Home Assistant One Wire component instead of your own external Scripts to poll Temp data and are not happy with the 0.1 degree rounding Home Assistant performs, you can change that here (on Hassbian):

/srv/homeassistant/lib/python3.6/site-packages/homeassistant/components/sensor/onewire.py

And keyword search “round”. There should be two appearances of this in the file. An example looks like this:

value = round(float(value_read[0]), 1)

For those that don’t know python, that number “1” above defines how many places to round to. Just change this to a 2 or 3 and you’ll get either 0.00 or 0.000 rounding.

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Just a tiny status update for everyone: I promised to start working on a Quick Start Guide / HOWTO get started with HA as an Aquarium Controller from scratch, detailing the whole process of steps soon, and just wanted to say…

The initial work on that has begun. And here’s how I’m going about it, as well as a bit of historical refresher:

Back between March to May of last year, I started looking at using HA as an Aquarium controller. Prior to announcing it on the thread here, I had only seen one or two other people on the Internet that were using “Home Automation” tools for aquarium management, despite the underlying hardware being very similar / exactly identical. And they weren’t using Home Assistant.

Clearly, at the time, I saw myself as a little bit of an outlier in this regards, but with no more than a week or two of “playing around” with Home Assistant for my home control purposes, I felt it could already do better than what I was using currently at the time - something I hobbled together myself 7 years prior, and did the job, but my wife never could use it / administrate it. It was all Linux CLI and “crontab” executed. Back then, there wasn’t support for my Neol and APC Power Bars and still isn’t, but there is support for SNMP now and that’ll work for APC and I’m almost sure I can make my Neol power strips work using native HA functions too. Back then, I couldn’t figure out how to make a component, so I just made dozens of externally called scripts to add the support where I needed.

Automating various functions of my aquariums had a lot of dependency on those external scripts. Without them, it just wouldn’t have been possible to get this far down the road. But with them, I couldn’t be sure that it would all fail some way gloriously and spectacularly.

As I do with most things, I hoped for the best, and expected (and planned) for the worst. When implementing the Automatic Water Change function or water top off functions, I worried endlessly those first weeks. What if somehow an automation accidentally triggered while I was alseep? What if a programmatic error caused the downstairs to flood & my wife discovered it in the morning? Would she ban HA from the house then? What if all my ideas about using HA were wrong. To an extent, that’s a big reason why I hesitated posting my full config file here, further, I wasn’t sure I could commit to supporting others regarding it, not just yet.

A full year later, and my view on all of that has done a full 180 degree turnaround. I’m literally over the moon with confidence that HA is up to the task. If you missed the post from almost a year ago - we barely had HA installed and running for 3 weeks (I think) when HA woke us up and got us out of bed in the middle of the night to tell us that the circuit breaker for the entire downstairs (and aquariums) had failed, the instant it happened. Had we awoken 8-10 hours later, we would have had hundreds of dead baby clownfish on our hands & a real mess to clean up (you can’t just turn on the pumps when the power comes back on in a multi-tank system, where one or more tanks go nuclear due to blackout conditions.) In two more instances later that year, HA would again “save the tanks” from otherwise certain disaster, including when a submersible heater began to leak and tripped a circuit breaker. The power and temp logging performed by HA allowed me super crazy easy and quick determination which heater was even the faulty one, removing the need for hours of diagnostic testing to determine what what was exactly even at fault, so I could remove suspect device from the circuit. (BTW, this was another advantage of having the “controlling” HA instance not on the same power circuit as your aquariums, but remotely installed on it’s own power circuit & relaying all sensor / monitoring data and commands through MQTT to a “slave” Pi: I could look into the HA log data to determine what failed BEFORE I tried switching everything back on.)

I have lost count the number of times HA has detected a stuffed DSL / Cable modem and rebooted it, but the most instrumental was when I was halfway around the world in India this past March, and I got a notification that the modem responsible for my VPN had become stuffed, and HA was going to attempt to reboot it. Next message I got was that it had been successfully rebooted and was back online.

The winning mark of approval came from my wife however. And it came in just last month. When we got our electrical year end summary. What she likes most of all is how HA demonstratively helped us save on our electrical bill for the first time ever - both in regards to the electrical management of the Aquarium and the whole house. Second to that, she likes all the “dedicated buttons”… both in software and in hardware I have made for her, for various tasks and “stupid things” that are easily automated for her.

