My head is ringing with HA ideas and my passion is achieving great things on the cheap. I have purchased a lot of different pieces of kit but don’t know how to mesh it all together and have a true “smart” home, all I can achieve is a connected home. I have experience with industrial PLC programming and with that head think it should be child’s play but this is different. I like the look of OpenHab but it isn’t something that I can jump straight into. I am also looking at a 433Mhz home alarm system with sensors that will work with sonoff RF bridge. So here goes. At my disposal I currently have
A google home hub
A google home mini
A Nest
3 x spare android phones
3 x android tablets
Android car stereo
1 x PC in my loft which I mainly use for Emby, never switched off
4 x Chromecast Audio’s (the best thing since sliced bread)
3 x Chromecast HDMI
Sony android TV
Sony Smart TV
Magic home light strips
Smart Home (tuya) light bulbs, smart sockets, IR blaster, WIFI PIR
Broadlink RM pro and 1 x smart socket
Sonoff RF bridge
433Mhz PIR that won’t link with sonoff
433Mhz sockets that wont link with Sonoff but do with broadlink
I keep buying this stuff, it’s an illness. I can get basic functionality out of it, but I find bouncing commands from cloud server to cloud server is laggy and unintelligent and at the mercy of big brother. I keep thinking I have found the answer i.e. Stringify but that’s a dead end too. I would be willing to learn a bit of code but just don’t know how to begin. Simple things like
If someone is home, and the light level is below acceptable, and someone is in the room, turn the feckin lights on.
Is anyone on my wavelength and can give me some guidance with bite sized projects that can give me a push in the right direction it would be much appreciated.
You don’t mention whether you have actually installed HA… I would suggest that as your bite sized project at first. You could installed it on your PC in the loft that you never turn off. That way you can see how you like HA without having to buy anything extra.
You can see how many of your devices HA automatically discovers; that was the thing that hooked me, the sheer number of devices that HA picked up without any assistance from me.
Ahh, so I need a raspberry pi, I have been curious about these for years. So if I invested in one and this software, would it then scan my home network and find my tech?
Yep that’s one of the best things it does, brings together so many disparate home automation techs. You don’t have to buy a Raspberry Pi but if you don’t mind that initial cost you’ll get a lot from it. I think you’ll really like it.
Also, just be aware that there are a bunch of different ways to install Home Assistant (commonly referred to as HA). If you look around at the different method you might find one that will install on hardware you already own. But if not Raspberry Pi’s are cheap. And also there a number of different ways that you can install HA on that platform too.
I’ve also got years of experience in PLC programming (Modicon & Siemens and some C++) and even so, it was a bit of a learning curve figuring out the programming language used by HA (yaml & jinja) but once you get over that hump it’s not too bad. Mostly…
And be aware that not everything can be discovered so you may have to manually configure some devices.
Dr. Zz’s facebook group has a lot of guys using 433Mhz, sonoff, and tuya devices might be a good resource if you go with HA.
I started with OpenHab, not enough worked out of the box.
With Lovelace you can make HA look really good, you could before but took more work.
Thanks for the feedback everyone. I have just watched a few youtube video’s and geek heaven juices are already flowing. For the minute I shall leave my clumsy google home driven rubbish as it is as I have a few home improvement projects really badly needed, and I also do a lot of running. My imagination is already running wild and I will definitely be purchasing a raspberry pi as I have been looking at them for ages and now I have my project.
I am convinced now that this is the answer I have been looking for.
Don’t be sorry, it is hilarious. I have Siemens S5, S7, Mitsubishi GX Developer, Modicon and now all run badly (rockwell) experience and it just annoys me how bad all of this cheap and even more annoying not so cheap (uhumm nest) doesn’t work. These things are called “smart” and couldn’t be dumber. My learning thermostat can’t figure out that my work shift cycle is a 28 day one even though it’s in my google calendar. I am so glad that I have clumsily stumbled across this website. I can’t wait to get my Pi.
My whole “home automation” journey started around 18 months ago by just trying to figure out a way to remotely monitor and/or control my garage door. With my background in industrial PLC’s I was trying to figure out why there wasn’t something out there that could control you house like you could a factory. Industrial automation has been around for decades so I figured that there had to something around that could do something similar for home use, right?
First I found OpenHAB but it looked way too complicated at first glance. Then I found HA and it all started from there. It’s kind of like an addiction now. I spend way too much time on the forums reading about all of the cool new things that I could do in HA…if only I could stop looking at all the new projects and finish up the ones i’ve already started!
The forums are chock full of people who are more than willing to help you out.
And, I might as well get this taken care of up front… make sure when you start writing code and need help (because you will need help ) make sure you properly format any of your code snippets that you post in the forum. YAML is very case and indentation dependent. If we can’t see how you wrote your code in your configuration files we can’t help you find errors.
the blue box at the top will get you started but here it is a little more visually:
maybe you could just download and burn a copy of raspbian to the card, get it setup then try to reboot from there and see how long it takes. if it still takes forever then try another sd card. they’re pretty cheap.
Why are you rebooting… that is going to end in tears fast. Use the Configuration->General-> Restart option instead. It’s faster and it does a validation check before restarting. Configuration errors can and will stop Home Assistant from starting so rebooting is a BAD idea unless unavoidable.
And so it begins. Is this software? I assumed this was just a forum for home tech. So no I haven’t installed anything yet.
) make sure you properly format any of your code snippets that you post in the forum. YAML is very case and indentation dependent. If we can’t see how you wrote your code in your configuration files we can’t help you find errors.
