[HN Gopher] Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
___________________________________________________________________
Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
Author : CapitalistCartr
Score : 290 points
Date : 2022-02-02 13:43 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pragprog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (pragprog.com)
| swayvil wrote:
| It's like that scene out of Brazil. The wall panel is removed to
| reveal a greasy maze of tightly-packed houseguts. A dizzying
| complexity of convolving and cryptic organs for... turning on the
| lamp.
| boringg wrote:
| Am I the only one who still has yet to understand the value
| proposition of a smart home [outside wifi + sonos]?
|
| The trade off isn't a clear win to me for me to automate
| everything else. If it was I would try a raspberry pi set up.
| xconverge wrote:
| I approach it like this. As you go through the next week, try
| and see if you can identify something that you do every day,
| almost like a habit, and think if automation could remove that
| task from your life. A few of my favorite examples:
|
| 1. Checking front/backdoor is locked every single night, now I
| have an automation that turns on the front hall light and sends
| my phone a notification that the door is unlocked.
|
| 2. The "did I close the garage thoughts", just being able to
| check your phone from the airport or wherever you are and see
| "yep its closed" is "nice" but not necessary of course
|
| 3. Everytime I open the garage door, the light turns on with a
| timer and some logic so that I never touch that light switch
|
| 4. auto turn off air purifier in bedroom in the morning (and on
| at night too)
|
| 5. Anytime the doorbell rings and I am not home, I get a phone
| notification with a picture of who is at the door. Helpful when
| worried about missing packages, deliveries, etc. Doesn't
| necessarily "help" solve the problem, but does do something
| mentally
|
| 6. Recently I added one that nudges the volume on the tv up a
| few clicks and down a few clicks based on the HVAC turning
| on/off, it was something I found myself doing habitually and
| now that it works it is extremely seamless and has been great
|
| I have way more complicated scenarios of course, all of which I
| find compelling, but I really like the automations where you
| dont know they are doing something necessarily, your brain just
| forgets they are even automations.
| brimble wrote:
| What's kept me from trying this stuff out is a few
| interrelated factors:
|
| 1) There's no possible way setting up and managing this stuff
| manually is going to be worth it if it only controls a couple
| things.
|
| 2) Doing enough to overcome point 1 seems to begin with "step
| 1: spend lots of money and time to replace tons of stuff that
| already works completely OK" and/or a bunch of research (I've
| used enough AirBnB IoT "actuate the existing deadbolt" add-
| ons to know that a bunch of them are time-wasting crap that
| barely works, plus I've never seen one that didn't look bad)
|
| 3) Taking a "just do it as you replace things" approach still
| results in spending more money (IoT will be more expensive
| than dumb, just about every time), plus lots of things will
| probably never need to be replaced while I own this house,
| plus that means potentially _years_ before I hit any kind of
| reasonable pay-off period.
|
| 4) I have a feeling I could solve several of the problems
| faster and cheaper with a dumb approach of low-voltage LEDs
| hooked to the right things and run to the right places, or
| outlet timers, or whatever, if I were so inclined--which I'm
| clearly not, because I haven't.
|
| Every time I get the urge, I think back to that automation
| effort/payoff chart from XKCD and then... don't, because I
| can't see how I'll _ever_ get on the good side of the line.
| Doubly so if _any_ part of it can 't go years without any
| kind of attention or maintenance related to the IoT aspect of
| it.
|
| [EDIT] The calculation would change if I enjoyed that kind of
| thing as a hobby, of course.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Yeah, I've installed a bunch of PIR controlled LED strips
| around the apartment to light up as people walk into rooms
| automatically, and aside from that there really isn't anything
| else I see I would need.
|
| The "smart" approach would be having all of them wifi enabled,
| and then being able to change colour, intensity, duration, etc.
| via web or app. You know what also works just as well for that
| though? One or two push buttons on each detector lol.
| tov247 wrote:
| I concur. I take a Battlestar Galactica inspired approach to
| appliances in my house. It's fine if they have computers in
| them, I just don't want them to be able to communicate.
| moffkalast wrote:
| So say we all.
| amelius wrote:
| How much convenience does this bring? Is it life-changing, or is
| it more like nice to have?
| rcarmo wrote:
| It's very handy to get off work, grab a mug of barley coffee,
| sit on the couch, say "Siri, let's watch Movies" to your watch,
| and have the TV turn itself on, the audio routed to the AV
| system, and the Apple TV set as input.
|
| All the above is done by Siri talking to the Apple TV (which is
| the home hub) and homebridge nudging the TV and inputs via
| plugins.
|
| And _nearly_ all the above happens solely inside your LAN,
| except for the speech recognition (which may or may not happen
| on-device if you have a recent iPhone nearby).
| haunter wrote:
| I have a home system and tried RaspberryPi several times but in
| the end I went with an older Mac Mini. Old ones are quite cheap
| on the used market and also significantly more powerful than the
| RaspberryPi, that was one of the main reason in the end I rather
| chose that.
| ramses0 wrote:
| Also of note is their recent kickstarter / crowd-supply:
| https://www.crowdsupply.com/nabu-casa/home-assistant-yellow
|
| It's basically an enclosure + some extra integrated hardware for
| zigbee (and supposedly "easy-to-add" z-wave).
|
| The ecosystem is heavily "run it on a rasb-pi" anyway, so you're
| 99% of the way there just purchasing or repurposing a PI, but it
| wasn't that expensive to back their crowd-funding and I'm happy
| to support an attempt at an "official" configuration that can be
| purchased.
|
| I use it slightly for its own capabilities, but mostly as a
| bridge to bring more devices to HomeKit compatibility.
|
| eg: I was able to add my wifi-controllable pool pump to
| homeASSISTANT and it creates corresponding devices in homeKIT so
| I can make an iOS shortcut accessible to siri: "Hey Siri, clean
| the pool" which turns on the pool cleaner. It's kindof like
| living in the future. :-P
|
| I also found recently a "chromecast => airplay" extension/addon
| which... bam... now the few chromecast devices I have show up as
| airplay sinks for audio (not airplay2, but airplay1 is convenient
| for where I've got them put).
|
| ...and I just got some Samba-mount thing so I can rip my DVD's
| and copy them over to `/Media/*.m4v` which I can then blast out
| via chromecast (nice b/c both my chromecast and home-assistant PI
| are wired, so it shouldn't be sucking up wifi bandwidth, and
| keeps me from having to set up a real ).
|
| It _really_ needs a complete overhaul of how it's thought about
| (ie: configuration via yaml, confusing organization of
| extensions, addons, configs, better update management) ... I'm a
| developer and I still get lost in the mental model they expose
| via the UI, but it gets the job done and it's got a good
| ecosystem and community to help figure out how to get done what
| you're trying to do.
| daill wrote:
| Am I the only one who uses Fhem? From my point of view it's
| extremely robust which increases the wife acceptance factor . I'm
| running Hue, Z-Wave sensors, Shelly's, Homematic and an Echo
| connection. Sooooo much potential.
| hatware wrote:
| Getting into home automation beyond Google/Apple/Smart things can
| be a boon, you really have to devote a chunk of time to it.
| Running useful services at home is one of the fastest ways to
| learn.
| YaBomm wrote:
| I'd rather use a few ESP8266... at $3 bucks each, they include
| WiFi... and support micropython.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I think a Pi is great to start with. Then you graduate to a real
| computer when your HA gets too big and laggy for the Pi to keep
| up with. I use a NUC. But my brother repurposed an old laptop
| with good results (built in UPS, and quiet!).
| nomel wrote:
| At what point does HA get too laggy? Are you doing audio/video
| transcoding?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Nope, nothing heavy like that. I don't know what the
| threshold is for every use case, but for me once I got more
| than maybe 50 devices, HA started to struggle on the Pi. The
| NUC is lightning fast, however, and I've grown my HA
| considerably since. Plus it's nice to be able to run ESXi on
| the NUC and have VMs for other things too, e.g. Grafana, etc.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| This would be nice if you could find one. Supply it terribly
| short these days.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Exactly... I have an order in place that _might_ arrive by mid-
| summer.
| destitude wrote:
| Yeah.. not sure where there is ANY Pi 3/4s available for sale
| in USA unless you pay way above MSRP price.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| Anyone have success with remote cameras? Services like Arlo and
| Ring seem straight up awful but also rolling my own seems like
| more effort and headache than it's worth.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I have ESP32 cameras that (mostly) work with HomeKit (there are
| a few memory issues on the ESP32 side), and a full blown
| HomeKit camera that "just works".
| johnl1479 wrote:
| I have had success integrate Ring and Wyze cameras through Home
| Assistant. If you'd rather not go that route, there is a
| project that publishes Ring cameras over MQTT and RTSP links:
| https://github.com/tsightler/ring-mqtt
| rabuse wrote:
| I've been wanting to create something for awhile that monitors my
| driveway, and when there's motion detected (through camera or IR)
| near my vehicle, it turns on a red light in my room, and possibly
| include a sound.
| urig wrote:
| From the contents page this looks like a very cool book indeed.
| Is there a webpage somewhere that explains what the projects are?
| For example, what do Photo Hook and Hue Fan do?
| melenaos wrote:
| I just implemented the foundation of my home automation.
|
| I installed NodeRED on a raspberry pi and it communicates with
| arduino through MQTT.
|
| The good thing with this is that i control the hardware parts
| woth arduino and the automation logic with NodeRED.
|
| NodeRED is much easier to use than HomeAssistant because of the
| extensibility and the use of NodeJs.
|
| I have implemented an arduino library that makes the development
| on that an easy task.
|
| I wanted to have everything on the local network and dont depend
| on the internet. We had some internet outage the past years and i
| dont want to lose the control of my house for that. Also,
| everything is much faster.