Now, HA has a lot more support and native support actually does translate into better performance. And I plan to jettison my dependency on those external scripts on all my RaspberryPi’s and go with native support for every function I can. And rather than migrating my entire configuration.yaml file (which by the way ‘vim’ reports 13K+ lines when I open it) - I’m going to rebuild all of that from scratch, in theory. In practice I’ll be cherry picking and cleaning out lots of old / disused / forgotten functions, scripts, comments and garbage I probably left behind over my first year with HA and start with a “freshly built” config, which I’ll be turning around and making part of my HOWTO guide and sharing on Github. And I’ll kill the monolithic beast this config file currently is and make it better understandable, digestible and palatable.

At the end of the rebuild / conversion / upgrade, I should have a network with 5 instances of HA (Hassbian builds) running on 5 different Pi’s distributed across 4 different floors (and electrical circuits) controlling my aquarium operations and house automation. And a HOWTO guide (including full blown code / config examples) to publish and share with others on here. :slight_smile:

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Anyone else here have an AquaMedic Reefdoser SP3000?

You know, the big black and blue “old dependable” liquid doser with a Red 7-segment LED display, and which has like ZERO connectivity and a horrid User Interface for programming schedules?

Well, I have 2 and I figured out an upgrade path (hardware and software) using a customised TASMOTA firmware flashed 8266 based Sonoff… as a near drop in replacement for that old micro controller interface it has. And after busting my ass for the last couple of days, I’ve now got it integrated with Home Assistant.

The UI is a bit in the rough, but it’s a lot easier to program now than it was before. Just dial in the amount you want to dose in ML per Day (from 1ml to 500ml) and how many times you’d like to split the dose over a 24 hour period and done. You can also pick the execution Minute so that it doesn’t “collide” with other dosing pumps, like it used to with the old IC controller. No more accidentally dosing ALK and Ca and Magnesium at the same time because the AquaMedic’s schedules collided. You can offset each pump from the other & despite what schedule you choose, they stay offset. :slight_smile:

But once you set the Daily Dosage Amount, the Dosage split (1 big dose, 2 doses, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12 or 24 doses in a day) and choose your “Offset” in minutes, the software does the rest.

But it also makes periodic weekly tuning of your water parameters SO MUCH EASIER now.

I was even thinking about adding a “Boost” or “Sleep” mode - for when you want to schedule an extra boost of supplements for 24 hours up to 7 days, or to “suspend” dosing on a single channel for the same time period - after which it would reset and default back to previous settings when a set time had expired.

The downside about the hardware upgrade is the built in Display and buttons don’t work anymore, but that’s not a loss really anyways. On the flip side, as a 10 year old doser that was upgraded into the era of IoT, it sports a nice Tasmota web page where you can toggle the dosing pumps manually, directly on the device.

Of course, I’m using MQTT to communicate between it and HA. :smiley:

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Realising there’s more applications than just Aquariums - I decided to post the entire HOWTO Guide of how I converted my Autodosers over to WiFi / MQTT/ Home Assistant control, but didn’t want to exclude anyone following this specific thread for updates. :slight_smile:

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@cowboy
I am waiting for your guide and would like to thank you in advance for taking the time to share what you have learnt and save us from all the headaches.
I have had the Rpi’s ready to go for some time now, it just seems like such a mammoth task However I absolutly belive that a HA based controller could be so much more than a comercial controller such as APEX. (Even though APEX is sexy and cool :slight_smile: ) ) Comercial options are limited and lack the customization possible with open source, not to mention stupid expensive and you need to have everything from their brand and it must be supported!

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@cliffdude: Thanks for the feedback / update / motivation. Believe it or not it actually helps me with the wife to help prioritise. :smiley: Which is actually good because she’s starting to see the need and potential demand for what I’ve created & is then willing to help me with it. FYI - she’s a professional Video/Film person. Believe it or not, her job is doing just that for the chaps on board the International Space Station. And I’ve been trying to convince her to help me with making my own video channel for all of this stuff. :slight_smile:

And on that note, I’m going to try to film my (re)build of my primary Pi controller. Migrating / Upgrading my other nodes to the latest release has been also a preparation for myself in plotting out how to do the HOWTO rebuild because I’m also still on v.54 with that Pi. And I want to do the build HOWTO with the latest release as well, but there were a lot of breaking changes between those versions. My accessory nodes let me port / migrate code over those breaking changes without disturbing my current running system. Once I get everything tested on an accessory node, I’ll then be ready to start the rebuild documentation / HOWTO authoring process.

