Upgrading from Hassbian and HA 0.35.3 to hass.io- what to consider

Installation Home Assistant OS
1

Hi all,
I’m considering setting up my Hassbian + HA 0.35.3 installation from scratch again, using hass.io - the new possibilities like managing HASS via the web interface are something I had always missed.

To make a smooth transition, I’d love to hear your recommendations what to do (or not) and how to most efficiently do it. Some questions I have:

  • can I re-use my old configuration.yaml or should I consider writing that from scratch? I have like a dozen or so devices, and some automations (like dim lights when watching TV at night) - I intend to move the automations to the web-interface
  • I gave up on HA’s own emulated hue to integrate with Amazon Echo (as it was unreliable) and installed HA Bridge. Is that still needed, or did the emulated hue within HA get stable enough? I would love to get of HA bridge as an additional layer.
  • my current HA version is pretty old (0.35.3) - any challenges I’ll face migrating? Did the config,yaml format change?

Thanks in advance for your replies!

2

try and look your log. Might have some errors, there were many breaking changes.

emulated_hue works very well, I would go with that, until the Alexa skill comes out

3

Thanks Claudio!
So… use old config.yaml and start debugging? Sounds like plan.
I’ll save an image of my SD card to have a way back for the worst case…
Klaus

4

yes I would do that

5

My advice, since you’re updating from a pretty old installation of HASS (almost 25 versions behind!) is to start configuring your devices from scratch. There are frequently breaking changes between versions and who knows which of your devices has been affected. You’ll spend tons of time debugging anyway, so why not just move components over to the new system one at a time, following the latest component docs? That way you can verify that each is working as it should before moving onto the next and when something doesn’t work you’ll know exactly what it is rather than having to decode logs to figure it out and fix it.

Can’t speak to emulated Hue but I know that lots of people are still using it for Alexa and there is bound to have been improvements in the last 25 or so versions you’ve missed.

1 Like
6

Thanks for your replies!
I found a spare 16GB micro SD card - great, so I can set up hass.io from scratch on it and swap back to the old system as long as I’m not done and happy with the new setup. Almost like my own test system. Only Alexa will probably confused :wink:

7

Did my first steps and I’m quite frustrated. “Check config” in the web UI does not seem to work - it always shows “Valid” for me, but then HASS won’t start due to syntax errors.

Groups are not shown as cards any more. I can set them to be views, but don’t get them to show up as cards. In each view, I only see “Light” as the only card. Any idea how I can fix this? (I searched the doc, played with hidden and view… no success).

8

Maybe post your config and groups yaml files? Please use the code tags so that it’s readable for syntax errors.

9

Thanks marthoco0 for answering :slight_smile:
Here’s the first part of my config.yaml:

 homeassistant:
  # Name of the location where Home Assistant is running
  name: Home
  # Location required to calculate the time the sun rises and sets
  latitude: 50.7683
  longitude: 6.076
  # Impacts weather/sunrise data (altitude above sea level in meters)
  elevation: 235
  # metric for Metric, imperial for Imperial
  unit_system: metric
  # Pick yours from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones
  time_zone: Europe/Berlin
  # Customization file
  customize: !include customize.yaml

# Show links to resources in log and frontend
# introduction:

# Enables the frontend
frontend:

# Enables configuration UI
config:

http:
  # Secrets are defined in the file secrets.yaml
  # api_password: !secret http_password
  # Uncomment this if you are using SSL/TLS, running in Docker container, etc.
  # base_url: example.duckdns.org:8123

# Checks for available updates
# Note: This component will send some information about your system to
# the developers to assist with development of Home Assistant.
# For more information, please see:
# https://home-assistant.io/blog/2016/10/25/explaining-the-updater/
updater:
  # Optional, allows Home Assistant developers to focus on popular components.
  # include_used_components: true

# Discover some devices automatically
discovery:

light:
  platform: hue
  host: 192.xx.xx.xx
  allow_unreachable: true

group:
  wohnzimmer:
    name: Wohnzimmer
    view: yes
    entities:
      - light.schrank_lampe
      - light.schalter_weihnachtsbaum

And this is what miy Home Tab looks like - everything in one group:

grafik
grafik516×575 24 KB

I’d appreciare ideas for how to fix this…
Klaus

10

OK simple fix. You need to set a default view - currently you haven’t so it’s just showing the default default view which shows all your entities on the first page.

Add the group default_view, and add your wohnzimmer group to it:

group:
  default_view:
    view: yes
    icon: mdi:home 
    entities:
      - group.wohnzimmer

Then remove view from wohnzimmer:

  wohnzimmer:
    name: Wohnzimmer
    entities:
      - light.schrank_lampe
      - light.schalter_weihnachtsbaum

Now go to Configuration - General - Reload Groups. When you go back to the main page, you should now see a view represented by a home icon, and Wohnzimmer will be a group on that page.

Hopefully this gives you the idea, you’re obviously free to use whatever icon etc you want, but you do need to have a default view or else all your entities will show up on the main page.

11

Wow, that was fast - and helpful! Works! Thanks!!!

So the newer versions don’t seem to automatically put groups onto the home view - the 0.34 still did that. One thing learnt :wink:

12

Like I said - a few things are bound to have changed in 25 versions :slight_smile: