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.
Best card: use weather.gov’s gifs to create easy radar
Ex:
type: picture image: https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/standard/KLOT_loop.gif tap_action: action: url url_path: https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=41.8832&lon=-87.6324We moved off a pi onto a proxmox server for better storage etc.
Best cards for the dashboard are the cards that matter most to you. We have our solar stuff, and some switches that we use most, as well as the camera feed for the gate.
As for presence detection, the app has your location and a home/away entity that might be what you are looking for?
That’s exactly what I’m doing as well. Got my VM set up, HAOS installed and bluetooth up and running. Now I’m starting to add my stuff already in my house and I’m looking for good ways to do it. I’ve also added it to tailscale and can access it from my phone.
It’s SOOOO much faster than the Pi.
Maybe get some metrics going with Grafana, makes exploring your data much easier
Tried it a bit, didn’t get very far but will have a look again. Very good tool to have some knowledge about.
One learning I had was to prefer devices that used AAA. A lot of the smart wireless devices use button batteries. The pro is that they are smaller but it is annoying finding, ordering and replacing those batteries. AAA on the other hand is way easier to source and you can get rechargeable ones.
Most of the ThirdReality zigbee stuff uses AAA batteries so huge props to them.
I actually just set up home assistant today and I personally like using a VM. Feels the most straight forward to me. I’m not a huge fan of docker, mostly cause it feels more complicated than it should be. Thats just me though. Either baremetal or in a VM is the way I like to do things, not just home assistant.
Get something small, maybe something like a Lenovo ThinkCentre mini. Put Proxmox on it and install HAOS as a VM. Then when you want to add software, add them as LXC containers on the Proxmox host. Like Z-wave, MQTT, ESPHome, zigbee, etc. I really like having things in separate containers so that way I can work on things separately. If I need to restart the HAOS VM, it’s a lot faster because my entire Z-wave network doesn’t have to restart.
Avoid adding things that require cloud access. I have to have a damned good use case before I add anything that requires Internet access.
Oh and I like this place: https://cloudfree.shop/
Avoid using device IDs in automations, use entity IDs instead.
Good tip. Thanks.
Is it better to keep MQTT, Zigbee etc in containers rather than in HAOS itself? Am I not just creating an upgrade/dependency mess for myself?
I think both of these ways are good and valid in their own way, they both have upsides and downsides. For me, having things separated is working well. I especially like being able to reboot HAOS more frequently and as soon as it comes back up all my Z-wave devices are ready to go. Back when I ran Z-wave inside of HAOS it took a lot longer for the Z-wave network to calm down and be ready after a reboot.
Well they killed off HA Core, so there’s that.
Make sure you keep regular backups, and move some off device. That’s about it.
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