It would be nice to have the capabilities of Homeseer’s devices page in Home Assistant’s entities view. Until that (ever) happens, the ‘Search entities’ field allows you to quickly cull the herd based on text-matching. The same can be done in the Developer Tools > States view.
The following example isn’t meant to be a perfect substitute for Homeseer’s devices page but simply to demonstrate how you can use templating and the Markdown card to present desired information in a tabular format.
This lists temperature sensors (but the template can be designed to select almost anything):
|Name|Area|State|Last Changed|
|:----|:----|:----:|:----|
{% for e in states.sensor
| selectattr('attributes.device_class', 'eq', 'temperature') -%}
|{{e.name}}|{{area_name('e.entity_id')}}|{{e.state}}|{{e.last_changed.timestamp() | timestamp_local}}|
{% endfor %}
I thought mentioning the Search Entities and Search Devices fields in their respective pages was too obvious. No need to scroll through 700 devices when a text search using these fields can narrow down what you’re looking for. The use of templates as mentioned above is also a nice solution. If you are looking for a page exactly like the HS3 Devices page…you won’t find it…but you could always open a Feature Request.
Homeseer’s devices page was very convenient and at first, hard to do without but I’ve found a very useful replacement. If you’re on a device with a keyboard, you can press “e” from many pages and it pops up an entities modal where you can search. Super useful and although not the same as the HS device page, most everything “device” related is done in HA with entities and this provides quick access.
New HS4 convert here too… I have HA and HS in parallel and moved all automation to HA with HS only being the z-wave interface for now (Z-Net). Ordered a Aeotec Gen5+ stick and will play around with that and cut a few over to see how well it performs.
on the homeseer integration, few questions I can’t seem to figure out:
RGB - is there any way to somehow map this in HA? I have many devices that can change colors. One example, I have an Aeotec Smart Plug with the square’ish light ring plugged in by the back door, when alarm is set it turns red, alarm disarmed it turns green. I had to edit the actual Z-wave device in HS (controls, and set each R/G/B channel as an independent “switch” to achieve this).
Energy devices, I have a bunch of switches that report energy, plugs and other things and would like to utilize the HA energy stuff. I found some articles and created some templates to sort of map data from sensors.
still learning the whole Devices vs. Entities and how they are mapped from the homeseer interface. This has been a challenge.
Envisalink DSC, got this moved over to HA natively but struggled at first with automations based on trigger events. This is where HS shines. “devices and child devices” in HS seems to have identified “selections” in the events. In HA automations, there is a lot of work to find what the actual “states” are. Example is the Envisilnk sensors (door) if I want to trigger on these I had to learn to trigger on “on” or “off”. This was not so clear as on the dashboards the cards show “opened” “closed”.
Overall… I love the HA world. Things that have really shined… Geofencing with the native HA iOS app. This was SUPER simple compared to anything in the HS world.
Welcome Mike. I’ve actually been moving my production Z-Net between HomeSeer and HA for testing, and so far that’s been working fine. When the family is in for the night I just disable the Z-Net interface in HomeSeer and connect it to HA as a virtual serial interface. It takes a while for HA to interrogate all the devices after startup, but 99% are recognized and controllable. My irrigation controller isn’t recognized. You have to export the S0 keys and add them to HA. I’ve documented the process if anyone is interested in trying.
oh wow! that is interesting! Could you share how you configured the virtual serial interface?
I’ve not heard anyone doing that and being able to move it back and forth between platforms… would make the final cutover migration simple and not need the zStick.
I am finding that HA does not recognize Aeotec RGB devices properly and doesn’t have native control over the RGB channels… at least for my “Aeotec Smart Dimmer 6” with the RGB rings (with zwaveJS integration, not the homeseer integration).
Zwavejs2mqtt is your friend. This allows you to use tcp://x.x.x.x:2001 as the serial port. I did this for my migration going back and forth. You have to make sure that the HS Zwave plugin is disabled first before you can use in HA.
New HS refugee here (well trying to make that determination). I’ve installed HA on a Windows Hyper-V using the provided image. Successfully added a few integrations custom and otherwise.
I really like HomeSeer, and if it wasn’t for a major Event Engine and Virtual Device bug that has gone unfixed for several months I don’t think I would be looking for alternatives.
I’m VERY impressed at what HA has to offer, even though there seems to be a lot more resistance (IE things that should work out of the box, but don’t) to creating a functional solution.