The release of the Doser how to is part of that strategy tho. I had long ago wanted to sit down to do this project and it kept getting pushed back. I realised others that might consider this solution might be discouraged if there’s not at least some sort of MQTT (or other) path to control AutoDosers since so many other controllers do that already. By hacking my Reefdosers & developing a very elegant interface to control them that’s effectively usable with ANY MQTT autodoser - I realised I could take out a few birds with one stone and deliver a more powerful HOWTO guide for people to follow. (Effectively, if one can 3D print their own Autodoser parts, buy some cheap stepper motors & a Sonoff device - at that point, they can actually build / create their own AutoDoser just by following my instructions (albeit a bit modified) and the software for it is free. :slight_smile:

Effectively, the Doser HOWTO is just a subset of the larger HOWTO that will be released / published. I thought to release it now because 1.) incase I get hit by a bus tomorrow, not everything will die with me and 2.) I thought it would at least show a little bit of what’s to come & what I’m working on towards that goal. :slight_smile:

The HOWTO has been a year in the waiting I realise - I wanted to make it worth everyone’s wait and thought a vendor neutral OpenSource AutoDoser Interface was a nice way to round off the overall package, making it more “complete” as an aquarium controller. Hopefully I’ll be right about that. :slight_smile:

PS - I’ll leave this here just for giggles… :wink:

“configuration.yaml” 13806 lines, 416945 characters

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Hey! sorry to jump in like this, im new in HA and also have an Hydra, did u made some progress on the API? Would love to take a look and help if i can

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Hey, yeah I made some progress.

I’m almost ready to cut a first release. Two last outstanding tasks I’d like to complete before the first release.

  • add a test to cover the case of two different models of lights being paired, with the power being limited by being maxed out on the parent and then also a test to do the same for a child light. Again, I don’t anticipate a problem here but it will really verify that my code to handle mixed devices is working correctly. I’ve 99% test coverage and this is the 1% that is remaining.

  • add tests to cover the Hydra 52HD model. I only currently have data for a 26HD and a prime. I don’t anticipate any issues here but I’d like to be sure. I added a post to the AI users group, on Facebook to ask for help but didn’t get any responses. I’m probably ok with skipping this task initially but it’s a nice to have.

If I can get these sorted (or at least the first one) then I’ll upload the module to pypi and it will be ready for anyone to use.

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Already responded on the other thread but I figured I’d crosspost here. My intention is to write a python module for the coral box wifi doser next, so I’ll have to see how to get this working with your interface as well, once it’s done.

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@cowboy Did you ever rig up a PH probe? I’ve got one of the Atlas Scientific ones coming to me in the next few days…I want it for a number of reasons but also as a fail-safe, in case my doser tries to dump a bunch of Alk into the tank.

@mcclown Not yet. Will go for a tentacle but I had to invest money in home improvement for now. Still wanting and planning to come back to that, but after the initial HOWTO guide to build your own basic controller. Also having some doser control was a bit of requirement to have for my probes & stuff I can do now without probes (like calculated vinegar injection into my continuous feed Kalkwasser setup). Also on to do is a better Seneye solution.

BTW, since my dosers are now controlled and monitored by HA, I can have HA tell me if anything goes wrong with dosers not turning off. :slight_smile:

Thanks in advance cowboy, your work is invaluable.

After extensive efforts to connect my seneye reef, it turns out frying the webserver also fried my sensor with an internal hardware fault detected. SO, my next plan is to replicate it with the PI.

As a noob to all this like many here reading, its hard to get your head around where to start and how, the above vid you shared was awesome and that will be my next step, however I know your keen to help people begin this journey so may I offer what I would feel the most effective info.

Firstly Equipment, I see mention of many sensors and bits and pcs, searching for a temp probe, or orp meter etc its hard to know what is both good quality, accurate and of course compatible with our PI. Advice on this would be very helpful.

Secondly - Bite sized info - Soooo much reading to get up to speed and since your many improvements much of it may since be updated. I think the best way to get started would be a separate instructional for each component. I.e.

  • setting up a temp probe, what to buy, how to connect, what code used … done.
  • setting up a ph probe … etc

So people can work through one by one, this would be unimaginably helpful, as right now I am having trouble swallowing all the info and acronyms in one go.

Right now I’m looking to replicate what my seneye did, so ammonia probe, ph probe, o2 and temp. I actually found all this info very helpful, and of course, while I have not had my seneye running I have encountered endless trouble with my tanks, mostly due to heavy metal poisoning from a broken themometer. Undoubtedly though I would have responded more quickly to the problems with more information on hand.

