Love Hate - Is there a guru out there i can talk to for $

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1

I’m a paying customer.

I need a guru.
Not to intergrate my shield, but to integrate ME
or to send me to the back of the line!

Anyone?

I’ve been toying with HA for several months.
I’m still sandboxing.
I’m using an Odroid n2+.
I etch the latest HA image to the emmc every few weeks to have a fresh start.
Networking, ip, hardware, install, etching… = is easy part.
I’m old school: i use static ip addresses. so give me the ascii command set and i can open my garage door from a dos prompt.

I’ve been using an Elk M1 (alarm panel w/ automation) and ISY99 (automation/notifications) for many years. And will continue to use (til i or they die).
Having something pretty to talk to them is my goal.
And WOW, was I blown away when i first integrated HA with my the Elk panel.
80 zones, 60+ scenes/tasks, countless lights, door locks, etc just appeared on the main dashboard.
Awesome, so I guess I’ll get a few tablets and create some cool looking dash boards.

But HA found some media players… and duplicates.
I’ve got:
An Shield showing as Android TV, Android TV 192.168.1.33, mac address of shield
An AVR shows up as Onkyo, ip of onkyo, mac of onkyo
A TV that shows up as androidtv and androidtv 123456
Another TV that comes and goes
On the dashboard - some controls work, some don’t.
One card shows something playing and another shows the thing is off.

So i’m hung up on that. And a few other things.
It just seems i’m missing something with HA.
Why do things ask for an entity id? Why not have a drop down?
Why does creating a new cool looking dashboard involve making a face?
Why does onkyo integration not integrate?

Why does HA have a setting that says:
“Configure what website addresses Home Assistant should share with other devices when they need to fetch data from Home Assistant (eg. to play text-to-speech or other hosted media).”
I just don’t get that at all…
Do i put my DDNS address there?
Wouldn’t my other devices be local?

i’m tired of searching for information only to find one year old videos that may have the subject right, but the answer outdated.

I’m venting… I know i’m not the first.
I’m just at that Love Hate point.
Do i spend another evening trying to figure out how to integrate an Nvidia Shield by taking a crash course in python and adb commands?
And which entity and i talking to?

I just feel like if i could talk to a guru for a half an hour…
That i can either be convinced:
1 - to ignore duplicate entities
2 - to embrace yaml
3 - that HA is basically gigo and it is up to user to do the code
or
1 - to put HA up for a year and come back

What’s a guru $ going for?
Anyone?

Kevin

2

I’m far from a guru, but I’ve been where you are from time to time.

Duplicate entities - 9 times out of 10 I’ve found those are due to some error I’ve made. Not sure why you’d even be concerned about them. They’ll just be in entities/devices. It’s not like they clutter up your dashboard? I’ve just learned to ignore them.

The other 1 time out of 10 - it’s because the device has multiple integrations that can talk to it. For example, my Vizio TVs show up as HomeKit Media Players, but they are also Chromecast devices, AND there’s a Vizio integration. You can just disable the ones you’re not using, or you can tell HA to ignore them.

Definitely embrace yaml. I resisted for a while, but I’ve made a lot more progress since I came around and stopped relying on the GUI for everything.

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A month later and i’m getting the hang of it (HA).
But damn, it ain’t easy.
It took me a week to do this:

~type: custom:auto-entities
card:
  type: entities
  show_header_toggle: false
  state_color: true
  theme: cyberpunk-2077
  title: zones ez*
filter:
  include:
    - entity_id: sensor.elkm1_ez*
      state: Violated
      options:
        secondary_info: last-changed
show_empty: true

That card shows any violated zones on my ElkM1 alarm and when they last changed.
It shouldn’t take a week to figure that out.
I think the capital V in Violated stumped me for days.

I’m getting there, but I still would love to talk to a guru for a helf an hour.
I just want to talk about topology, ip and mac addresses and entity names, domains, orphans, themes.
Name your price.
We’re talking about a half an hour for an expert… Any out there?

4

Well this is not Micro$oft. It’s linux community where people share their knowledge for free.
Why they are doing that?
Basically because it’s in fundamentals of gnu/linux. You have to invest you time, and yes time is money, to learn about your system and things that you using every day.
Is it hard? Yes. Does it take time? Yes it does.
But in the end you will gain knowledge and this is something that is not expendable like money.
And in the end you will became a guru that you are searching all along.

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