homeassistant

We aren't too fond of cameras around here and there's almost always someone home so it's not really a necessity for us. Having said that, we've had a few cams for a while now and most important is the doorbell.

I'm certain for 95% of you I don't have to explain why I want the Amazon/Ring bell gone.

I run HA and have deployed Frigate separately to start messing with IP cams.

Here is my question? I understand that you can take the feed from the Reolink bell/cams and import it into Frigate from which I will send it over to my home assistant. For those of you who already do this, how offline is it? Did you need to set up any kind of reolink account to adjust settings or do the initial login? Does the camera try to call home occasionally? Is it fully offline?

I learned my lesson with Amazon. I want to control this doorbell myself and I'd to avoid video, audio, or logs exiting my network without me knowing.

How has the Reolink - Frigate - Home Assistant trio panned out for you?

I've got a cheap salt lamp with a LED inside and it runs on a 5V wall wart. I think it originally had a USB plug but I cut that off and connected it to an old 5V power supply.

I've never used esp32, but I've been doing some reading and it seems like an esp32-c6 will allow me to do this with ZigBee.

Does this sound reasonable? Are there other options I should consider?

A rain sensor just tells you if it's raining or not. A rain gauge will give you cumulative rainfall values. I know there are DIY projects to make HA-compatible gauges but I'd rather have something out of the box, at least in terms of hardware.

I found this on Amazon, and it appears to be be a clone of a more expensive station by Ambient Weather. It looks like it could be made to work with HA as it has a web interface, but I'm not sure if an app is required for setup. The rain gauge also doesn't seem super accurate, which is frustrating as that's the only thing I really care about.

Google announced the end of support for early Nest Thermostats in a support document earlier this year that largely flew under the radar. As of October 25, first and second generation units released in 2011 and 2012, respectively, will be unpaired and removed from the Google Nest or Google Home app.

Users will no longer be able to control their thermostats remotely via their smartphone, receive notifications, or change settings from a mobile device. End-of-support also disables third-party assistants and other cloud-based features including multi-device Eco mode and Nest Protect connectivity.

Ubiquiti is pretty good about HA integration, so I decided to take a chance buying one of their new line of sensors. It's a door/window sensor that also senses motion, light, temperature, humidity, and (somehow) leaks.

You either need their proprietary (boo) superlink hub or a U6 series access point for the sensors to work. I have the latter. Everything gets reported to HA immediately as expected. My only complaint is that you're unlikely to need or want every single sensor in the same place. I still don't know how the leak detection is supposed to work on a door sensor. It uses an uncommon battery size, and cramming all those sensors into a single package makes it an expensive purchase compared to other brands, especially if you purchase directly from Ubiquiti.

All in all it does what it's supposed to, and I suppose it's worth the cost if you need all those sensors in one place.

It would seem logical to name them for where they are and what they do. "Bathroom motion sensor", "Bedroom lamp", etc. However, I've found that, if it can move, it ends up moving sooner or later. My "bathroom" motion sensor is now in the upstairs family room, for example.

Moved into my own house again recently. I would like to get a lot of stuff automated like I had in my previous house.

Unfortunately, theres a lot if old wiring here and most switches have no neutrals in the box.

What is the current best option for smart switches (ideally dimmers) that dont require a neutral wire?

I'd prefer a non-wifi solution that doesnt require a proprietary hub but it seems like there are limited options anyway and I am having trouble finding almost any good options that dont require a neutral.

Anybody using anything they really like?

I got the Meross Smart Matter+Wi-Fi Thermostat MTS300 US running today.

In case anyone is curious about what gets exposed to Home Assistant, here it is!

The installation was some what haphazard. I think I was supposed to install with the Meross app. But I'm not sure if that actually was needed. I think I installed via scanning the Matter code in Home Assistant... and then later it appeared in the Meross app. 🤷

The Meross app exposes fan controls. Also child lock. You can also create a schedule in the Meross app. None of these features are visible in HA. (Also cannot control display brightness via HA. Sad.)

