Home assistant

[Pocster]

Considering migrating away from homeseer ( always hated it running in windows )to home assistant green .

Want to move over zigbee devices 1 at a time - so I can test and be confident.

This doable ? . Any home assistant people here ?

Thinking to try node red 

Edited December 7, 2023 by Pocster

[Sparrowhawk]

That's doable. I went with zigbee2mqtt instead of nodered but I'm not doing any automation.

[billt]

You can run Homeseer under Linux. Mine runs on a Raspberry Pi 4. It also has an instance of Home Assistant running on it, an old version. With that version you had to delve into yaml for anything but the simplest stuff so I haven't played with it much. It may have improved since then.

 

One thing that I did find was that it could talk to DeConz at the same time as HomeSeer, so if you're using DeConz it should see all your Zigbee devices and you can control them from both HomeSeer and Home Assistant. I've moved to ZigBee2MQTT and MCSMQTT so Home Assistant no longer sees Zigbee devices.

[Pocster]

5 hours ago, billt said:

You can run Homeseer under Linux. Mine runs on a Raspberry Pi 4. It also has an instance of Home Assistant running on it, an old version. With that version you had to delve into yaml for anything but the simplest stuff so I haven't played with it much. It may have improved since then.

 

One thing that I did find was that it could talk to DeConz at the same time as HomeSeer, so if you're using DeConz it should see all your Zigbee devices and you can control them from both HomeSeer and Home Assistant. I've moved to ZigBee2MQTT and MCSMQTT so Home Assistant no longer sees Zigbee devices.

Thanks . That’s handy to know . 
Do you find home assistant stable ?

Homeseer on windows always has issues when windows decides it’s update time .

What’s the advantage of zigbee2mqtt over just home assistant seeing zigbee devices ?

 

I also use blue iris - really good but again windows based . I believe an “ equivalent “ is frigate ???

 

[joth]

2 hours ago, Pocster said:

I also use blue iris - really good but again windows based . I believe an “ equivalent “ is frigate ???

It's hard to call it an equivalent as frigate is far more limited functionality, but for me that's a real plus as frigate does everything I need in an easy to manage package, with massively less grunty CPU and power consumption.

Get an edgetpu for it though if you possibly can. Keep blueiris about for doing device discovery on new cameras, it's the best I found for that. 

Articles rave that frigate must be run "bare metal" but IME inside docker is just fine. I do have the edge tpu though. 

 

 

[oliwoodings]

5 hours ago, Pocster said:

Thanks . That’s handy to know . 
Do you find home assistant stable ?

Homeseer on windows always has issues when windows decides it’s update time .

What’s the advantage of zigbee2mqtt over just home assistant seeing zigbee devices ?

 

I also use blue iris - really good but again windows based . I believe an “ equivalent “ is frigate ???

 

One advantage of Zigbee2mqtt is that your ZigBee network doesn't restart (and temporarily go offline) when you restart home assistant.

 

I've got home assistant running on a raspberry pi 4 and I'm very impressed. The UI is very easy to use, I've got some quite advanced stuff running without having to resort to custom YAML config yet. I also found a great backup add-on that syncs backups into Google drive for disaster recovery.

[Pocster]

4 hours ago, joth said:

It's hard to call it an equivalent as frigate is far more limited functionality, but for me that's a real plus as frigate does everything I need in an easy to manage package, with massively less grunty CPU and power consumption.

Get an edgetpu for it though if you possibly can. Keep blueiris about for doing device discovery on new cameras, it's the best I found for that. 

Articles rave that frigate must be run "bare metal" but IME inside docker is just fine. I do have the edge tpu though. 

 

 

Didn’t know about the edge tpu . For my cameras I don’t really need ( yet ! ) any advanced object detection / ML - just standard zone / masking for movement. I use that to control lighting ; far better than 20 movement sensors in a room .

Really want to bin my windows based system . So slowly migrating across is the plan . All must happen without SWMBO noticing !!! 

[Pocster]

1 hour ago, oliwoodings said:

One advantage of Zigbee2mqtt is that your ZigBee network doesn't restart (and temporarily go offline) when you restart home assistant.

Does that matter ? . The mesh just rebuilds anyway .

What I mean is ; even if the zigbee mesh stays intact no HA processing is going to happen until home assistant is back up.

Or is it you’re simply trying to minimise the ‘down’ time ?

Edited December 8, 2023 by Pocster

[Sparrowhawk]

31 minutes ago, Pocster said:

Really want to bin my windows based system . So slowly migrating across is the plan . All must happen without SWMBO noticing !!! 

Get yourself something like this and HomeAssistant - and anything else you want to run - will run faster than on a Pi. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/386317625023

 

I installed Proxmox first, then HomeAssistant inside that. It's been great.

 

Edit: £69 is about right to pay. Prices are higher pre-Christmas on many listings

Edit 2: This is the one I have for £10 less https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/176078465130

Edited December 8, 2023 by Sparrowhawk

[Pocster]

6 minutes ago, Sparrowhawk said:

Get yourself something like this and HomeAssistant - and anything else you want to run - will run faster than on a Pi. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/386317625023

 

I installed Proxmox first, then HomeAssistant inside that. It's been great.

 

Edit: £69 is about right to pay. Prices are higher pre-Christmas on many listings

Gone for home assistant green as an out of the box solution . Did consider some kind of NUC . Had 2 modern i7 Nucs before ( mame and homeseer ) - both failed out of warranty 😕

I could offload my ip camera stuff to my Synology nas ( been rock solid ) but resent paying a license for cameras 

[oliwoodings]

10 hours ago, Pocster said:

Does that matter ? . The mesh just rebuilds anyway .

What I mean is ; even if the zigbee mesh stays intact no HA processing is going to happen until home assistant is back up.

Or is it you’re simply trying to minimise the ‘down’ time ?

Minimising down time is one benefit, yes. In general, Zigbee2mqtt is better for the more advanced/power use cases, while ZHA (the built in home assistant ZigBee integration) is easier for the simpler stuff.

[Pocster]

Changed my mind to an o droid m1