Thanks again for your great work, your a champion.

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Hi Stephen,

Thanks for the constructive feedback. I found that invaluable suggestions and will take it all on board.

There was a set back this week to getting started however. We’ve already been going through a heat wave / drought for some time here, but this past week it got up and over 37C inside the house (we have no air-co) which not only caused some re-directed attention to my aquariums, but also killed our home firewall - an old but enterprise worthy 5-network port beast that links to our dual uplinks. Email, DNS and other services were taken out as well. And I spent the next couple of days implementing a new temp firewall, until I could get some replacement hardware delivered.

FWIW, HomeAssistant performed brilliantly during the loss of Internet connectivity. In regards to the aquarium, it never missed a beat. It even spent the hours until we woke up, trying to bring the Firewall back online, rebooting it every 5 minutes. But alas, she’d blown several capacitors I would discover the next day, and was never coming back.

In regards to ‘convenience’ items around the house, like sunrise based timers, Google graphing resources online, etc… I have some things to think carefully about and learn from this. Nothing bad happened, it’s just more of my attitude of “oh, that could be improved, and that could easily be made to work better, etc.” But this all went down in 37C (98F)+ temp conditions inside our house, and with sweat dripping down our faces just from sitting on the sofa. I didn’t feel like doing anything that I didn’t have to after all that. And I figured dripping sweat onto my electrical builds probably’s not a good idea. :smiley:

BTW, another thing I learned during this heat wave from Home Assistant: Because I use Home Assistant to track exactly how much top up water (evaporation make up water) into my tank, and can now calculate accurate daily totals, I learned that my aquarium system, which normally evaporates about 6-10 liters of water a day…can evaporate up to 30 liters per day under heatwave conditions (and fans blowing air across the sump).

My wife’s response to this knew treasure of knowledge was “You mean 30 liters of water are evaporating inside our house and oozing out?” :smiley:

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Well I had a bit of catching up to do here. Glad to see the project is still alive and well. HA has been running some simple automations on my aquarium for a while now. Just lights (refugium, quarantine, t5 supplemental) and the heater for my quarantine tank. My temp probes are all working. The only time I had a problem a quick restart of the pi zero fixed it.

I think my plan going forward is staying much the same as I am running it now. Keep most of the main life support on my reef angel (which I want to integrate the data to home assistant somehow. Apparently the newest version of the controller allows mqtt communication). Then expand the home assistant capabilities. I would love to do ph, salinity and orp.

Actually what I mostly plan on doing is copying stuff cowboy does!

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Also I find it funny there was a small discussion on soil moisture sensors because I have a project on hiatus for auto watering of the plants in my house.

The problem I ran into was I couldn’t find a script using a platform I understood that would report the values over mqtt. I wanted to use a nodemcu for them but the only way I know how to flash a nodemcu is through Arduino IDE. So until someone makes a sketch like that I’m kind of stuck!

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Hahahaha… thanks @Ciwyn … I consider imitation the highest form of flattery. :slight_smile:

BTW, you better buckle in then, because I’ve done something rather interesting since my last post.

As previously mentioned above in the past, before I began the hardware rebuild - I knew I needed to get my primary HA controlling Pi moved up to the latest current releases and off of version 0.53. But, I’d hit the Python2.7 --> Python3 wall in terms of upgrading directly on the Pi itself, but couldn’t upgrade HA until I upgraded Python which was sure to break everything (high potential of risk.)

Additionally, there was another operational detail that was becoming a real PITA. Restarts of HA were taking anywhere from 10-15 minutes, thanks largely due to a massively large config file & lots of checks and scans being performed at startup. And this was on a very recent RaspberryPi 3+. And having to step through each major version of HA on path to 0.7x goalposts to figure out the various “breaking changes” quickly along the way … meant this wasn’t going quickly at all. I was using a secondary RaspberryPi as my ‘evolution server’ in this process…but as I said, it was a PITA.

Then, something fortunate happened - I had another computer failure in the house for another service I have running, and it’s replacement got me to thinking about VM’s and the possibility and benefits to run HA on a VM, instead. And on top of that…I learned about the new OpenSource project to reclaim control of XenServer, called XCP-ng, from the same group that develops Xen Orchestra. We’d used XenServer at my former employers, but I wasn’t responsible for running it & never sat one up myself… so I thought I’d give that a try over VMware’s ESXI, esp since it’s OpenSource. :slight_smile:

Dug out a couple of old Laptops (circa 2010) that had VTd / Virtualisation support, slapped in 8GB and a 120GB SSD and started installing XCP-ng and building Xen Orchestra Community Edition and then Home Assistant on a bare min Debian 9 install, and a companion Debian 9 VM to host the PostgreSQL server, sporting a Virtual Network linking the HA VM and the PostgreSQL VM.