|
| Every arduino can run on its own, that way even if the raspberry
| pi is out of order, i can open and close the lights using a
| button or a switch.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I second this approach. My home automation is 98% HomeKit (via
| homebridge) and 2% Node-RED (for a few custom MQTT message
| translations and a dinky little dashboard with metrics).
| m4tthumphrey wrote:
| Slightly OT:
|
| > Run Your Home on a Raspberry Pi
|
| If you can get hold of one!
|
| I've been looking for a Pi4 for ages to use with PiHole but sold
| out everywhere, some have back orders for 2023 O_O
|
| Anyone got any recommendations of other devices that work well
| with PiHole? I have a Mac Mini acting as a home server but from
| what I've read, PiHole does not run great on it via Docker...
| ComradePhil wrote:
| I tried running PiHole on a Windows box using Docker Desktop.
| It worked for a bit but it stopped working at some point... and
| I didn't bother fixing. It had been working fine for so long on
| my RPi.
|
| You can buy fanless celeron mini-computers from Aliexpress for
| $100-$150. You can also get i5/i7 if you are willing to pay a
| lot more. Most of them come with pirated Windows (some sellers
| even say that they'll send it with Ubuntu pre-installed) but
| you can simply remove it and install Ubuntu Server and then
| install PiHole, Home Assistant or whatever you want.
| arcbyte wrote:
| They only made 150k in all of 2021, so we're seeing the result
| of that right now. Good news is they're expecting to make 250k
| in Q1 2022 with 500k planned for Q2.
| squarefoot wrote:
| > If you can get hold of one!
|
| You don't need any in fact. It's Python so it runs on any
| powerful enough Linux platform, and there's a boatload of them
| out there; the Raspberry Pi is just the 1st one to become
| popular and it's the most advertised. Hoarders depleted all
| stocks to sell them overpriced? Well, screw them, we're going
| to the competition instead.
|
| Here's a list, updated yearly, of the most known Linux boards
| available with data and prices.
| https://linuxgizmos.com/catalog-of-136-open-spec-community-b...
|
| Take a look also at the devices supported by Armbian and
| DietPi.
|
| https://www.armbian.com/download/?device_support=Supported
|
| https://dietpi.com/#download
|
| Also worth visiting is the Linux-sunxi site, where you can find
| a huge load of open documentation about hardware and software
| for Allwinner CPUs used in some of these boards.
|
| https://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page
|
| Also available are Amlogic CPUs docs at the Hardkernel site.
|
| https://dn.odroid.com/
|
| Example: here's the over 1000 pages long S905x3 full data
| sheet.
|
| https://dn.odroid.com/S905X3/ODROID-C4/Docs/S905X3_Public_Da...
|
| The public Raspberry Pi CPU data sheet is 166 pages long.
| moffkalast wrote:
| It's probably not worth going much past something that's also
| super popular like an ODroid. Otherwise you'll just be
| spending an inordinate amount of hours trying to figure out
| obscure bugs that the non-existent community hasn't yet fixed
| for you.
|
| I once made the mistake of buying a Banana Pi M2 Zero. Specs
| were great, support looked decent, I thought I'll be getting
| a Pi 3 in a Zero form factor. What I instead got was a thing
| nobody uses on which barely anything runs properly with such
| flaky wifi that it's practically useless. Never again.
| driverdan wrote:
| Pihole will run on anything and works fine in Docker. I'm
| currently running it via docker on a Pi but will eventually
| move it to a more standard server with other services.
| nerdjon wrote:
| I have to ask others, have people had good luck with this?
|
| I have tried to do this multiple times, with multiple models of
| Pi and every time after 6ish months it just seems to completely
| stop working. I can't get it to boot even off of a new sd card.
|
| Am I doing something wrong or does the hardware really not want
| to be run consistently in this manner?
|
| I have since decided to just run some home automation VM's on my
| media server which has worked flawlessly (minus networking being
| weird sometimes).
| aulin wrote:
| The only time I've bricked a Pi ever was when I shorted 5V and
| 3.3V rails in a 3B+. A friend always talks about one bricked
| with an apt upgrade by a broken firmware or something, never
| seen anything like that. Saw plenty of dead or corrupted
| sdcards but that can be fixed with a new one, which doesn't
| seem to be your case. Maybe a bad power supply? Pi is a bit
| picky, you need one with 5.1V to prevent low voltage warnings.
| wjdp wrote:
| Have had the same problems, though it's always the Pi chewing
| up the SD card, a new card solves it. These guides really need
| a warning saying "If you find this useful, switch to using a
| server that doesn't rely on an SD card after ~6 months"
|
| The Pi is fantastic for getting a taste of self-hosting / home
| automation as it's so cheap but by no means should it be relied
| on.
|
| I moved our Home Assistant install to a docker container on
| basic PC and it's been rock solid after several SD cards were
| eaten by the Pi. Though I still have DNS (via PiHole) running
| on a Pi and that's starting to act up.
|
| Only time I've found Pis reliable is when they either don't
| write much or are running a read-only disk most of the time.
| We've a network audio player using piCorePlayer[1] on a Pi
| running for years and never had an issue, it's running tiny
| core linux and only makes the disk r/w when you're upgrading or
| changing settings.
|
| I'm tempted to move my MQTT server to a Pi using tiny core as
| that'd keep messaging up while I'm rebooting or doing some
| other task on my single server. Something like
| http://akeil.net/posts/mosquitto-mqtt-on-tinycore.html
|
| [1]: https://www.picoreplayer.org/
| nerdjon wrote:
| I have a TV PI that seems to so far be running just fine
| after about 6 months. But I also have it reboot once a day so
| maybe that may be some magic.
|
| I have PiHole running myself, my original plan was to use a
| Pi but the last thing I wanted for that thing to die and my
| internet stop working. An easy enough fix, but a frustrating
| one.
|
| Mine is also running on the my media server. Which... is fun.
| When I reboot it I have to start things VM's in a certain
| order or things get really unhappy.
|
| I agree that a warning like that should be in place, I am
| surprised though that a new card worked for you. I have a
| drawer of Pi's that I never managed to salvage.
| wjdp wrote:
| Mix of things mean I haven't changed it (yet) - As you
| point out having on a shared server isn't great. I do want
| a separate device for DNS, I don't want the network down
| because the 'everything server' needs a reboot. - aand when
| it breaks I don't tend to be in the mood to fix it. Usually
| late in the evening when watching telly. It usually needs a
| reboot or `pihole-FTL.db` has gotten to several GB in size
| and needs deleting. But I'm sure it's getting closer to
| being unrecoverable.
|
| I've also got it doing DHCP so every device gets a
| <hostname>.<network>.uk domain, plus it handles some static
| records as well. Means it's not just a quick swapout, need
| to find and migrate the custom stuff I've done to it. Most
| of this should be in a git repo but unsure if all of it is.
|
| The joys of overcomplicating home networking!
| Semaphor wrote:
| I have my PI running off a USB-SSD instead. It works very
| well, though initial set up can be a bit of a hassle.
| paulmd wrote:
| I used to boot my fileserver (not a Pi) like that and it
| worked fine for a number of years until the USB-SATA
| adapter died. Not sure if you meant an actual purpose-built
| external SSD but I don't know that I'd trust a home-brewed
| solution in the long term.
| not1ofU wrote:
| If you dont mind, do you have some link to hand that you
| used to set that up?
|
| Edit: - sorry, nevermind, I should have read the rest of
| the comments, there is a link below this comment (at time
| of writing)
| paulmd wrote:
| Be sure to move /var/log and other write-heavy directories to
| a tmpfs so they're not constantly chewing up writes.
|
| The long-term solution for this (if you're up for it) is to
| PXE boot from your fileserver, so you don't need a SD card at
| all.
| h2odragon wrote:
| I've got "TV Pis" that idle LibreELEC/Kodi most of the time and
| have been running for 4+ years on the same SD cards (updated
| them a couple times in that time, not recently).
|
| My "server Pi" is >3yo old, only turns off when the power
| fails, and doesn't _do_ a lot with its SD card but the OS, but
| has never had an issue.
|
| What kind of power are you using? I've got these on little 2.5a
| wall warts; the "server" has a scrounged 20 year old PSU pulled
| from a Cisco 2500 router running it and some other stuff. No
| UPS tho and we get power outages and weirdness as usual for a
| rural area.
| nerdjon wrote:
| Maybe the power supply is the issue. Every time I have setup
| I pi I would get the Canakit sets so maybe it is just not
| suitable?
| h2odragon wrote:
| My wall warts are mostly from canakit sets, i can't
| complain about them.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Make sure to check the USB cable you use. I have a few
| which has ~1 Ohm resistance, and given that the Pi can use
| 1-1.5A under load that translates to a 1-1.5V cable drop.
|
| This can cause the Pi to shut down, and SD cards are not
| happy losing power while writing AFAIK.
|
| I've had multiple Pi's run for years off the same SD card
| without issue. My Home Assistant install has a 3GB database
| with updates every few seconds due to some chatty Z-Wave
| modules. Been running just fine since 2018.
|
| I also had a few with issues, and _all_ of them were down
| to cables with too high resistance. Some were sold as
| charging cables, yet were rubbish.
|
| I got a USB cable tester from AliExpress, alternatively buy
| some known good ones.
|
| For SD cards, make sure they're class A1 or A2.
|
| [1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32973869742.html
| paulmd wrote:
| Not only are SD cards not happy with losing power during
| writing, but they are very sensitive to "brownout"
| undervoltage conditions. In this case writes may appear
| to succeed but actually fail to commit, which is
| obviously problematic for the integrity of your data.
|
| (if people were using a checksumming filesystem like ZFS,
| this of course would be immediately apparent when it was
| occurring!)
