Moved all my receivers and whatnot onto a more permanent shelving solution in preparation for the whole home audio video. Started writing the script for it, and it got so long that I realized it would need to be broken into two videos, so I’m just working on finishing up the script for part 1 and locating all the bits to film that. Part 1 will discuss the receivers, speakers, volume controls, wiring, and tools I used for the installation of the system. Part 2 will cover the Home Assistant integrations and dashboards and all that fun stuff. Looking to have Part 1 out maybe next weekend (1/20), and part 2 out a couple weeks after that perhaps.
Had to fix my zigbee network as well. My wife unplugged all the Sonoff Zigbee outlets that were serving as repeaters. She didn’t realize they were necessary, she thought they were only switches that we were using to control the Christmas tree lights. “There was nothing plugged into them, so I thought they didn’t need to be there.”
Had to go through and figure out which room they all came from, put them back, and make all the zigbee stuff work again.
Also looks like one of my Aqara motion sensors mights have failed. It’s still reporting in HA, but it doesn’t ever actually detect motion anymore. Just perpetually says “clear”. sigh
LOL Tell me about it. Lucky for me, that motion sensor must’ve just gotten mad about the Zigbee network falling apart. I re-paired it and it’s reporting motion again like it should.
Knock on wood. I haven’t had a zigbee device go offline in months. And I’ve never had a z-wave go offline. I think z-wave will be my go to protocol from now on.
I’ve had zigbee issues exactly twice: once when the devs blew something up in 2023.5, and when my wife unplugged several repeaters. Lol
I only have one z-wave device, and it’s been stable. But it’s also about 4 feet away from the usb stick, so… Tough to call that one.
But, I’m an equal-opportunity protocol user. Whatever works well and is inexpensive, I’ll throw it in my environment. I experiment a lot, too, so there’s that.
Had to remove fastdotcom from yaml
had to remove systemmonitor from yaml
had to remove ping entities from yaml
had to switch weather.get_forecast to weather.getforecastS
had to change all my logins from legacy API (computer, tablet(s), phone(s), etc.), along with several tokens, SSL certs, etc.
Last week I had to completely switch 39 ZWave and 45 Zigbee devices from USB radios over to Hubitat (after spending $100+ on the USB radios and then $150 on the Hubitat) - as the controller ‘jammed’ issues were too much and my wife was going to kill me
This week I’m looking forward to ensuring that every card_mod style: is preceeded by a card_mod: line… and then indenting the style: and following style lines
In general - wasting hours of my life on sh!t that worked previously, but no longer does so… SMH…
HomeAssistant. Like climbing a sand dune sometimes. Two steps forwards, one step back.
Man, that card mod change kicked my a$$. Spent hours going through raw config editor and finding them all. And that was just one dashboard. I use card mod on almost every card, for design elements, sizing, etc. Just about have all my dashboards sorted out now.
When bubble card broke, it was the same way. Re did my whole damn dashboard, again. Took all my bubble card pop ups and put them back into their own pages. They’re staying that way.
I remember that. I think I had just began my HA journey and got everything set up, then boom!
I’m not a protocol snob either. I think I’m at 63 zigbee and 12 z-wave devices. Add in a handful of wifi and esphome devices. Usually if a zigbee device goes down it’s a battery. Network has been super solid since adding some IKEA plugs and a couple aeotec extenders.
I’m kind of stalled out right now, waiting to move this summer. I can’t wait to go nuts on the new house!
I have an entire page in my dashboard dedicated to batteries, and get push notifications from an automation that monitors them, so that’s never an issue.
I have over 90 wifi connected “devices”, the bulk of them are lightswitches. They were very early in in my smart home journey, but they work great and didn’t cost as much as the fancier options (like lutron).
With my setup growing and gaining more and more relevance in critical functions of the house I finally jumped into moving the HA vm to a more secluded network. Gigantic pain you know where having to reconfigure the firewall for the new access between multiple zones. And at least 3 hours wasted figuring out why stuff didn’t work due to me locking things down and forgetting later.
I added a USB 2.0 extension cable that’s 5 meters as I had moved my router to a new position to try and build out a home lab.