BTW, important note: Everything get’s logged. Everything. I know this isn’t ‘recommended’ or ‘desirable’ in 99% of the cases, but I have my own reasons for doing so & migrated to a dedicated RaspberryPi for DB functions. It was a big improvement for awhile, but over time, as my HA install and feature set grew, even my dedicated Pi for this function was getting bottle-necked with the 100mb Ethernet interface.

I did consider going to a AlternatePi hardware platform, and there’s some good candidates, as well as installing USB based SSD’s for storage over the SD cards I was using now, but there was another issue in the back of my head: Backups. I have backups now, but going through a restore / recovery process is still a pain. I wanted something better.

After about almost 2 months with it, I found XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra give me what I’m looking for and am really happy with the performance. Actually, the performance is amazing. Boot times of Debian AND Home Assistant (both) are under 30 seconds. If for some dreaded reason, I have to reboot the whole computer, it takes just under 3 minutes for XCP-ng’s Hypervisor & Four separate guest VM’s to spin up: HA, Database Server, Xen Orchestra VM (the tool to manage your VM’s through. web interface), and a Windows10 running Seneye Connect App.


(IP and MAC addresses removed to protect the innocent)

Furthermore, I get the added ability to do Snapshots of my entire HA environment (including Debian OS). This ability to back out of a botched change to my Config file or various other add ons I’ve got in my install is just a dream, as the ability to make a snapshot of everything - just single digit seconds, whereas my old backup script would need up to 2 minutes to run, if HA was running at the same time. Maybe 30 seconds, if it wasn’t.

Further, since HA controls a major portion of my house & my aquariums, I have always been keen on Disaster Recovery. And that’s what the Second laptop is for - to have a place to stream Disaster Recovery images too, ready to fire up as ‘warm stand by’ backup copies, in the event the primary Hypervisor / Laptop fails.


What’s really cool about this - is when you have similar enough hardware specifications - you can not just copy VM’s between machines for backup, but you can also migrate said VMs to another Hypervisor hardware host AS THEY RUN…which is just amazing and reminiscent of the time I first saw this on Sun Solaris on E10000 Hardware that cost hundreds of thousands of Euros. :smiley:

In the screen cap above, the VM’s running across two Laptops (Thinkpad and Daisy) are shown.


On my old RaspberryPi 3B +, system load used to run around 0.9 on the load side, and could easily peg 2.0 and just stay there for up to 30 minutes. Loading times on iPads and in browsers would still work, but you could feel it was “slow” sometimes on the Pi’s (disclaimer: I have lots of Tabs and dynamically changing Panels on my HA interface). And if you attempted to view the History Graph page or Logbook page… it would either bring the Pi-based HA instance to a crawl for up to 3-4 minutes before recovering… or crashing and freezing up because of RAM issues.

The log / history viewing problems are all gone now. So is the high load. It runs along nicely at between 0.05-0.2 load and with 3GB+ of RAM available, even the long standing Synology Cam memory leak issue isn’t a problem so much anymore - more of a nuisance than a stability issue.

All of this is just peanuts to my real goal with all of this tho: I finally just completed the migration, testing, debugging of my HA version to version .77. Finally, I am “current” on all my HA instances now (both Pi and VM based), and can move onward toward rebuilding CoralPi and documenting all of that.

BTW, those who might be asking “How do I get GPIO’s physically out from my Home Assistant VM?” The answer is, I don’t. In fact, on the “core controller” (aka Joshua in the screen caps above) - that RaspberryPi was always a GPIO “free” box & it was based upstairs away from all my aquarium stuff. Coral Pi and NemoPi are the RaspberryPi’s that have all the GPIO connections and are located by my aquariums. TimelordPi also has GPIO aquarium related sensors for my Phytoplankton farm and provides GPS synced Time to the network, but all of that is on the roof. Splashes, Spills and “knocking things over” happens around the aquariums. I didn’t want my primary logic controller for everything to be around the aquariums - so HA Pi and Database Pi were always located far away from that - everything happens over HTTPS, MQTT and other protocols. This makes “virtualisation” of my primary logic controller rather easy.