|
| Samsung sells "high endurance" SD cards - I would
| strongly recommend these for RPi usage, and they are also
| very useful for dash cams since those are always
| continuously writing as well. Sandisk sells high-
| endurance cards as well but frankly Samsung is a cut
| above the rest of the SD card market - my SD card
| failures have essentially gone away since I stopped
| buying other brands. I think I have had one SD card
| failure since then and it wasn't related to write
| endurance, just didn't use it for a couple years and it
| was dead when I tried it again.
|
| But yes, in general, power quality is a massive problem
| for RPis, and people don't really consider it because
| it's one of those "it works 99.9% of the time"
| situations. It's like a race condition that you only
| rarely ever hit, it _looks_ correct and people will die
| on the hill of "it's worked perfectly fine for months
| now, the power can't be a problem" and then you hit a
| weak flash cell when the CPU is heavily loaded and the
| voltage is starting to droop and it happens to be a
| critical file rather than just some log or a chunk in an
| audiovisual file somewhere, and _then_ you notice it.
|
| I'd say >95% of all Pi failures come down to either power
| problems or SD card wearout. They're certainly not
| otherwise flawless, it's a janky cheapass SOC in general,
| but that is the _overwhelming_ cause of Pi system
| failures.
|
| If you can swing it, network booting from a fileserver is
| a much more reliable option in the long run. I haven't
| really experimented with it, and performance will
| probably be worse, but it gets the SD card out of the
| equation entirely, which mitigates both of these
| problems. You're not writing to flash, so brownout
| doesn't matter in terms of the potential for failed
| writes, and you aren't writing to a physical SD card so
| there's no wear.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I have 2 and they've been running for years on the same SD
| cards. Maybe power or cooling is an issue? Mine use reputable
| USB-C adapters (the official Raspberry Pi one just because it's
| small, but alternatively I'd go for an Apple or Anker one) and
| cases with a little heatsink you can stick onto the processor.
| wyager wrote:
| Pis are horrendously unreliable. Even if you pull out all the
| stops to make them work reliably (like disabling SD card
| writes), they don't.
|
| The broadcom chips they use are complete garbage. I was hopeful
| I could use the watchdog timer to make a pi more reliable (by
| restarting it when it inevitably crashed). Guess what? The
| internal watchdog timer doesn't f*cking work! You'll notice
| that every project using pi hardware that needs a WDT uses an
| external one.
|
| Total junk! I don't use them for anything anymore, and I used
| to have like 6 automating various things.
| paulmd wrote:
| I played around with Pis a lot in the OG Pi 1B era and yeah,
| I got tired of fixing it every couple months (I attribute
| this to power quality and SD card failures) and just moved to
| using various x86 based systems. I used surplus SFF
| optiplexes from surplus sales (paid as little as $5 for
| some), AM1-based mITX (mobo+CPU for $50!), or Atom-based NUCs
| (used to get "surplus" J5005 NUCs with the plastic still on
| for $125).
|
| I'm looking to get back into it with some Pi4s for a few
| things - but I'm planning to PXE boot this time around to try
| and sidestep the SD card/power problems. Basically just stuff
| like LibreElec to free up some of my J5005 NUCs for actual
| stuff.
| aulin wrote:
| I've used the internal watchdog without any issue. I mean the
| one you enable from systemd with RuntimeWatchdogSec=10 (where
| 10 iirc is a number less than 14 which is the number of
| seconds where the timer overflows). Not really much to
| configure or customize but it works reliably.
| wyager wrote:
| Interesting. Perhaps they fixed the driver/hardware since I
| last looked at this a couple years ago. At the time, no one
| had got it working successfully (the special device was
| there; it just didn't seem to do anything).
| rcarmo wrote:
| Modern Pis have effectively zero (pun intended) relationship
| to the original ones. The kernel issues were fixed, and as
| long as you keep them cool, you can go a long way even on SD
| cards.
| andylynch wrote:
| For this kind of application, my own experience and others
| using home assistant seems to be your much better of plugging
| an SSD into the pi's USB 3 and using that. It's also really
| important to use a good power supply.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Bingo. Booting from an SSD is much better. Yeah it is a
| dongle dangling off the side of the Pi but it is much more
| reliable.
| creeble wrote:
| I've had good luck running pi's for years between (power fail)
| reboots.
|
| One thing though - I don't think any of my pi's run x windows,
| I think they're all console mode. I get the feeling that they
| do fewer writes in general this way, but I don't really know.
| Anecdotally, I had a pi that ran x that I was experimenting
| with, and after a couple of months found it locked up/dead to
| the network. A reboot brought it back fine, but I unplugged it
| a few days after that and haven't been using it.
| cpascal wrote:
| It might be the Pi wearing out the SD card. The Raspberry Pi
| Compute Module 4 [1] actually has a PCIe Gen 2 x1 socket.
|
| Jeff Geerling (who's active on HN) has actually gotten SATA
| working [2] through the Compute Module 4 and the Compute Module
| 4 IO Board [3].
|
| If you go his route you could potentially set up a Pi with more
| durable storage. Although, if you watch Jeff's video its a PITA
| getting SATA working as he had to recompile the kernel with
| SATA support. Also its pretty hard to get the Compute Module 4
| and the IO board at the moment.
|
| [1]: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-4-io-
| boa...
|
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSx1BRwz1bs
|
| [3]: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-4/
| rkangel wrote:
| Alternatively you go PXE boot and network storage but then
| _that_ assumes that you 've got something else running to
| provide it. It's a nice solution when you've got half a dozen
| Pis around though (we use it in labs for our hardware test
| setups).
| Saris wrote:
| Yeah it's better to spend $80 or so on an off lease small form
| factor desktop. They don't really use that much more energy
| than a Pi but are much faster and more stable with real SATA
| storage.
| ldiracdelta wrote:
| I ran 20 pi's at work for years and had one failure. I've run
| my irrigation system off a pi for 4 years without a problem. I
| may be the anomaly and I don't live in Death Valley.
|
| When you have an image that you're happy with, back it up.
| Using a USB<->SD card reader on a linux machine, run gparted to
| slim the image down to the minimum, then run something like
| this sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=my-pi-v1.img
| bs=1M count=7000 status=progress
|
| Where `/dev/sda` is the sd card and `7000 `is the number of MB
| the pi disk takes after you gparted it down to the minimum
| size.
|
| Next, flash the image on a new disk and make sure it works with
| the pi.
| scottlamb wrote:
| You have bad luck or are doing something wrong. I've had a Pi2
| running for years and a Pi4 running since they were released in
| 2019. I had to replace a SD card once (and now am using a SATA
| SSD on a USB bridge instead). Otherwise, no hardware failures.
|
| > I can't get it to boot even off of a new sd card.
|
| Best guess: power adapter problems. Either the power adapter
| itself is dead or it misbehaved, killing the Pi.
| fernovus wrote:
| It's super doable, especially if you store your root in a HDD
| partition. Using an USB flash drive would be the same as
| relying on a MicroSD, not the ideal for 24/7/365 usage
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I'm with the others who have been running pi's for years with
| no issue. I did however go back into the office awhile back and
| stumbled across a pi display setup that had gone into read only
| at some point - most likely an sd card failure.
|
| I would think if you want to take it up a step, you could look
| at something like an Intel NUC.
| hinkley wrote:
| I still have this dream that some day everyone will have a little
| stack of SBCs running home services from tracking energy use to
| running pinhole to running persistent game servers (eg,
| Minecraft).
|
| Every year you pop out the oldest one and pop in a newer one and
| speed the whole thing up.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| Home Assistant[1] is the best approach I've found for this. It's
| pretty amazing but has a pretty steep learning curve (although
| they're getting better and better at this). The real power of HA
| is the rich integration ecosystem[2], the Community Store[3], and
| that it runs locally (more reliable and much faster for things
| like motion sensors, etc).
|
| It expresses everything from every integration as an entity in
| various device classes so as long as some random tech is
| supported by an integration you can group them seamlessly. For
| example - I have Z-wave based motion detectors but I can control
| Hue lights and Wemo switches for motion detection - but only if
| I'm home as reported by the zone feature in their iOS companion
| application.
|
| Their supervisor/docker based install for Raspberry Pi is pretty
| slick[4]. Write an image to disk as you usually would and you get
| a bare-bones OS with Home Assistant running in docker. Then there
| are additional docker-based add-ons you can install for stuff
| like MQTT, Z-Wave, Let's Encrypt, SSH access, nginx, and more.
| All managed in the web ui. Pretty cool.
|
| [1] https://www.home-assistant.io/
|
| [2] https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/
|
| [3] https://hacs.xyz/
|
| [4] https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/raspberrypi
| phreeza wrote:
| Does anyone have some experience to share with integrating home
| assistant with Homematic devices? I'm stuck with those for
| controlling my heating but really dislike the interface.
| Inversechi wrote:
| They have a really welcoming community from my experience.
| Try either their forum or discord.
| aivisol wrote:
| +1 for Home Assistant. Have it running on RPi4 for almost two
| years already without single glitch. It has tons of
| integrations, and besides that you can always build your own
| Arduino modules to connect with it over MQTT if you have your
| special use case. Web UI is really nice, you can even access
| and edit config files with it without going ssh. Android/IOS
| app also works pretty well.
| ornornor wrote:
| Not to mention that, with the help of appdaemon[0], you can
| write Python code to implement all the logic you can dream of.
|
| I found this much more powerful than the base GUI, and much
| more expressive (and less clunky) than Nodered or the yaml
| automations.
|
| [0]: https://appdaemon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
| m0ngr31 wrote:
| I setup Home Assistant to be able to talk to my solar inverters
| and see my battery voltage without walking out into the garage
| (over modbus).
