SunFounder Pironman 5 / 5 Max – Local Home Assistant Container Integration

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1

Hey everyone :waving_hand:

I recently built a fully local Home Assistant integration for the SunFounder Pironman 5 / 5 Max, specifically designed to work with Home Assistant Container.

The idea was to bring the Pironman directly into Home Assistant and control and monitor it without relying on a cloud service or external portal.

What it currently supports

  • :thermometer: System monitoring

  • :cyclone: Fan control

  • :light_bulb: RGB control

  • :desktop_computer: OLED display control

  • :bar_chart: Local status information

  • :electric_plug: Communication through the local Pironman REST API

The integration communicates directly with the Pironman software running on the Raspberry Pi.

:spouting_whale: Home Assistant Container

The integration was developed and tested with Home Assistant Container running on a Raspberry Pi 5.

This means you can run the integration alongside your existing Docker-based Home Assistant setup without requiring Home Assistant OS or a separate add-on.

:wrench: Installation

The integration is available on GitHub:

I have also submitted it to the official HACS default repository and it is currently waiting for review:

:hammer_and_wrench: A little background

While developing the integration, I also came across a few issues in the Pironman software itself.

I submitted fixes upstream to SunFounder:

Both PRs have since been merged. :rocket:

If anyone else is using a Pironman 5 or Pironman 5 Max with Home Assistant, I’d be interested to hear how you’re using it and what you’d like to see added to the integration.

Feedback, ideas and bug reports are very welcome! :blush:

2

Very nice, I wish it was something I could have used, I have a different solution to the Pironman 5 oled display issue from a year ago or so that I implemented, so unfortunately my use case does not do it for me, however it is similar and I’d love your advice…

I have an RPI5 8Gig in a prironman 5 running Raspbian primarily for the display, with QEMU/KVM running HAOS as a VM. It works well. I allocated 3 cores and 6GB Ram to the VM, so I can have a few daemons running on the host as well. Network connection is by Ethernet, and I’ve also got two USB extension cable plugged into it, one with a Zwave stick and the other with a Bluetooth coordinator.

I also have an RPI4 which used to be my whole HA setup, but had also purchased an overpriced RPI5 when they were overpriced and in short supply around the pandemic. It sat on a shelf for almost a year because I wasn’t sure how I wanted to upgrade, because the RPI4 was also running Weewx on the host and ha as supervisor, and I wanted the vs code Editor with the intellisence…

So I decided on the current infrastructure, leaving weewx on the rpi4, and there are a lot of daemons now running on the rpi4 making rest API calls the HAOS sensors on the rpi5, including numerous updates to ha for deep inspection daemons running snmp and the Omada API to closely monitor the health of every device on my network, which then in HAOS goes into an influxdb3 DB which feeds some Grafana dashboards in ha.

My HAOS instance is pretty huge so it’s sometimes running low on memory but 98% of the time it runs with no issue. One path for me that would resolve the memory issue would be to switch over to a 16Gb RPI5, but as my next step might be to add some cameras, my next step should be to beef up the hardware and put everything on one box (except possibly for video storage), but my biggest concern right now is to figure out a way to be back up and running in 5 minutes if there is a hardware failure of any kind…

The partially figured out roadmap is to therefore get everything onto a new piece of hardware, beelink or nuc (with proxmox), but then to constantly clone the nvme to another nvme or SSD, and then have a full copy of the entire machine, so I can just move the nvme over to the new box and plug it in. Still have not flushed out the details however…

Thoughts?