Oh yeah, I also got rid of the dedicated PC running Win7 to host the Seneye Connect App - or more correctly stated - recycled it and moved it upstairs where it now runs Win10 on a XCP-ng VM. I used the brilliant VirtualHere USB client app on Windows to forward USB over Ethernet and plugged the actual Seneye Device into one of my RaspberryPi (NemoPi), which also now runs a VirtualHere USB Server along with an instance of HA. This should hold me over until I can get this working natively in Python on a RaspberryPi & means I don’t have to dedicate an entire laptop to this tiny function, and can now use it for other things as well… like automated redundant backups of my entire HA environment. :slight_smile:

If you’re interested in looking at the OpenSource alternative to XenServer (or ESXI or other) for hosting your HA environment, have a look here to getting started with the core Hypervisor:
https://xcp-ng.org

To manage it from a Windows desktop, install this windows client: https://github.com/xcp-ng/xenadmin/releases

To manage it from a Web interface (i.e. - Mac/Linux users) have a look Xen Orchestra Community Edition:
https://xen-orchestra.com/docs/from_the_sources.html

Tip: If you decided to build the XO Community Edition, you can build it piece by piece following the instructions above - OR - as I have done more recently… follow this instructions which automates the whole process, kindly produced by Lawrence Systems (see Youtube channel of same name). It’s basically downloading their install script, running it and go for coffee and 15 mins later, it’s done.

Furthermore, I’m now seriously considering… AFTER I do the CoralPi / NemoPi Rebuild and co-documentation for the DIY guide… :slight_smile: … I’m seriously thinking about doing a Publicly shared prebuild of Home Assistant + Debian and essentials on a VM for public distribution & use on XCP-ng (should be backwards compatible with XenServer, me thinks)… not unlike Hassbian (my fav of the Home Assistant distros) but for XCP-ng, and might even explore the idea of creating a custom HA component to manage XCP-ng right from the HA interface, thereby eliminating the need for Xen Orchestra. Hmmmm… :slight_smile:

But again, and for now, I’ve got all my HA instances upgraded and current and I freed up two RaspberryPi 3+'s for re-use in my Coral Pi rebuild (NemoPi is already a 3+).

I’ve also revised my rebuild plans a little bit. I’m going to do two rebuilds and focus a bit different on each rebuild. I’m going to do what I call a “beginners” rebuild of Coral Pi as planned, but with the emphasis on “beginners and novices” who are new to the whole Hardware building topic / skillset. The idea will be to really try to pull you ladies and guys in further into your own comfort zone about getting your hands dirty with electronics and soldering. Then we’ll dive into installing HA and linking all the hardware to the software sensors we create & show how that is best done and maybe look at an alternative approach or two, and the reasons you might want to consider that. This should be interesting because until now, Coral Pi is the only Pi that doesn’t run HA actually. It’s a huge collection of scripts that communicates with my remote HA Pi upstairs (Joshua) but yet, has the single largest collection of GPIO sensors of all the RaspberryPi’s. It’s an original model RaspberryPi and it’s GPIOs are nearly all consumed - so the upgrade to a 40pin GPIO bus will be much welcome.

The second rebuild will focus on NemoPi and will come a bit later after CoralPi. It’s focus is going too be how do you take something from a “Breadboard (Proof of) Concept” design (which is what CoralPi is now, and will still kinda be after the rebuild) and turn that into the kind of thing that uses your own Printed Circuit Board designs and how you tackle doing all of that. It’s more Intermediate / Advanced level but the idea is to pick up where the Coral Pi rebuild leaves off. It’ll also serve as a nice topical bridge to other projects which I’m looking at doing & even maybe getting my wife to help with Video production of for a YouTube channel or something. Not that I really like being in front of a camera (just the opposite) but I am convinced that many people find instructional videos the more attractive way to learn things themselves.

I decided to take these extra steps because of the feedback I quite literally had - to keep in mind some of the intended readers / viewers of DIY Build guides aren’t so skilled with hardware (yet) - and also would like to say again Thanks to those who did say something to me about it.

Hopefully, now that I’ve sorted some operational / logistical pre-requisites, I can get started on the actual rebuild of CoralPi now in just a couple of weeks or less. It sucked to have to put everything on hold a couple of months ago, but now that I’ve managed to use that as an opportunity to solve / address other issues, I can pick up speed and get this out the door now,… finally. :smiley:

I retract my previous statement! I plan on copying a small bit of what you are doing!

I like having hassIO on a raspberry pi. That was involved enough for me. Those temp sensors are working out quite well though. So I am glad I undertook that project.