Side question: how do y'all create a schedule for your thermostats? I feel like I shouldn't use Meross' scheduling features and I should keep all the smarts in HA, right? I guess I should create Automations and trigger them based on time of day?

Another noob question: see the attached image of my thermostat. Would it be possible to switch it for a smart one? What would I have to check? If it is possible, what would you recommend? If is don't want any 3rd party app or account?

I'm looking for a minimalistic layout to control and see the status of blinds in the overview dashboard.

I am currently using the entity card and it works but the downside is that it doesn't show the current blind status. I could add a blind status entity but then the card becomes a lot taller. I wanted to see if anyone has any good layouts for their blinds that doesn't take up too much space and allows them to easily control and see their status (ie. open %).

Pretty much what I want is something that is like what is shown below but with like a 2nd line that shows what the current open % is.

I have had around a dozen smart bulbs/switches/plugs from three companies for 5-10 years now. Globe Suite, Meross, and 'C by GE' (General Electric). All three are dependent on their respective cloud services, and are integrated with Google Home. (I know, I know.... It's time to dump this crap, it's why I'm here) Globe Suite has been great tbh, but 'C by GE' is absolute trash, and one of the two Meross devices have now died, prompting a long awaited change.

My big sticking point is knowing where to start with hardware. I don't know much about the different communication protocols/methods or what to choose (zigbee? Z-wave? Do I need some sort of Hub? Can/should I just use a wifi connection like the current setup? 🤷), and I don't really know where to look to purchase smart devices that aren't cloud dependent. (buying from Canada)

Funds are tight so this'll be an over time project. For now I'm looking to replace three switches. One single pole. One 3-way. Ane one dimmer. Neutral wires are available at all three locations.

Later I'll be looking to replace 3 smart plugs. Adding current/power monitoring would be neat, but definitely not a priority as I have an Iotawatt at the pannel. After that 4 dimmable white light smart bulbs. Finally there's an RGBW LED controller that'll need replacing. The plugs, bulbs, and leds are all Globe Suite; I'm not in a major hurry to replace them as they've given me next to no trouble compared to the other two companies garbage.

Where do I start? Where do you guys buy hardware, and what manufacturers?

What should I be looking for in hardware I can integrate with HA and essentially firewall off from the internet?

Finally, how about things like sensors? (weather, motion, moisture, sound)

The next week or so I'll fire up an HA container just to poke around a bit more. That part I'm pretty confident in, it's just figuring out some hardware to go with it. Thanks for any advice :)

Hi. I'm currently rebuilding my setup from scratch, moving away from my old Pi. What's best practice these days? How would you do it? What cards are the best for the dashboard? How would you do presence detection (getting home), mqtt via ha, or stand alone?

Looking for good ideas, and possibly things to avoid.

TIA.

Partly because of your help, I now have a pretty decent HA set-up with lights and motion sensors. I was wondering if I could again pick your brain/ experience with the next step I need to take: add a camera.

A few days ago I bought a TAPO camera, and to my disappointment it was practically impossible to get it working without an app + account. Luckily I could return it.

I now want to avoid making the same mistake 😬 And I would love to hear how you approached this.

I am a dabbler in home automation and thinking about starting to get into lighting. I have heard mostly good things about the Philip Hue line and wanted to see what peoples thoughts are about it.

Our main current automation are a large number of Google Smart Speaker and Arlo video doorbells. Everything is working now on the Google ecosystem which I think Philip Hue will connect with. Our house is 100 years old which means that our possibilities to automate are lower than a new home since we have very few overhead lights, power outlets are at a premium (we have lots of power strips running through the house).

We are thinking about doing smart bulbs in some lamps which we can leave on and a chandalier. I think the biggest issue will leaving things always powered on.

At my insistence we bought a Canon laser all in one printer in 2022. It's turning out to be more trouble than it's worth, and it can't do some stuff that some family members need, like printing on thick card stock.

I do, however, like the fact that the Canon reports toner levels to HA. Is there a normie inkjet printer that also has this functionality and won't fleece us with BS ink subscriptions and lock us into using their ink?