|
| Since then I started adding in door sensors and my thermostat.
| I just need to find a way to see how much propane I'm using and
| I'll be set.
| davemtl wrote:
| I recently set-up HA on a Raspberry Pi, integrating my lights,
| security system and other devices. You're right about it having
| a steep learning curve but once it's up and running it's pretty
| much set and forget. With HA I'm able to use my Hue switches to
| toggle a TP-Link Kasa smart power outlet. It also has the added
| benefit of only requiring ONE application on my phone instead
| of nine.
| xxpor wrote:
| I'd also suggest to everyone looking into HA to take the time
| to learn Node-RED. After running HA for a year and a half,
| but only ever creating basic integrations, NR has really
| unlocked the power of HA for me. Part of it is the tutorials
| for NR explained the internal data model of HA in a way that
| I finally get it. Plus just ergonomically, I find NR MUCH
| easier to deal with than HA's native automation UI.
| iamspoilt wrote:
| I spend my last weekend setting up Home Assistant using VMWare
| on my spare machine. To say that it has been very rewarding is
| understatement. I am completely blown away by the possibilities
| that it enables. For instance, I have all my unsupported
| devices magically supported in HomeKit via the HomeKit Bridge
| integration in HA.
| contravariant wrote:
| Does anyone know how Home Assistant compares to node-red? As
| far as I can tell Home Assistant is better at building a
| dashboard of things, but node-red is better at actually
| automating specific actions (unless you want to grapple with
| HA's YAML based scripting language).
|
| Is this about right? Is it possible to combine Home Assistant
| and node-red, or has Home Assistant outgrown the need for
| something like node-red?
| OJFord wrote:
| It is possible, and a few years ago seemed quite a trend
| (just going by /r/homeassistant spectating) -
| https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-node-red - but I
| gather HA's own automation scripting has at least
| visualisation if not GUI programming now.
| avel wrote:
| They are not comparable because node-red is a generic low-
| code programming tool while HA is home automation software.
|
| If you mean how they compare when you plug in node-red to HA
| and use it for automations, rather than use HA's "native"
| automations... I believe the consensus is that node-red is
| more user-friendly in that way, and because it can plug to
| other things on its own it can provide more flexibility. On
| the other hand, HA has recently worked on the UI of their
| automations, and it is already pretty good for simple flows.
| In the end both of these approaches are great, each with its
| own pros and cons.
| Semaphor wrote:
| IME: For simple automations, HA UI is far easier. For complex
| ones, if you want a GUI, node-red, if you want to handwrite
| scripts, HA. If you don't care it really depends, in some
| cases coding them is easier, in some cases node-red is
| easier.
|
| But then this is about Node-Red integrated into HA.
| seanw444 wrote:
| I was thinking about getting started with HA, and then I saw
| the YAML. Dear God. May just be the ugliest scripting
| language I've ever seen.
| entropie wrote:
| For me node-red is more of an addition to homeassistant.
| There is node-red-contrib-home-assistant-websocket [1] to let
| node-red speak with homeassistant, you can watch state
| changes etc. I use ha for like two years now and at the start
| there was no inbuild automation-backend like it is now so we
| did everything with node-red.
|
| https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-home-
| assista...
| rcarmo wrote:
| I've settled on homebridge to talk to the Home app on my
| iPhone (which is where all the automation is done, and then
| executed on an Apple TV) and a little Node-RED for custom
| flows.
|
| I have zero YAML to maintain, and I'm happier for it.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Same. I've been a huge Home Assistant fan and minor contributor
| for many years. My house is among the smartest houses I've ever
| heard of. HVAC control, security system, air quality
| monitoring, multi-site IT systems monitoring, lighting controls
| (including LED strips that update to the right color scheme for
| the next holiday), whole-house networked audio (including
| streaming off-site if connected to the VPN), on and on. All
| self-hosted, on-prem, zero cloud, coordinated by Home
| Assistant. Offsite notifications via email, offsite control and
| monitoring via my Openwrt router's VPN server.
| bredren wrote:
| Have your written up your implementation? What type of air
| quality sensors have you used and how are they integrated
| into the home's behavior?
| scottlamb wrote:
| I'm still figuring out Home Assistant. I love that it has a
| real ecosystem and that it seems to have a decent
| HTTP/WebSocket API (that I just started playing with).
|
| Some things I don't love:
|
| * A lot of the integrations seem half-baked or to not quite fit
| the generic Lovelace cards. I think to some extent this is an
| inherent problem in supporting a lot of devices that have
| crappy, non-standardized APIs. Example: if I bump up the low
| temp on my Venstar thermostat on the Home Assistant dashboard,
| Home Assistant will immediately set it back. If I dig through
| logs, I see the thermostat complained that in auto mode
| (heating or cooling as needed), the low set point and the high
| set point have to be (at least) six degrees apart. When I
| adjust the thermostat through its own touch screen, the high
| set point automatically raises to meet that constraint. Home
| Assistant should do the same. I've been meaning to look into
| fixing it myself, but there seem to be weird things like this
| on every integration.
|
| * You need multiple automation rules to do almost anything. I
| think it's common to want the state of one thing to match
| another (for example, garage door open => sticky notification
| on my phone, person in driveway after sunset within last 5
| minutes or switch on => driveway light on). You need a rule in
| their YAML DSL to for the off->on transition and another for
| the on->off. It'd be nice to set a rule that defines a level
| rather than an edge and have it internally do the
| transformation. It'd also be nice to define the actions of a
| notification's buttons inline, rather than as a separate
| automation.
|
| * The companion Android app's notifications seem to be flaky.
| At least, they're sometimes slow. I think they can be delivered
| out of order and possibly are lossy, which aggravates the
| problem with not having something that just sets the state
| reliably. I assume it's pretty hopeless to have it reliably be
| in the right state if your phone was off when a notification
| was supposed to be delivered or Home Assistant was down on
| state transition or the like.
|
| * Some things seem to be only checked at startup, so my house
| has race conditions after power outages. For example, if Home
| Assistant starts up more quickly than my Yamaha AV receiver (+
| network switch + DHCP server), I can't control my home theater
| setup until I restart Home Assistant.
| dheera wrote:
| I also hate that you have to install it as an OS or VM to be
| fully featured.
|
| If you use the docker version it is crippled with no
| "supervisor" mode.
|
| Also every now and then a light or switch will go greyed out
| in HA, their official apps still work, and I have to restart
| HA to be able to use it in HA again. Pretty annoying when you
| get home after a long day, soaked in rain, fumbling in the
| dark to turn on lights and now you have to fumble more to
| restart the damn server before you can use your lights.
| janitha wrote:
| How is the container version crippled?
|
| An anecdotal data point, but I've been running the home-
| assistant container image on k8s without any issue, and I
| have a lot of integrations.
| dheera wrote:
| You can't run HACS, supervisor mode, Kelvin-sun matching
| plugin ...
| giobox wrote:
| I'm running HACS in the container release right now, it's
| worked for a long time. So long as you have your HA
| configuration folder as a volume etc it will preserve
| across restarts/upgrades.
|
| I'd go as far as to argue the (officially supported!)
| container release is the best way to get a production
| quality install of HA - containers are a great way to
| package and release complex web apps like HA. Mines
| automatically updates itself every time new container
| image released, has done so with no intervention from me
| for over a year. With the container lifecycle/config, you
| don't really need Supervisor mode either.
|
| To say it is crippled is nonsense, it is literally one of
| the two officially recommended install paths:
|
| > https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/
|
| Official support for Docker release in HACS:
|
| > https://hacs.xyz/docs/setup/download#home-assistant-
| containe...
| lookingsideways wrote:
| HACS works in a container, or is there specific
| functionality of it that doesn't work? I've been using it
| inside a Docker HA container on a Pi without issue.
| easton wrote:
| Supervisor mode is basically operating system configuration
| stuff (DNS, audio, etc.) telemetry for the dev team, and
| health checking: https://www.home-
| assistant.io/blog/2020/09/16/supervisor-joi.... (Unless I'm
| missing something?)
|
| It seems fine that this isn't available in docker, since
| you can do all of this via docker and your host's
| configuration system. It would be nice to have a GUI for
| it, but if you need a GUI then you probably aren't running
| HA via docker, you used their image.
| nomel wrote:
| > ... for the off->on transition and another for the on->off.
| It'd be nice to set a rule that defines a level rather than
| an edge and have it internally do the transformation
|
| The "solution" I found was to poll, and use "choose", and
| sometimes some helper switches for state, to do what is
| needed. But, I think at any reasonable level of complexity,
| you're better off using one of the three python components:
| the one built into Home Assistant, pyscript, or AppDaemon.
|
| Home Assistant Python: https://www.home-
| assistant.io/integrations/python_script/ No imports.
|
| pyscript: https://github.com/custom-components/pyscript Full
| python. Supports Jupyter. Straightforward.
|
| AppDaemon: https://appdaemon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/HASS_TU
| TORIAL.htm... Full python. A little lower level. Allows the
| creation of dashboards.
|
| Related, the Matter protocol is on its way. I'm waiting for
| these devices before I redo my house, or put much more effort
| into any of this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard)
| antsar wrote:
| Matter is interesting. But...
|
| > The project group was launched and introduced by Amazon,
| Apple, Google, Comcast and the Zigbee Alliance, now
| Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA).
|
| I'm having a real hard time believing that anything user-
| beneficial will come of this, unless you're willing to sell
| out your smarthome and privacy to big tech.
| heurisko wrote:
| > I'm having a real hard time believing that anything
| user-beneficial will come of this, unless you're willing
| to sell out your smarthome and privacy to big tech.
|
| At this level, the way data is handled is vendor
| agnostic.
