Am I the only one who has had a major breakthrough in your home automation project and no one in the family can understand your success???
I’ve been a Home Automation enthusiast for just over a year now. HA is the only platform I’ve ever used. Starting with a Hass.io on a Pi and a Z-Wave thermostat. Over the past year I’ve gone through several iterations of my config. Not being terribly strong at programming, I quickly gravitated to the Node-Red plug-in for my automations. I moved away from the Pi and installed HA on a Ubuntu/Docker server. This gave me more processing power and I could run Node-Red in its own container.
The issue I ran into is Bluetooth. My server was in the basement and the Bluetooth signal was spotty using a Bluetooth dongle on my server. I briefly tried a hybrid environment; main HA server on Docker and Hass.io/Pi upstairs for Bluetooth and Z-Wave. I connected the two via MQTT. It worked great, but I never like having two HA instances.
Last weekend I reconfigured everything. I installed Hass.io back on the Pi. I have a Z-Wave dongle and use the Zwave2MQTT plugin. On my Ubuntu server, I’m running Docker with Portainer as a management platform.
I installed a MySql container and migrated the recorder off Hass.io. The instant speed increase on the PI was amazing. The other Docker containers I’m running are Node-Red, Traccar, MQTT, Portainer, and Pi-Hole.
I only use HA for integration. As I said before, all automation is through Node-Red on the Ubuntu server. MQTT is great for integrating the non-HA compatible devices; switches and sensors. With all the “hard” processing and I/O being done on the Ubuntu server, it will be a while before I outgrow HA on the PI.
I just needed it post this so someone who can understand the success can appreciate it.
Cheers,
Dan
Yeah, I get it. The family don’t understand the effort that goes in, nor the sense of accomplishment at achieving a good result.
I would describe myself as creative, but not good at music or the traditional arts. Fortunately computing gives you an opportunity to create something, even while the saxophone gathers dust. Oh and the sax cost more than everything I have spent on home automation!
I feel your pain Dan. It’s a constant struggle with my family when the lights automatically come on or go off depending on the light levels. The new Ikea Zigbee light in the bathroom keeps getting switched off from the outside switch messing up the rest of my small Zigbee network
The ONLY thing they seem to like is the LED on the top of my Pi that shows the water tank temp for anyone that wants to shower but that is all - Green or Red means it’s hot enough.
I can only share my successes with the odd colleague in work but it seems my family are a lost cause
I understand how you feel. I am full time carer for my Mother. So using hassio and cameras along with a number of integrations and other sensors, automatons to help her better; fall on deaf ears. To them I am spying but to me I am counteracting her disabilities . Home assistant not only has its place in reducing the repetitive routine in our lives. It can also enhance the lives of the infirm!
Rant bit now! I have been accused of spying, controlling and intruding but those that accused do not have 24/7 361 days a year responsibility for caring for someone. They do nothing! But I use my 30yrs IT experience to enhance her life and free up some time of my own.
Nuf said really! Do what you do as you are a pioneer in your field.
Sometimes you just need someone to appreciate your efforts.It’s like cleaning the house. If you do a good job, people don’t notice because that’s how it’s supposed to look. But leave a mess…
Anyway, I’m just thrilled my wife actually likes being able to turn lights on and off remotely. To me that’s just a side benefit from monitoring the house and scheduling a pattern of lighting while I’m away.
Funny thing, just today I was explaining to my boiler service guy how the burner monitoring works, and showed him the chart on my smart phone. I don’t know if he fully appreciated why I’d want to do that, but at least he understood how it works. That’s gotta count for something!
Yup. We used to struggle to identify “owners” for applications; you know, the person responsible for approving changes, testing, and making decisions about access. A job nobody wanted, because it meant more work. And the owner took the blame if someone didn’t like their choices.
The simple solution was to “pull the plug.” Disable the application or system, and wait for the phone to ring. The first caller was the new “owner.”
I feel you. The other night my girlfriend called me while I was not_home because an automation had triggered unexpectedly and she didn’t want to “break it”.
Understanding the complexities and time spent in these achievements, no f’n chance. Just getting the family to embrace it at this point seems harder than learning to code it. The only praise i’ve received thus far is kudos on setting up a motion sensor and automations for the kitchen lights, nevermind all the implementations or hours spent setting up lovelace to be on point functional and streamlined.
Most of the time I just get that “are you seriously still talking about that home assistant thing” look.
We just got our first electricity bill since I started tinkering, good news, it’s down considerably, maybe that will help, who knows.
I guess I am one of the lucky ones, my wife loves home assistant. Ofc she doesn’t know the technicalities behind it and stuff but it works most of the time (say 95% without problems). She actually wants me to buy more stuff like window sensors or radiator valves and she is using the app consistently (even changes I push to the frontend are used without her asking me how it works).
Though at first she only wanted to use homekit as the states ui was horrible (her words). But ever since lovelace came out I made my setup look a lot like homekit (https://github.com/jimz011/homeassistant) and ever since I made those changes she doesn’t use Homekit anymore (I have also disabled Homekit so that the choice would be none).
True whenever it doesn’t work she will call me or something, though I made my network in such a way that if there is any problem needing a restart, she can simply restart the server, wait a few minutes and all should be back up and working again (this includes stuff like dhcp servers, dns servers, plex, sonarr etc). She knows that if the server is down nothing in the house will work (including internet). But then again I am lucky that she is kinda lazy .
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