The latest, and most difficult hurdle to overcome is USB. I realize this is not an HA issue, but more of an OS application for me (Windows 10 Host, Running HA in a Hyper-V).
I have several USB devices (MySensors, APC UPS, RFX) that cannot be seen by HA. I’ve have tried several free methods without success, and really don’t want to spend a bunch of money in paid solutions to allow USB Passthrough if at all possible.
What are my options for (USB Devices) success in the least amount of resistance?
What you will find is most people using Hyper-V also use a low power device (raspberry pi or thin client) with linux loaded (rasbian or debian) and the USB devices plug into this. I do this as well for my proxmox setup. Technically it’s not necessary but I’ve found it’s better to separate the integrations that use USB to a separate device so they can maintain connection while the main home automation server reboots.
Then you need to find if the home assistant integration can communicate over IP or if it needs a local agent installed on the low power device.
Here’s what I did.
Basically, you use ser2net for MySensors and RFX. It’s the same utility HS uses for the Z-Net to transcode serial to IP. Works very well and is extremely reliable. I’ve actually gone away from RFXtrx due to long standing reliability issues that were present with HS. Now use rtl433 loaded on the low power device with an rtlsdr sending MQTT to HA.
For APC UPS, use NUT instead and load it on the low power device. The HA integration for nut communicates with this via IP. I also do this with zwaveJS2mqtt and node-red; they are installed directly on the low power device.
Everything works very well. I have both my main home automation server, which runs proxmox and LXC’s for everything (HA, Frigate, etc.), reboot weekly along with the low power device. Just be sure to have the low power device reboot first, then the main automation server after. Probably not necessary to have it do this so often but learned this long ago when managing large networks.
Doing this I’ve been able to completely remove windows. Used Frigate to replace Blueiris and since HA is natively linux, windows isnt needed for HomeSeer either. My main home automation server runs at about 2% CPU utilization running 20+ containers while doing time machine backups for my Mac.
All of the info to do this can be found in this forum. Might have to google some of it but everyone here is very friendly and helpful just as the HomeSeer forums were.
Thanks for the information. Which of the VM solutions is preferred for HA?
Most present on my mind: (Things that don’t work out of box)
On the HA Cloud page, there is a" TTS Try" box, and even though I have signed up for the trial cloud account (that has been working great), TTS’s will not work there.
TTS: Alexa speakers returns an error message something about you need a media player (which I had to perform an additional install of a mini client, which only works in that client).
TTS: Chromecast Audio speakers tests also doesn’t work anywhere in HA (Music files work fine). Logs indicate can’t find some file (still working on this one)
One would expect that if you’re going to have a “Try It” out function it would work.
In reference to the VM solutions preferred, I don’t think HASS indicates any preference. One positive side of HASS is that the documentation is plentiful and outstanding. I’d recommend reviewing the installation guidelines here Installation - Home Assistant (home-assistant.io) and planning from there. If you want a supported installation there are specific requirements. There is a Virtualbox image under the alternatives section, for example.
I’m running 2 instances myself - a dev instance under Raspberry Pi4 and the Virtualbox prod instance, both running Debian 11 OS and the Home Assistant Supervised option.
I’m still running both HS3 and HASS in parallel, it will take some time for me to migrate. I’ve spent weeks reviewing the ins and outs of YAML, Jinja2, and how to translate the common event engine patterns of HomeSeer to HASS. I’d like to take things slow and avoid early mistakes. In the meantime I’m using the HomeSeer integration to bridge the two systems.
I also run HA in a VirtualBox VM under Windows 10. Being able to take a VM Snapshot is very handy when experimenting.
The one thing I’ve found about USB pass-through is the fact that the bevice must be fully supported by the host OS. In the case of Windows 10, this isn’t really a problem since many (most) USB devces have Windows drivers. A while back I tried running VirtualBox under MacOS and found that my USB-Serial devices would not work correctly. As it turned out, Apple had broken the FTDI device driver that was built into the OS. Even though the devices were showing up in HA, I was still getting data corruption due to the host OS. This is just a warning to others, not an issue with HA.
EDIT: I should have noted that I run HA and HS4 on the same Win10 Pro machine. Z-Wave will continue to run on HomeSeer until I get the time to migrate it to HA. With 2x Z-Nets and 87 devices, that’s going to be a lot of work.