|
| I see Matter as more akin to USB, or indeed, the
| internet, as the idea is that devices are supposed to be
| able to communicate via IP, not just by ZigBee.
| lazide wrote:
| Another way to look at this - maybe this is a way to give
| a pressure relief valve for all the privacy conscious so
| they stop harassing them so much for the 90% of consumer
| case that doesn't care?
| rcarmo wrote:
| I gave up on it solely because of the GUI. It's confusing as
| heck and very far from Apple's Home app, which is the preferred
| UX of the CFO (Chief Family Officer), even for fairly complex
| automations.
|
| So I just used homebridge for everything, with a smattering of
| Node-RED for (very few) device shims (it is _very_ easy to do
| MQTT handling with it).
|
| Also, I now have zero YAML to maintain, which is also a boon.
|
| Kudos, though, for Home Assistant auto-discovery, which I use
| with my Tasmota-reflashed devices (there is a homebridge plugin
| that transparently adds them to HomeKit as soon as they're set
| up).
| gregable wrote:
| For folks here I strongly recommend installing the appdaemon
| integration and just writing python scripts. The downside is
| there is a good bit of learning curve and time investment
| just to get the hello world going (turn on a light at
| sunset?).
|
| Once you are there, you can write shared libraries, abstract
| away whatever you want, have legit tests, and just do
| anything you would normally want in your coding environment
| (vscode, auto-formatters, source control, etc). Obviously not
| the right recommendation for a consumer system, but if you
| are like me and feel more comfortable with a programming
| language, it's the way to go.
| ornornor wrote:
| Fully agree.
|
| Interested about the tests though. I'm not a professional
| python developer but would love automated tests for my
| appdaemon code. How did you set it up, and how do you run
| the tests?
| rcarmo wrote:
| I can do that with homebridge-mqtt (I just stopped doing it
| in Python because Node-RED did what I needed and gave me a
| dead easy chart for temperature sensors).
| iandanforth wrote:
| How do you handle network security? I wouldn't trust an IoT
| device on the same network as any of my family's computers or
| phones for example.
| syshum wrote:
| For me I mainly use Zigbee and Zwave Devices not WiFi
| Devices.
|
| I am sadden that wifi seems to be taking over and ZigBee and
| Zwave are starting to lose favor.
| nomel wrote:
| I like to believe that it's because matter protocol is on
| its way, so hardware isn't being developed:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard)
|
| But, I think it's actually because wifi is easier for the
| average person to get working. With Zigbee, you need a
| Zigbee hub, but sometimes you need a brand specific Zigbee
| hub, sometimes you don't (even though it's advertised that
| you do), and sometimes the Zigbee compliance is so bad that
| adding a device from another vendor break your whole Zigbee
| network (looking at you Aquara). Zwave throws more
| incompatible hubs to the mix. And, even within these, it's
| rare to have devices work with each other in a way that
| makes sense.
|
| Hopefully matter saves us, so I don't have to install 5
| integrations in Home Assistant to remind me that my car
| isn't plugged in at night or my back window is open, while
| the heater is on, and then another to make any of it
| accessible to HomeKit.
| syshum wrote:
| I must be lucky then because I have lot of Zigbee and
| Zwave devices all running Transmitting to Nortek
| GoControl USB stick attached to a rPI running Home
| Assistant.
|
| I have several vendors of both Zwave and Zigbee Sensors,
| HVAC thermostat, Bulbs, Switches, etc.. All of them play
| nice with each other, and FAR FAR simpler to setup than
| WiFi which often requires the use of some weird mobile
| app, and play hopsotch with the networks..
|
| Zigbee I just pair them to the GoControl and it is done
|
| hell I even bought some no name used Door Sensors off
| ebay that were Zigbee, I mainly use them for Temp
| monitoring in various places.. They had no problem
| connecting to my network either
| xxpor wrote:
| In addition to all of the "use Z-Wave/Zigbee as much as
| possible" comments (which I personally do), for stuff where
| there's no choice like Roombas, I have a separate SSID on a
| VLAN that can only talk to the internet, my DNS server
| running Adguard, and HA (which is on the main network). I
| also have stateful rules that allow connections to be
| initiated from the main network to the IOT network, but not
| vice versa. I also try to find things with ESP* controllers,
| as mentioned.
|
| I've really been trying to move away from cloud based stuff
| not only because of data privacy, but concerns about services
| going away and (most importantly) latency.
|
| My old wifi smart plugs had 2+ seconds of latency from when
| I'd hit the button in HA to actually turning on.
| Zigbee/Z-wave stuff is (from my meatsack perspective)
| instant. I have a zigbee door sensor on the door to get into
| my garage, and a zigbee smart plug connected to the overhead
| florescent lights. By the time the door opens enough for me
| to actually see inside the garage, the lights are on.
| Sometimes I think they never turned off. It's fantastic.
| vladgur wrote:
| How do you setup a separate VLAN and SSID? None of the
| "pro-sumer" wifi mesh setups under $500 support VLANs
| xxpor wrote:
| I use Unifi for wifi gear, which supports it out of the
| box.
|
| https://www.ui.com/unifi/unifi-ap-ac-pro/ for the wired
| AP, https://store.ui.com/products/uap-beaconhd for the
| extension into the back of the house. Pricy, but not
| completely outrageous IMO.
|
| For an actual router, I run OPNsense in a VM (on the same
| box as HA, funnily enough). My server has dual 10 gig
| ports, so I pass through one of them to OPNsense and run
| it as a "router on a stick", where the basic internal
| network is the untagged VLAN, and the public side is VLAN
| 99. My switch then strips the VLAN 99 tag from the packet
| before sending it to the cable modem, and vice-versa. My
| switch is https://mikrotik.com/product/crs328_24p_4s_rm,
| which was $379 in 2018. However, you can get similar
| functionality from MUCH cheaper microtik or
| unifi/ubiquity switches if you don't need 10 gig support.
|
| If you're starting from scratch I might get something
| like https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-network-
| unifi-os-cons..., and an el cheapo dumb switch, as long
| as it'd pass through vlan tagged traffic. You want
| anything that's crossing a vlan boundary to end up on the
| router anyway, so you can apply firewall rules to it.
| zrail wrote:
| Do you feel that using a virtualized router with other
| things on the box puts you at greater risk? I.e. you're
| putting an awful lot of eggs in that one basket. I've
| considered setting that up before but shied away from it.
| xxpor wrote:
| Availability risk? Sure, but that's 99.9% my own doing
| (constant experiments, etc)
|
| Security risk? Not in the slightest. I'm running an up to
| date proxmox which is just KVM+QEMU with some scripting
| and a website on top, basically. I know how to setup
| IOMMU groups and such. If it's good enough for the big
| cloud providers, it's good enough for me.
| zrail wrote:
| Yeah primarily I'm concerned with availability. I have a
| "production" hypervisor now with all of the household
| services running on it that I've promised my spouse I
| wouldn't mess around with which cuts off one avenue of
| experiments.
| vladgur wrote:
| Do you know if Dreammachine can work with another
| ubiquity Access point in a mesh fashion?
| nybble41 wrote:
| The Ubiquiti Access Point AC Mesh Pro[0] (~$200) appears
| to support multiple SSIDs and VLANs. Of course you'd need
| at least two of them to count as a "mesh", which is
| $400... was your $500 budget _per access point_ or for
| the whole system (and if so, for how many APs)?
|
| [0] https://store.ui.com/products/unifi-ac-mesh-pro-ap
| wyager wrote:
| Not OP, but I make extensive use of VLANs to isolate off
| security cameras, IoT devices, etc. etc. into their own
| mutually isolated network environments.
|
| I also don't use Wifi for any of these devices anymore. It's
| usually a bad experience. Either use ethernet or a dedicated
| IoT-oriented wireless protocol. Z-wave seems OK but not very
| flexible, Zigbee is a pain in the rear (but the only option
| for many device classes), and I'm hopeful that Thread will
| actually be good.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I just don't use Google or Alexa (devices from those
| ecosystems punch holes through my home gateway for a bunch of
| server-side glue that is extremely ill-advised, and a bigger
| risk than LAN security IMHO), moved most things (sensors,
| typically) to ZigBee, and reflashed everything I could with
| Tasmota.
|
| It's extremely inconvenient to have IoT devices segregated
| from, say, TVs and media devices, especially if you rely on
| AirPlay or Chromecast to get audio around the place, so I
| just secure my Macs (and PCs) properly as if we were still
| traveling and visiting clients.
|
| I keep tabs on Apple security bulletins (HomeKit has
| relatively few issues, and works mostly inside the LAN except
| if you're outside the house - it then switches to a variation
| of the old iCloud "back to my X" tunneling).
| alufers wrote:
| I personally just flash everything possible with open-source
| software. All my light switches and Wi-Fi lightbulbs run
| Tasmota, which I password protect and semi- regularly update.
| The one odball is my Gree AC unit, which is on a separate
| WiFi network and subnet (I just run hostapd on my RPi since
| it's close-by). But it's more to protect it from the outside,
| not the other way, because it's controlled with JSON sent
| over UDP, and if you send a malformed packet the
| microcontroller inside crashes. When this happens and the
| compressor is engaged it will freeze up, possibly destroying
| itself and start flooding the floor, because the condensation
| pump won't turn on.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| >> When this happens and the compressor is engaged it will
| freeze up, possibly destroying itself and start flooding
| the floor, because the condensation pump won't turn on.
|
| Do not buy Gree. Check.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Or maybe not automate destructive devices. Might be
| simpler and more responsible anyway, since equivalent
| harm can be had if your kids ask Siri to warm up the
| house...
| bliteben wrote:
| What lightbulbs do you find are best for running tasmota?
| I'd prefer not to have to setup a zigbee setup in addition
| to my zwave.