I also had some new Aqara Motion Sensors, and I replaced my Ikea Motion Sensors so that I had some more reliable motion sensors. I had bought some SmartThings Zigbee plugs but found they were making my network go offline randomly and wouldn’t stay connected, even though one of them was right next to the coordinator. Replaced them with some Tuya plugs, and my network has gone rock solid.
Replaced some buttons that I was using as light switches with Xiaomi WXKG16LM which gave me major points for the WAF (well, girlfriend).
I’m currently playing with the dashboard and button cards to get it working so that it will display the day when our recycling and refuse is due.
Had been doing some testing with the Aqara Pet Feeders as there are some major issues with Z2M atm and so I’m not able to remotely trigger them.
Also added two Linptech ES1ZZ(TY) so that the lights will turn off when there is no presence in a room. I was told that I’m not allowed to automate them turning on
Oh and hardwired a Reolink camera to my network, with a plan to get a new network switch, Reolink Doorbell and hardwire another camera.
In my never ending quest to make a smart home actually SMART (rather than just automated and/or a pain in the butt), I shaved off about 90kWh a month on my home automation server by:
Moving all my external drives into three towers
The main tower with my movies & TV
My backup tower for archives and daily backups
My portable tower that mirrors the main tower
Writing a bash script (it’s a Mac server) to dismount drives that I can call from HA on a schedule and stop Plex server at the same time
Plugging all into a smart power strip so I can have HA unmount then power off the towers
Shut down Plex in HA on automation so it doesn’t error out trying to talk to a server that isn’t running
Automatically power up only the drives that are needed at the right time:
TV and movies drives only when we turn on the TV or theater
Backup tower once a night with scripts to shut it back down when the backups complete
Mirror tower once a night with a script to turn it off when the mirror is complete
Set up Wake On Lan in HA and a script to send my server to sleep during times of no TV, no mirroring or no backups (this is new today, another 18kWh on top of the 90 saved)
I’m really happy with how this has worked (I didn’t do the tower solution today, I did it two weeks ago and it has worked flawlessly) and it’s fun to watch my smart house be smart about power consumption in this way as that was my single biggest power draw outside of things like clothes dryers and ovens.
And while nothing impressive, I got a heated desk mat for my wife that plugs into her desk accessory smart switch with power metering to help her not use the 1400W space heater when she’s chilly. This shaved off another 100kWh a month.
So, my smarter home is now 208kWh/mo smarter than it was before.
Nice! I have to admit I’m not very frugal with power usage. I treat is as one of those things you just pay/deal with.
Today, I used chatgpt to help me write an automation that uses some templates and helpers. Checks at 3am, and If the word “school” (for no shool) is in a calendar event, it turns off all the morning automations for my three kids instead of lights and alrams at 530am, etc.
Small wins! Plus I learned how to write templates from a robot . It so crazy how real talking to AI feels.
The IoT vlan is my second most restrictive as it has Internet access whitelisting. Devices in it have to convince me in a case by case basis of their use case to access the WAN.
This I can’t live without under all my desks, including at work.
When I was cutting on power usage, simply getting into the habit of putting PCs to sleep when not using them brought my power bill 30% down. My main workstation is a beast with multiple monitors and 6, 7 desktops with a gazillion windows open.
Good god man. You have a main workstation AND 6-7 pcs? Is this in your house? What in earth for? I mean, I’ve been working in IT for over 25 years, doing some pretty heavy duty stuff, and if we are talking about systems I actually put hands on regularly (meaning not ha, plex, or blue iris/deepstack), I have my own personal workstation with 3 monitors & a 55" TV, and a company laptop with 2 additional external monitors.
Even back in the day before virtualization, and now cloud computing, the most I ever had was my machine, a company machine, and one or two of my previous desktops that I had turned into (slow but functional) servers.
I agree with you about my iot vlan. The only thing in it that can reach the internet is my ha server. Nothing else. Works quite well.
For any sort of mmWave sensor in bathroom, remember to plan for AC power (or USB 5V) access. Bathrooms often very limited on AC power outlets and placement.
. It so crazy how real talking to AI feels.