Also: mains powered devices (lightbulbs, smart plugs, zigbee repeaters) will all act as a repeater in your mesh. Depending on your home it might help to add in a few of them. But keep in mind that this will not magically make your existing devices use them. When setting up your network always pair your permanent powered devices first so they can act as endpoints for your battery powered ones.
For the power state monitoring I can recommend this blueprint, which does everything for you (and maybe even more): https://github.com/leofabri/hassio_appliance-status-monitor
You can now use templates and still maintain the visual editor for the rest of the component. Very nice!
Do you use the default alarm clock? Is it possible there is some other app providing a wrong “unplug time”?
I don’t know if Home Assistant is so niche. Everyone who does some form of smart home comes to the point where there are several manufacturers forcing you to use their own app. If you’re lucky you can use something like Google Home or Siri to have a unified control interface, but these are usually very basic. You can try to stick to one system for as long as possible, but sooner or later that will fail. A system like Home Assistant is the inevitable solution to these problems and it is a very good thing that HA exists as a strong and open software to solve this problem.
I have an Intel NUC (3rd gen I think - it’s several years old by now) which runs Proxmox, which runs several VMs including Home Assistant on HAOS. The only thing I did was upgrade the RAM as the VMs eat this quickly…
Other services I run on this small box are AdGuard, Paperless-ngx, KitchenOwl, tt-rss and two Nightscout instances.
Absolutely. While I love fully automated solutions there is also stuff that needs an user interface more complex than just a button. I love how much easier it has become to create personalized dashboards that even can adjust themselves based on the situation.
Dashboards can get quite complicated and funnily enough TV remotes are not all the same. With a small userbase (it is by far not the most requested feature) it will be hard to maintain such a feature without just fulfilling a one-user-usecase.
ZHA works just as well. You just need to use the remote to pair Hue devices either way.
I am not sure how two synced HA instances (if that’s even possible) would help. You would need to allow your IoT devices to be accessible by the Home Assistant instance you want to use with your personal devices. If that seems like a risk to you, then why not run HA in the DMZ alltogether?
There are lots of cheap Zigbee (multi) buttons available. If you want something a little bit fancier I can 100% recommend Home Buttons. You can either build it yourself (3D printed enclosure, custom PCB) or buy one already built for you. They each fancy an e-ink display you can configure with Material Design Icons (or even custom text in case of the bigger one). They integrate into Home Assistant via MQTT and can be fully used for any automation you would like. You can even change the 4 or 6 button labels using Home Assistant.
I totally understand your concerns. We just don’t have such cold winters here in Germany. And I also understand your point more (also after having read your other comments). If the insulin vial in question is a spare it will most likely not being noticed if it freezes until it is needed.
In theory you could use the Bluetooth sensors of the companion app which can be used to detect BLE beacons. But that would require a special Bluetooth device that activates once a threshold temperature has been detected. Maybe such things exist (I’m thinking of (food) supply chain monitoring), but I am not aware of any.
I know this is technically not an answer to your question, but as a fellow T1 diabetic (for 20+ years) and dad to diabetic child (currently 2½ years old): Is this something that regularly happens to you? I don’t know where you live, but in over 20 years of being a T1 diabetic I never had a vial of regular insulin go bad. I don’t have to worry about the cost of insulin as my insurance would without any questions replace any medications gone bad for me, but I understand that this is a luxury not everyone shares.
There are products (but I have to assume you are aware of this) that can help you with the temperature safe transport of insulin for everyday use (basically insulated pouches with an integrated cooling pad). That may be something you can look into if this is something you need to worry about.
I hope it’s not just a coincidence. I would love to see Home Assistant as a smart speaker platform progress.
Image loading and sizing seems to be pretty broken in recent versions. I switched to Connect recently because it has become often impossible to see the content using Boost.
There are a few buttons around the house. For my wife (and kids to play with) the most important ones are the ones controlling the light in the bedroom. There is a motion sensor covering the door and wardrobe area which can be muted with a button (e.g. if the kids have snuck into our bed and we don’t want to wake them or if either one of us goes to bed later). We use mostly the IKEA Zigbee buttons.
We also have a great device called Home Buttons in our kitchen. It uses MQTT and has a fantastic battery life (using a 18650 rechargeable battery). It has an e-ink display and six buttons. I programmed it to display several things (you can use one MDI icon and a short text to display for each button) for everyday use, like switching some lights, displaying temperature and humidity and controlling the climate in our conservatory. You have to press a button for it to update (to save battery - even though it easily lasts months).
The main touch point though is the app. I built three dashboards:
But I also made Home Assistant send notifications to our smartphones for several events (dishwasher, washing machine, too hot / cold in the conservatory, low blood glucose levels, kids turning on the TV in the morning). Some of them offer to respond with an action others are just reminders that something needs to be done.
My wife appreciates especially the notifications I think because you don’t have to think about some things as they pop up when action is due and we both can more easily share the workload as she gets notified as well when I started the dishwasher without me needing to tell her. (This may sound like we’re not speaking to each other, but we’re just not saying things like I just started the dishwasher can you empty it later.)
If you don’t name the ad the app creator can’t contact his ad provider and change something about it either…
I think you need to complain to the company making your messaging app. If they don’t support webp Boost can’t do anything about it.
That is really a missing part of this whole thing. I get that I could build something myself, but I don’t want to have the hassle of doing it and keeping it working all the time (because I am able to build it, but not on a “works perfectly all the time” level). I really hope that sometime in the future there is a standard for smart speakers (and screens maybe) that allows me to add them to my cloud service of choice.
I also have several of these as a replacement for some Tuya sensors I added a power supply to because they ate through batteries. The Sonoff not only has a way better battery life, they also feel and look nicer and the readings are far better. The Tuya sensors were all off by several degrees and the Sonoff are way closer to the real temperature. I cannot recommend them enough.