Now that I have my HA Yellow up and running, I’m thinking of repurposing my HA Blue as a development system, to allow me to have a playground where I can experiment with integrations and settings without worrying about causing problems to my running system. (I did manage once or twice to lock myself out of my system, and had to connect through Samba and repair or replace a configuration file)
Is there a way to share devices connected to my main system with the development system? Currently most of my Zigbee and all of my Z-Wave devices are connected to a Hubitat that I want to eventually phase out. When I eventually get my devices connected to the Yellow, is there a way to have those devices available on the development system?
I have the Blue running now with the configuration before I moved it to the yellow. I disabled all of the automations on the Blue so they aren’t stepping on each other trying to run the same tasks. I also disabled the cloud backups so they wont overwrite the main system. Is there anything else I should do to the Blue to keep it from interfering with my main system?
Any other suggestions on things I may not have thought about?
Anything using MQTT can be used by both systems. ESPhome devices don’t have a problem too with 2 HA instances. Other integrations may vary, but I have a main HA and a test HA, and everything connects to both.
Thanks, I’m not using MQTT, I do have a couple ESPHome devices, hadn’t thought about them. Good to know they will work on multiple installations.
My big question will be the Zigbee and Z-Wave devices. Currently they’re connected to a Hubitat and accessed by that integration, which works on both systems, but when I get around to moving them to the HA controller on the Yellow, is there a way for the Blue to share them? I know the Hubitat has a way to do this (I think it’s called a ‘Hub mesh’) that will allow the 2nd unit to share/access the devices from the main unit, but I only have one of those devices (and am looking to phase that out snd move everything to HA) so I’ve never needed to use it. I’m wondering if the HA has something similar.
It looks like keeping the Blue as a backup was a wise decision. I have to go back to using it as my primary system, my Yellow is now completely screwed up after trying to restore from a backup. Most of my add-ons won’t load, including the file editor, which will not start.
I have tried restoring multiple times from the backup, and nothing works. It looks like I’m going to have to wipe my Yellow again and hope that starting over will fix the issue.
If you’re willing to run a custom component there is Remote Home Assistant. With it you can import any combination of entities and services from another instance.
I use RHA to offload some tasks to a second device to reduce overhead on my primary instance. But it could easily be used as you are suggesting. Keep in mind that this is a software solution, you’re still limited by zwave or zigbee controllers.
Does this need to be installed on the main system, the slave system, or both? I only really intend to share the devices/entities in one direction. At least, that is my intention at this point.
I did find another issue with having both instances running, the AndroidTV integration can only run on one instance.
I have had problems with it sometimes having errors in the past before I set up the Yellow, I have been having the same issue, didn’t realize it was because it could only run on one instance.
