Hello all,
I’m completely new to HA and have been putting off making a move as I’m nervous of messing things up.
I did look into hubitat a while ago, but my devises wouldn’t work, soci dropped that plan.
The more I look into HA the more it looks like It may be a viable option for me to play with.
At the moment I’m running a mix of about 12 smart home brands from alexa, tcp, aqara and flic,
Each have their own echo system hubs that are linked to alexa for some sort of home automation control.
This works to an extent, but I find it rather limiting to what I can do, and also the time delays due to being cloud based are a pain.
My research so far (limited) I’ve seen that I could run HA on a synology NAS running a VM.
If thisnis a viable option, would I link the hubs to the ha to then access the devices and sensors, or would they need to connect directly?
Please excuse my ignorance with all this, as mentioned, I have only just realised peeked into the realms of this.
The answer really depends on what those devices are, and whether HA has an integration for them.
For instance, the Alexa branded items are likely to be a challenge, but Aqara has a native integration, and custom options. If they’re Zigbee devices you also have the option of buying a Zigbee coordinator (radio) and going direct.
Your plan to run it on the NAS should work fine. If you’re keeping the hubs you’d connect the devices to the hub and the hub to HA.
Thanks,
I think the plan would be to run HA off my NAS as its running 24/7 anyway for home and work backups.
If I keep the hubs running and link these to HA as a gateway (again, please excuse my lack of knowledge) to the seniors and devices, alexa would purely be as a voice command.
HA to run automation and routines,
Alexa to voice control.
From your knowledge, would this be a viability?
This is such a new direction to me, I think even a novice has more knowledge than me right now. 🤦
I’m always looking for ways to streamline my setup, and with the limitations between what I have setup right now, I’m putting serious thought into it if it will work the way I need it too.
Don’t expect to get to grips with HA on your first install. Always be prepared to play about a bit and when you have a feel for it do a fresh install and start again. If you can use the hubs you have I guess you can keep using your existing setup whilst play with HA along side.
Some tips.
Make a lot of backups, its easy to do. Then at least you can go back to before you made that big mistake. take notes or copies of your yaml files if you make any changes as you can then copy any code when or if you do come to do a fresh install.
Its very easy to move HA from one platform to another, so don’t be afraid of having to stick with one type of hardware.
And ask questions here as someone will almost certainly have been through the same problem before, and you normally get an answer quite quickly.
The good news is that everybody starts there, even those of us who’ve been using HA for years. Nobody knows every corner of HA and every integration - not even the developers. All of us are still learning what HA is capable of.
Between here and the Discord server you’ll find many people who can help (and some who can’t, but feel the need to answer you anyway).
I’d also second Arh’s advice … backups, backups, backups. They’re also not backups if you leave them on the computer, you need them automatically copied off to somewhere else (like cloud storage such as Dropbox or Google Drive).