I'd also like it to be JUST a printer, not an all-in-one. I'm looking at a dedicated scanner, which doesn't need an HA integration.

I wasn't a fan of HACS making a github account a requirement.

I understand the reasoning, but IMO it should be optional.

I've been getting by fine manually installing custom components, but some basic automation to this process would be nice., especially for updates.

Before I start on my own barebones addon for maintaining custom components, I figured I would ask around if any such thing already exists.

At the bare minimum an addon that serves as a frontend for git clone/pull plus moving the files into the appropriate folder. A bonus would be to display available updates with change logs attached.

The HACS searchable database is great, but I don't find it particularly necessary. Manually pasting a codeberg/github repo then clicking an Add button seems totally acceptable.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/22763407

Major AWS outage takes down Fortnite, Alexa, Snapchat, and more

The internet is down... well, if you use AWS services it would appear to be true.

Things such as Alexa (now working again?), Ring, etc are either slow or not responding whilst they try to get things running again

cross-posted from: https://awful.systems/post/6008914

A while back I played a round with the HASS Voice Assistant, and pretty easily got to a point where STT and TTS were working really well on my local installation. Also got the hardware to build wyoming satellites with wakeword recognition.

However, what kept me from going through the effort of setting everything up properly (and finally getting fucking Alexa out of my house) was the "all or nothing" approach HASS seemingly has to intent recognition. You either:

• use the build in Assistant conversation agent, which is a pain in the ass because it matches what your STT recognized 1:1, letter by letter, so it's almost impossible to actually get it to do something unless you spoke perfectly (and forget, for example, about putting something on your ToDo list; Todo, todo, To-Do,... are all not recognized, and have fun getting your STT to reliably generate the ToDo spelling!), or
• you slap a full-blown LLM behind it, either forcing you to again rely on a shitty company, or host the LLM locally; but even in the latter case and on decent (not H100, of course, but with a GPU at least) hardware, the results were slow and shit, and due to context size limitations, you can just forget about exposing all your entities to the LLM Agent.
• You also have the option of combining the two approaches; match exactly first, if no intent recognized, forward to LLM; but in practice, that just means that sometimes, you get what you wanted ("all lights off" with a 70% success rate, I'd say), and still a lot of the time you have to wait for ages for a response that may be correct, but often isn't from the LLM.

What I'd like is a third option, doing fuzzy matching on what the STT generated. Indeed, there seems to have been multiple options for that through rhasspy, but that project appears to be dead? The HASS integration has not been updated in over 4 years, and the rhasspy repos are archived as of earlier this month.

Besides, it was not entirely clear to me if you could just use the intent recognition part of the project, forgoing the rest in favor of what HASS already brings to the table.

At this point, I am willing to implement a custom conversation agent, but wanted to make sure first that I haven't simply missed an obvious setting/addon/... for HASS.

My questions are:

• are you using the HASS Voice Assistant without an LLM?
• if so, how do you get your intents to be recognized reliably?
• do you know of any setting/project/addon helping with that?

Cheers! Have a good start into the working week...!

Hey guys, Actually I'm pulling my hair because I can get my Nous A1Z plugs connected to Zigbee2MQTT, but I won't find them in the general Devices and Entities. They only show up under Zigbee2MQTT devices.

Also there are two groups, but I can't add more groups.

Thanks in advance.

What are people on Lemmy using for their home thermostats?

I'm in the US with a packaged HVAC system (cool+heat) and was looking to buy a new thermostat, but I wanted to make sure it's highly compatible with Home Assistant.

Ideally, I'm looking for something that speaks Matter over WiFi or Thread. I would like to mainly control it via HA. Everyone in my household are Android users (not totally sure if that's important?). Also, it would be nice if I didn't have to connect it to the cloud.

I was considering the Meross Smart Wi-Fi Thermostat, which seems to check all of the boxes. I was wondering if anyone here uses this thermostat.

Another one that seemed interesting was the Siterwell Smart Thermostat GS368M, although this was just announced very recently and who knows when/if it'll go on sale.

So the result is a camera that yells 'Doggo!' more or less at random.