| slingnow wrote:
| > But it's more to protect it from the outside, not the
| other way, because it's controlled with JSON sent over UDP,
| and if you send a malformed packet the microcontroller
| inside crashes. When this happens and the compressor is
| engaged it will freeze up, possibly destroying itself and
| start flooding the floor, because the condensation pump
| won't turn on.
|
| Wow, the future is truly here folks!
| jve wrote:
| How did you find that out? You mean random UDP packet can
| destroy AC?
|
| /me having a Gree unit that is to be installed
| clownpenis_fart wrote:
| tragictrash wrote:
| if you flash openwrt/ddwrt to your router, you can create an
| isolated subnet with its own DHCP server and enter your own
| firewall rules (iptables) blocking all traffic from your
| local subnet to your IOT subnet. You can then bind that to a
| wifi ssid (the guest one). Its kind of a PITA to setup, but
| it works great once you get it. Netgear Nighthawk routers
| have worked great for me in the past.
|
| Don't forget to set up a reverse proxy with ssl and automatic
| cert renewsl, even in your home network. Wifi can be hacked
| with trivial ease. Caddy or nginx/certbot will do you well
| there. If you also run a pi-hole you can have the pi on your
| local network pass ssl checks by overriding some DNS entries.
| rhinoceraptor wrote:
| One, I avoid WiFi products entirely if there is a good
| alternative. Zigbee and ZWave are two good ecosystems, you
| get a USB radio, plug it Home Assistant machine and you're up
| and running.
|
| A second option is finding devices that can be flashed with
| Tasmota or ESPHome. This could also mean putting together
| your own devices with an ESP8266, ESPHome is basically plug
| and play for simple things like temperature sensors. You
| assemble the device, configure which pins to use via YAML,
| and then flash it to the ESP.
|
| You don't even need to download a local build toolchain, the
| ESPHome add-on to Home Assistant can flash devices plugged
| into your computer just from the web interface, and then do
| OTA firmware updates.
| clownpenis_fart wrote:
| mindslight wrote:
| I prohibit IoT devices from connecting to the Internet at
| all, and only use devices that can be controlled by the local
| network [0]. Thus firmware updates don't matter (as long as
| the manufacturer hasn't included any logic bombs), as the
| trust model is that devices are just an extension of the
| network segment.
|
| The least-involved way to set this up would be to set up an
| old wifi router to create a second network, don't connect
| this router to your existing network or uplink, and then set
| up your home automation server with two ethernet ports.
|
| [0] eg TP-Link Kasa, although I heard this may have changed
| for recent ones? Either way, with this setup you'll be
| immediately aware of whether local control functionality
| works, so you're well within the return window. FWIW I stay
| away from Amazon's GENSYM brands, even though they'd be easy
| to flash with Tasmota etc, because I don't trust them to get
| line voltage design considerations right and I don't feel
| like QAing every single device.
| slothtrop wrote:
| I'm aiming to use a supervised installation to free up the pi
| for other tasks, but concerned about performance. Will be
| booting from SATA to help to this end, and to avoid degradation
| from writing to microSD often (this may be the case when I
| start recording security footage)
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I haven't had any issues just using the stock image on an SD
| card - it seems to be fast enough. YMMV especially if you
| plan to run other things on the Pi, though in this case I'd
| recommend going for a mini-PC instead and just installing a
| standard Linux distribution on it.
| slothtrop wrote:
| I see. Really it was just going to be something like pihole
| which is supposedly light. Maybe better not to use the
| supervised if this is focused on running HA?
|
| In the future I'll consider the mini-PC, thanks. This will
| have to do for now.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| You will probably not have a great experience running cctv
| from a pi. You may want something a bit beefier unless your
| cams are low res, mostly due to transcode/copying costs.
|
| In terms of disk, you want multiple disks as either
| raid/zfs/btrfs/lvm. It will probably be better to do this on
| a separate machine and mount it via nfs.
|
| For your boot volume, you can also use a usb thumb drive to
| help avoid sd card fatigue.
| paulmd wrote:
| I've really wanted to get into this to some extent but it's
| such a complex (and expensive!) topic that I really would like
| some distilled knowledge from someone who's been through it and
| figured out what works and what doesn't, the pitfalls, etc.
| This is probably a good place to ask - does anyone know of a
| reliable guide (or ideally blog) to get started? Or maybe would
| be a good topic for a future HN submission.
|
| My personal focus would be on cloud-free/self-hosted systems.
| Looping through the cloud as a convenience is fine but I don't
| really want to rely on cloudshit 100% for the operation of my
| house.
|
| Also I've heard really good things about the Lutreon stuff? Not
| open, and not cheap, but it works, and I've heard the z-wave
| stuff isn't always 100%.
| belthasar wrote:
| I've used Home Assistant on a Pi 3B+ for about a year now. My
| main objective is like yours, I want as few devices as
| possible connected to the internet and generally only buy
| devices that have a local API (local polling in HA terms). I
| do pay for Nabu Casa, HA's cloud service for convenient
| access to everything but nothing I use requires it. This also
| help support a project that I really enjoy using and rely on.
|
| I have most devices connected to an old wireless router that
| is completely disconnected from the internet. The raspberry
| pi is connected to my main network through ethernet and is
| connected to my "smart network" over wifi. I like to think of
| the HA instance as a two way mirror since it can reach the
| internet and see the devices but the devices themselves can't
| phone home or access the internet in anyway.
|
| For bulbs, light switches, and smart plugs I generally stick
| with TP-Link Kasa. The local API works great with HA though I
| believe they are removing this in future firmware updates
| [0]. This appears to be for the UK only but I'm not 100% sure
| on that. I purchased a plug a few months ago that still
| works.
|
| My thermostat is a Venstar color touch with the local API. I
| have it connected to the internet but I could disconnect it
| and everything would still work how I want.
|
| You can flash Wyze v2 cameras with the official RTSP firmware
| to view them locally. You lose some of the features of the
| Wyze cams but I think this is a fine trade off. While this
| works with the Pi, streaming video taxes it a lot. It isn't a
| perfect experience by any means.
|
| I also use Zigbee devices instead of Z-Wave (no real reason
| other than the first device I wanted was Zigbee). I have a
| Sonoff Zigbee bridge flashed with Tasmota that allows me to
| use any compliant (or quasi compliant in the case of Xiaomi
| Aqara) plug, motion sensor, temp sensor, etc across brands.
| The Zigbee bridge is also has access to the internet because
| it needs to connect to an NTP server. This means that these
| devices work fine when the internet goes out but if for some
| reason the hub gets power cycled while having an internet
| outage they stop working.
|
| You can get Zigbee antennas that connect directly to the Pi
| but I avoided this because the USB ports can cause
| interference. You can fix this by getting a USB cable
| extender.
|
| Feel free to ask any other questions about my setup.
|
| [0] https://alerts.home-assistant.io/#tplink.markdown
| Macha wrote:
| They've also been pretty hostile to OS packagers trying to let
| you run it without dedicating an entire device to it, most
| publicly NixOS but they indicated they planned to insist the
| same against Fedora and Gentoo too:
| https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326
|
| That behaviour kind of makes it hard to trust that it won't
| lead to the next Marak situation.
| asveikau wrote:
| I run it in a VM and don't mind it; it's got the updater, it
| feels pretty self contained.
|
| I even do USB passthrough to give it access to my z-wave
| stick.
| bmicraft wrote:
| I've been running homeassistant installed by pip3 for years
| now (before they even had a os) and that has always worked
| fine.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| For what it's worth frenck does not represent Home Assistant
| and the first sentence of his profile is "Slightly assholic
| at first sight"...
|
| That said you have a point but in my usage of Home Assistant
| almost since birth when it was a single pip install command I
| can tell you the sheer functionality, integrations, etc make
| getting it fully running a nightmare. Not to mention from
| their perspective actually supporting it almost impossible.
| Maybe this speaks to a wider problem but I'm very happy to
| install it with docker on the distro and hardware of my
| choice and have everything more-or-less just work.
|
| I referenced the operating system approach here because it's
| the quickest and easiest path to get up and running on a
| Raspberry Pi and therefore relevant to the article.
| bpye wrote:
| This kind of pushed me away from HA. I've ended up using
| integrations built using hc [0] to bridge devices to HomeKit,
| either existing or ones I've built, and then using Promtheus
| to collect metrics. It's not something that 'just works', but
| I feel much happier with how it works than HA.
|
| [0] - https://github.com/brutella/hc
| billfor wrote:
| If you don't have any need for bleeding edge devices, Openhab
| still works on a rpi4 as an alternative to HA. I like that I
| can just install it as an apt package onto an existing rpi with
| other things and java just does its stuff, rather than
| dedicating the entire rpi4 to it or running in a container.
| scottlamb wrote:
| > I like that I can just install it as an apt package onto an
| existing rpi with other things and java just does its stuff,
| rather than dedicating the entire rpi4 to it or running in a
| container.
|
| If you try Home Assistant again, you'll probably like Home
| Assistant Core. No separate OS or container needed, just a
| Python virtual environment. That's how I have it installed. I
| have to do the updates and backups manually (rather than it
| self-updating automatically / through the UI) but I find that
| preferable to dealing with an extra machine, VM, or
| container.
| mr_person wrote:
| +1 for OpenHab. I have tried HA several times, but always
| cone back to OH for its super simple ui and app layout
| editors. Apt install is also nice.
|
| Also, plugging in a half-decent zigbee controller usb dongle
| and receive native zigbee controls in the system, no need for
| a bridge like mqtt
| wyager wrote:
| I had a terrible experience with Home Assistant. Slow, buggy,
| unreasonably difficult to implement non-trivial automations.
