early_riser

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.

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.

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.

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

We've been having trouble with ~~rodents (I assume squirrels)~~ in the crawl spaces on our second floor. I decided to stick a PIR sensor on the door to see if I could catch any movement, and sure enough, a bunch of movement around 1 AM this morning. (Correction, it was a possum, which makes sense in hindsight as they're nocturnal).

I've been using the same Raspberry Pi 4 to host HA for years. It's worked well enough, but I worry about the stability of the SD card. I'm no stranger to cards that fail suddenly. Had one fail on another Pi just yesterday.

The various HA hardware offerings (Green/Yellow) use more stable flash storage. Can I swap out one hub for another? If so, how difficult is it? What would I be gaining or giving up by going with HA's offering? I know the Yellow has a built-in zigbee radio and PoE, but you need to buy a Pi compute module. There are also fewer USB ports on both the yellow and the green compared to the pi.

I know I could use any computer to host HA, and thus gain arbitrarily performant storage/memory/other stuff. Is there any advantage to, say, having more storage? What exactly is HA storing besides the history of entity states?

First, I have a Kwikset Homeconnect 620 deadbolt. It locks and unlocks fine. I can add codes via the keypad itself but the manual recommends using the smart home hub the lock is paired with, which is HA of course.

I don't see a way to do this in the Z-Wave JS UI.

Second question: I'm looking for a DLNA speaker to use for TTS announcements. I really wish I could just pair a bluetooth speaker with the raspberry pi that HA is running on, but that seems to be difficult to impossible, which is surprising. Is there an integrated (as in not a puck with a 3.5 mm jack) DLNA speaker that y'all would recommend?

Are any of you aware of any of the following. I don't think I've ever seen these but they seem like no-brainers to me:

• A zigbee/z-wave/matter over thread E-ink display for arbitrary visual or text output. E-Ink sips power, which would be perfect for these low power protocols.

• Status lights, also running on the above protocols. By this I mean RGB LED arrays that I can program to display different colors to indicate different statuses of things around the home. Like red for bathroom occupied and green for bathroom free, etc. Yes I could get light bulbs to do this but I don't want to use the same thing for both status and regular illumination. This nightlight comes tantalizingly close. Maybe I'm thinking too hard about this? I guess I could just use LED strips, but I'll leave this here in case anyone has any ideas.

UPDATE:

Regarding the granting and revoking of user codes for the lock, I still can't find anything in the Z-Wave UI, but there's an action that can be triggered from developer tools which in tern can by scripted.