Home Assistant

[penfold]

After looking again at smart home stuff and still not decided on anything, I am kind of coming to the conclusion that a single brand will not do what I want without paying a stupid amount of money. As a result I've just installed Home Assistant for the second time. I did this previously on an old Raspberry Pi and if I remember correctly, I was able to set it up to connect to the Google Nest Mini I had a setup a simple automation. Anyway, fast forward and I have an old server I used to use for learning at home and I want to convert it into a NAS so I was looking at TrueNas when I discovered TrueNas Scale which also allows you to run Home Assistant as an App. So I have setup TrueNas, installed Home Assistant have gone to search for my network devices and it sees nothing. I did manage to get it to recognize my chrome cast, but I had to specify the IP address. Unfortunately, after I deleted it to try and force a discovery, now it doesn't even see the chromecast if I manually add the IP address.

 

Because I have not installed TrueNas and only 1 time for Home Assistant. I don't know if I need to configure some additional settings to get Home Assistant to discover my devices. Or even if there is any limit to running Home Assistant as an App in TrueNase Scale.

 

So my question, has anyone done this or can point me to a good walkthrough for getting this setup? Each time I see troubleshooting steps the first things being asked is what version are you running and on what type of system. As I am just playing around, I don't know if I have done something wrong or not. Pretty sure when I installed it on the Pi it was up and running in about 20 minutes with no issues.

[Aprice]

Not sure about running it on TrueNas, mine is running on a Pi4 with no issues. Although I have been eying up the new HA green box which seems quite reasonably priced.

[Davit2005]

I have my HomeAssistant on the same subnet as all my smart stuff. There are a lot of integrations these days, I started setting up Alexa but I've since binned or given away all the Alexa devices in the hope to find a truly self hosted system reliant on the least amount of cloud services.

 

Get on YouTube would be my first bit of advice, channels such as the below.

Home Automation Guy

Smart Home Junkie

Everything Smart Home

 

I'd also suggest setting up a specific account for things like Google, Amazon, etc and not using your main account. For instance I have Gmail calendar shared from my main account to a dedicated account and that is what HomeAssistant connects to for updates to it's local calendar, then using those calendar events to trigger automations.

 

Starting down the Zigbee route now but looks like I need to move away from a docker instance of HomeAssistant running on a VM in Synology.

[penfold]

@Davit2005 - I was looking at Home Automation Guy. I am just looking at getting Home Assistant setup on something I already own. I don't want to be buying more things if I can help it. Especially if I only want to be playing with things at the minute. My thought is that I want to automate some things I have in the basement (something I thought about last year) and I'd like to keep things local if I can. HA seems to offer this by integrating different vendors so I can setup some automation.

 

I might see if I have a spare SD card so I can get it back on my old Pi to check if it is a problem with HA setup or my devices

[penfold]

OK, Something odd going on. I tried again this morning. Not expecting anything different. I deleted the Google integration, added it again specifying the IP address of the chromecast and this time it worked. Also it picked up on my Nest Mini I didn't enter also so it must have been auto discovered. I never did anything different which isn't filling me with confidence, but at least I know the steps & config were right yesterday:rolleyes:

[XiJ]

I’ve been running HA for a bit. First in a 1gb rpi4 now in a docker container.

 

I’m looking at a low cost 2nd server to run HA etc to enable easier connection / access to Bluetooth and zigbee etc. running on a proxmox based Linux container running docker confuses driver access etc. at least to me!

 

HA has all sorts of integrations, is getting more user friendly all the time and I now check any purchases against HA compatibility.

 

My favourite automation is telling me what colour bin day it is. One day I’ll get it to take the bin out itself !

[Davit2005]

I’ve been running HA for a bit. First in a 1gb rpi4 now in a docker container.

 

I’m looking at a low cost 2nd server to run HA etc to enable easier connection / access to Bluetooth and zigbee etc. running on a proxmox based Linux container running docker confuses driver access etc. at least to me!

 

HA has all sorts of integrations, is getting more user friendly all the time and I now check any purchases against HA compatibility.

 

My favourite automation is telling me what colour bin day it is. One day I’ll get it to take the bin out itself !

 

I'm trying to get Zigbee2mqtt working but as I have a VM on Synology which has a Docker containerized HomeAssistant I think it is going to be a big hassle to get it to work with USB Zigbee and Bluetooth dongles. I have a few docker hosts so I'm thinking of moving it over to get more flexibility. The thing I liked about the VM was it's ease of portability and backup potential whilst in a VM especially as I've invested a lot of time getting HA setup to where it is now.

Edited November 24, 2023 by Davit2005

[XiJ]

HA is fairly easy to move to be honest. I think even the docker. Version has a built in back up system. Just import when you spin up a new system I’ve done this and it worked pretty well.