|
| My heuristic since then has been to minimize the amount of
| node.js in my home automation codebase and this has worked
| wonders for its reliability and usability; currently the only
| component I still have that's node-based is zigbee2mqtt, which
| (possibly not) incidentally gives me more issues than any other
| component.
|
| The best approach I've found has been to have (in isolated
| jails/containers) zigbee2mqtt dealing with zigbee network stuff
| (you must use CC2652 based coordinators and routers for any
| kind of reliability), mosquitto acting as an MQTT broker, and a
| custom program (write it in whatever you like) talking to
| mosquitto, with Pushover for push notifications.
| bonzini wrote:
| I do the same for the automation part
| (mosquitto+zigbee2mqtt+custom scripts), but I do have Home
| Assistant for GUI and logging. For example I have a card in
| Home Assistant that shows whether any system at home doesn't
| ping.
|
| Here is an example of an automation script, turning a zigbee
| plug on/off depending on solar roof output: https://gist.gith
| ubusercontent.com/bonzini/c705bdd47fd5cd16a...
| kkielhofner wrote:
| I'm not understanding how node.js relates to Home Assistant
| (written in python)?
| late_groomer wrote:
| Home Assistant has been nothing short of amazing. I started out
| just wanting to control my Christmas lights back in early
| December; tried going the HomeKit with HomeBridge route, only
| to realize I needed an iHub or some other (i) device on my
| network to have it work remotely. It was a bad experience even
| while on my network, luckily stumbled upon Home Assistant
| looking for better options a week or so into the journey. Now
| I'm controlling everything, even watching my security cameras,
| through HA.
|
| The one caveat in my experience has been trying to run Pi-Hole
| on the same server as HA Supervised or using Adguard Home.
| Trying to run HA and PiH, even though they were both in docker
| containers, caused the Pi 3B+ to freeze every few hours. HA
| makes it clear running anything else is a bad idea, and that
| proved correct. I deleted PiH and tried the Adguard Home addon
| for my DNS for awhile, it was really slick and had a lot of
| features, but I found myself missing the PiH for several
| reasons. For one, it really sucked to be tinkering with HA
| while other people on the network were on the web; every time I
| needed to restart HA (which was often setting up the cameras),
| I'd get constant groaning and moaning about the internet being
| out. I also found it harder to control white/black lists;
| adding individual sites here and there was not as simple as it
| is in PiH. It also lacked the simple "disable for X
| minutes/seconds" feature I used so much.
|
| I ended up installing just PiH on the Pi 3B+ and grabbing a
| cheap Chromebox off ebay to run HA. All the things I was doing
| on HA really pushed the Pi at times and I read one too many
| stories about SD cards dying from heavy use. Now everything is
| zippy and I feel _safer_ with HA installed on the internal M.2
| SSD.
| jrm4 wrote:
| I'm curious about other people's experiences with this stuff,
| especially if you're someone who likes simple scripting and found
| Home Assistant to be too clunky.
|
| Basically, I've bought a lot of these little devices, and am much
| more interested in doing this in a more "Unix Way" way; give me
| text streams/web APIs and let me figure it out. I think there are
| things like Huginn and there's a like a Perl one or something?
|
| Frankly, I'd really like to do it in Bash or similar? Anyone gone
| their own way like this?
|
| (I end up not getting far because the use cases aren't compelling
| enough for me to put the time in? I don't know.)
| rustyminnow wrote:
| You can do both! I run HA for the web gui, but I have a few
| shell scripts for more automated things. Actually, now that I'm
| looking at them, they call to an HA api to make changes. So you
| could run HA to provide a web API for things and script around
| that?
| piceas wrote:
| I did. I haven't sorted out proper ventilation for my laundry
| room yet. Using a pi zero with a dht22 to control a
| dehumidifier via a tradfri power switch when needed was quick,
| fun, functional, and offline with no vms or GUIs needed.
|
| Logging the data elsewhere to influxdb was a fun little
| addition for a few pretty graphs.
|
| I'm a fan of nats.io but it isn't necessary. A private network
| via zerotier makes life easy but is also completely optional.
| djanogo wrote:
| Better yet, run your home on Dell/HP micro computers that get
| decommissioned by enterprises/hospitals/big-orgs every 3 years.
| Find them on Offerup or FB or Craigslist market place for
| $100-$200.
|
| These are built solid with metal enclosures, fan cooled, UL
| certified PSU, ~7k CPUbenchmark.net. Usually i5 6thGen Intel CPU,
| 8GB-16GB RAM and have REAL storage(SSD) and M.2 NVMe. If you are
| lucky you might find vPro version with remote management.
|
| Currently running a HP G2 bought on Offerup for $70 with
| i5-6600T, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD running Ubuntu server with
| HomeAssistant VM and few containers. It idles at 7w, with <2% CPU
| for my work load.
|
| I tried Raspberry Pi with HomeAssistant with it's piss poor
| antique storage solution, it idled at 5W, it went straight back
| to store.
| Fiahil wrote:
| > [...] Currently running a HP G2 [...]
|
| Great, except it's fucking huge and noisy.
|
| I'm running a kubernetes cluster on a pair of raspberry pi and
| a 4-bay NAS as storage. What kind of lunatic would store data
| on a single, non-redondant, disk or an SD card ?
| bduerst wrote:
| Pi's don't have SATA or PCI - what's the I/O of the drives?
| Is it noticeable?
| 29083011397778 wrote:
| Perhaps late, but I'm using PXE to boot and run my pihole
| at home. Works quite well IMO
| djanogo wrote:
| It's the twice the size of Pi with case, not sure what's
| "massive" about it.
| rnestler wrote:
| I currently run a home server on a librem laptop where I broke
| the lid and can't be opened anymore without breaking it further
| (I tried to repair it, but since some parts broke mechanically
| I couldn't really fix it)
|
| Works kinda nice and is completely silent most of the time.
| mindslight wrote:
| WHAT STORE DID YOU BRING THE PI TO? IS IT STILL THERE?
|
| I'll second the recommendation for real PC hardware. Tinkering
| is fun up until it's not. When it becomes not fun is when
| something breaks, takes down a system you have come to rely on,
| and now it becomes _work_ to recreate the functionality you
| used to take for granted. Seeing people go for the RPi for
| something they 're going to put a lot of hours into makes me
| cringe a bit, having had several SD card filesystems get
| corrupt. If that's what it takes to get you started with self
| hosting, by all means go for it. But there is much nicer
| hardware for running servers on.
|
| Having said that, I still use RPis for edge devices and the
| like.
|
| PS I really like that idle power figure on your server. I wish
| there were a list of power consumption figures for integrated
| hardware, it seems quite hit or miss.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| You can fix that SD problem by booting off a USB SSD instead.
| Much faster and more reliable.
| mindslight wrote:
| I want to use a Pi4 8GB as an arm64 build host so I'm going
| the USB SSD route there. But adding on additional hardware
| ultimately seems like the "stone soup"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup) version of
| setting up a server.
|
| Furthermore I'm hesitant to rely too much on the arm
| ecosystem in general. If one pops a drive with a Linux
| installation into any amd64 machine, it straightforwardly
| boots. Whereas just making an arm device boot can be its
| own tinkering session of figuring out its own bespoke
| partitioning scheme, firmware files, and U-boot image. Many
| times you're stuck using a non-mainline kernel since that's
| what the embedded developers hacked on to get something
| running. Devicetree compiler what? And sure, using a
| purpose-built distro can hide much of the complexity, until
| that distro decides your device is too old and drops
| support.
|
| Heck, I've even moved my wifi AP's over to low power amd64
| machines instead of the popular answer of OpenWRT/DD-WRT.
| When I want to upgrade to a new wifi standard, I'll just
| pop in a new wireless card. The same machines also run Kodi
| for the TVs (which used to be separate RPis).
| spookthesunset wrote:
| That is not a half bad idea. How loud are those things?
| zrail wrote:
| When my G3 (newer version of parent's machine) is booting up
| all of the VMs it's running it can get kind of noisy but it
| settles down quickly to basically silent.
| some-guy wrote:
| I have an SFF Dell Optiplex I bought for $100 many years ago
| that's still my main "homelab" machine. It's fairly quiet
| besides the two 12TB spinning hard drives inside but the fan
| isn't noticing.
|
| A rack mount server would be out of the question as I live in
| a small condo, both for size and noise.
| djanogo wrote:
| Barely audible, you have to have your ear <1ft from it to
| hear the hum.
| rubatuga wrote:
| Same for my HP Z230. Literally have to be within a foot or
| two to hear it.
| afavour wrote:
| I did that too but those PCs are just stupidly massive for the
| purpose. Raspberry Pi 4s don't require SD cards any more so the
| storage issue is moot. My RPi sits next to my router now, you
| wouldn't even know it's there unless you looked closely.
| nomel wrote:
| > My RPi sits next to my router now
|
| Some brave souls have installed Home Assistant on their
| routers: https://www.snbforums.com/threads/home-assistant-
| entware-gt-...
| djanogo wrote:
| Did you read the part which says "micro", these are about
| 2-3x the size of Pi with those cheap plastic cases. I had
| mine beside the router before I moved it inside TV console.
|
| Pi will be single purpose device, the "micro" can be full
| blown server and comes with ALL parts required, no need to
| hunt for good PSU, case, cooling, storage. Some of them come
| with 1 Sata and 2x M.2 NVMe, so you can literally pass those
| NVMe to TrueNAS in proxmox and run full blown NAS with
| encryption/encoding/decoding in VM.
| KolenCh wrote:
| May be you mean 2-3x in every linear dimension but that
| still seem to be smaller than those in my mind. (While Mac
| mini is not known to be the smallest, it definitely exceeds
| 2-3x in some linear dimension already.) What kind you have
| in mind?
| rubatuga wrote:
| Using my HP Z230 with 16GB ECC RAM, multiple VMs, 2 NVMe SSDs,
| and 2x3TB HDD.
| justin66 wrote:
| > fan cooled
|
| As if that is a benefit.
|
| Putting a server in a corner of my home and forgetting about it
| is an application where I want the machine to be powerful
| enough to work without active cooling, as small as possible,
| and with no moving parts. None of these constraints is
| difficult to accomodate in this day and age.
| djanogo wrote:
| Ya it's possible to build a fanless system, but Apple or any
| OEM with those parts is not going to sell you that system
| <$100. Not with out of the box compatibility with every x86
| software out there.
|
| The fan ramps based on usage, as I said, Ubuntu server with
| HASS OS, VS Code Server, Netdata monitoring, NodeRed, Sonos
| Airplay, InfluxDB and few other containers, it's barely gets
| to 2% CPU usage and CPU temp at 25C.
|
| Look at Pi, they have been at it for SO many years and that
| shit is slow with no real storage interface, they are only
| faster compared to their own previous generation.
| justin66 wrote:
| > and that shit is slow with no real storage interface
|
| We were talking about using it for a home automation
| system, which is just a very low traffic web server with
| some odds and ends. We are not talking about competing in
| the TOP500 or something. It's _easily_ doable with a newer
| Pi.
| YaBomm wrote:
| zrail wrote:
| I just migrated all of my "production" home things to an HP
| Elitedesk 800 G3. It's great! Maxed out the ram and threw a 1TB
| SSD in. I'm using Proxmox and have:
|
| * home assistant VM
|
| * pi-hole primary LXC
|
| * UniFi controller LXC
|
| * media stack LXC (jellyfin is installed directly on the host
| to minimize hardware transcoding issues)
|
| * a VM running various docker containers with dokku, including
| AppDaemon
|
| It's barely ticking over most of the time and using very little
| energy.
|
| We use zwave devices around the house and due to issues making
| zwave complex (RF + brick = bad, plus it's a very long house),
| I actually have a handful of Raspberry Pis with zwave sticks
| running zwavejs2mqtt scattered around. Yesterday I decided that
| I'm tired of dealing with the rPi-zero-W being so slow so I
| ordered a bunch of Dell Wyse 3040 thin clients off of eBay to
| replace them. Still trying to decide how I'm going to run them
| but probably it'll look something like Alpine diskless running
| docker and zwavejs2mqtt in a container.
| djanogo wrote:
| Cool, and your elitedesk I believe comes with remote BIOS
| access with Intel vPro, that's even cooler, never have to
| plugin display.
| amanzi wrote:
| I have three Dell Optiplex micro PCs with vPro running
| Proxmox. It's so nice having full remote access to them,
| makes life so much easier.
| zrail wrote:
| Yeah. I haven't set that up yet after getting Proxmox up
| and running, but it's something that I should probably work
| on.
|
| I've had such a good experience with this one that I keep
| trying to figure out if I can replace my Dell T20 minitower
| router running VyOS with one. The blocker is that the Dell
| actually has standard PCIe slots, whereas if I were to use
| a USFF I'd have to either go way up market to something
| like a Lenovo M920Q or accept USB ethernet adapters.
| bpye wrote:
| I'm still running an 8th gen HP micro server, but I would run
| something else if I could get >=8GB memory and 4 SATA ports for
| relatively cheap. I haven't seen anything that gets me there
| yet though.
| djanogo wrote:
| Nope, no OEM wants to make that, not enough market for it.
| However you can buy NVMe to 6xSATA adapter, but your case
| might not fit those drives,
|
| I planned on buying NVMe extension cable, cut a slit in case,
| run the cable outsidde, plug in NVMe to 6xSATA adapter
| outside of the case and keep the SSD's outside, this would
| need reliable external power supply for SSD (Amazon sells
| them for ~$30, but I don't trust them).
|
| I believe you will get to ~10-15w with this setup, at which
| rate you could build regular ITX/MATX case to hold all SSD's
| with i3-10100 and be at ~16w idle.
| hedora wrote:
| It sounds like you want a Synology, at least hardware-wise.
| This one supports up to 6 GB of RAM, four SATA ports, and
| idles with low wattage and low noise.
|
| Built-in virtualization and docker. It's $500 at Newegg.
|
| https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS420+#specs
|
| They make bigger ones, of course.
| wyager wrote:
| I've been doing a bunch of home automation work recently. Here
| are some observations I've made:
|
| 1. Most extant home automation software is totally unreliable
| garbage. Buggy, slow, poorly designed. You want to reduce the
| amount of code you pull in as much as possible.
|
| 2. Raspberry pis are totally unreliable garbage. The hardware is
| just bad. There's no way to make them reliably operate for long
| periods of time without crashing, and there's no way to make them
| automatically recover from a crash (because the watchdog timer,
| or its driver, in the crappy broadcom chips they use is broken).
|
| 3. Most of this home automation software is optimized for users
| who don't know how to code at all, and is extremely poorly
| optimized for people who can write basic scripts or whatever.
|
| 4. Most of the radio protocols for wireless IoT devices are
| totally unreliable garbage.
|
| After messing around with this on and off for a few years, the
| best setup I've found is:
|
| 1. Use a normal computer or server, not a raspberry pi. It
| doesn't need to be expensive or anything; just use a decent
| machine with an x86 processor. There are tons of great industrial
| PCs for cheap on ebay.
|
| 2. Use some kind of containerization setup for separating
| components. I strongly recommend using jails on FreeBSD, since
| you can treat jails as physically separate machines for
| networking/firewalling purposes (using vnets).
|
| 3. Make liberal use of VLANs to isolate IoT things from the
| internet and from each other.
|
| 4. Don't use any IoT devices that operate over WiFi. Ethernet is
| great, and dedicated wireless protocols (zigbee, z-wave, etc.)
| can be OK with a bunch of work.
|
| 5. If you want non-trivial automations, don't try to use some
| existing "user-friendly" or "low-code" or whatever home
| automation software. Just write a normal computer program that
| does the automations.
|
| The specific stack I have for most of my automations in my
| current house is zigbee2mqtt running in one jail (this is by far
| the most problematic component), mosquitto running in another,
| and then my program which does the automations running in a
| third. My program can also do things like send me push messages
| via pushover.
|
| I've managed to get a seemingly stable zigbee network with a not-
| totally-trivial number of devices (around 25 now) by using CC2652
| radios and plenty of zigbee routers, and also turning off all
| lightbulbs before adding more devices to the network.
|
| It's a shit show, and I can't really recommend getting into it
| right now unless you _want_ to spend a bunch of time doing
| sysadmin tasks, or you only want very simple automations (in
| which case maybe use HomeKit or something).
| rcarmo wrote:
| I would like to challenge that assertion that Pis are garbage.
| If you use a recent hardware revision you should not have any
| issues, mine have outlasted the ODROID I had running homebridge
| for a few years off an EMMC.
|
| Also, I git push my automation services to a server using
| https://github.com/piku, which isolates them in (simple)
| sandboxes. Zero issues for a long time now, and with Docker
| pull restrictions coming up soon, I can certainly put up with
| npm taking a while to update Node-RED...
| zrail wrote:
| I agree with all of your recommendations. I use Home Assistant
| running in a VM on a normal machine as a sensor fusion platform
| and for dashboards. Every non-trivial thing is then an
| AppDaemon[1] app running in a separate VM on the same machine.
| I have zwave devices rather than zignee so I use zwavejs2mqtt
| on raspberry pi's in various locations around the house (soon
| to be replaced with tiny Atom machines).
| sleepingadmin wrote:
| An upcoming project of mine is to setup magic mirror:
| https://magicmirror.builders/
|
| Then start moving my other stuff onto the rpi as well like pihole
| for example.
|
| I wonder if RPI has a zigbee module or similar for automation. It
| doesn't seem like it? Anyone ever find anything like that?
| atsmyles wrote:
| Jeff has it covered (It's coming soon):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJFsZL5CTgM
| jvlier wrote:
| Take a look at Zigbee2MQTT. Works on Pi with Zigbee USB sticks.
| Integrates with Home Assistant.
| Donckele wrote:
| I have the ARP1600 board which has an xbee slot plus a bunch of
| other useful stuff.
|
| https://www.waveshare.com/arpi600.htm
| sirtaj wrote:
| You can use a USB module, or wifi-zigbee bridge devices from
| vendors like Sonoff are also supported.
| cryo wrote:
| Beside several USB dongle options there is the RaspBee II
| module for the io header https://phoscon.de/en/raspbee2
| klft wrote:
| The Book "Control Your Home with Raspberry Pi" by Koen Vervloesem
| is excellent imho. His approach centers around mqtt and he shows
| how to connect ZigBee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth and 433.92 MHz devices.
| He is very into security, showing how all communication is
| secured via TLS. He also shows how to setup VPN so you can access
| your home automation system securely from outside.
| krnlpnc wrote:
| I find running my home servers on USFF x86_64 systems to be much
| more reliable. You can find them used for the same price as a
| kitted out raspberry pi, and they are faster, have more ram, and
| more durable disks.
|
| I like USFF because it's essentially laptop components in a mini
| desktop case. With power saving features turned on (currently I
| force all power saving features on using powertop) they don't use
| many watts.
|
| I don't rely on raspberry pi for anything that needs to run 24x7
| because of sd card wear and the hassle of downtime and
| replacing/reflashing/reconfiguring a new card causes.
| justin66 wrote:
| > I don't rely on raspberry pi for anything that needs to run
| 24x7 because of sd card wear and the hassle of downtime and
| replacing/reflashing/reconfiguring a new card causes.
|
| One can always use an SSD. They work great.
| krnlpnc wrote:
| Indeed, my USFF has an m.2 :)
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