Based on https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt/releases/tag/1.38.0

I don't have yet any preferences. Cheap, easy to set up, secure. What do you use and can recommend?

I woke up this morning at 6 am with IBS cramps. I tried to go back to bed but I'd woken fully up so by half 7 I was sat at my PC with a brew for some uninterrupted tinkering.

My espresence has been a bit finicky since ai set it up. I've been moving the nodes around to find better positions with slight improvements but nothing making it properly stable.

Well this morning was even worse than usual. I'm sat in my front room with my sensor flitting between the floor above and below me but never on the floor I'm on.

I moved the sensors again. I played with dwell time. I changed "wait until" up. I even dived into the rabbit hole of tuning the base stations by increasing rssi and absorbsion, which actually seemed to do the best at improving it.

So at this point my phone has been sitting on the desk for a few hours while I fine tune all this, when my wife comes down the stairs. Her beacon is firmly set to "frontroom" when she sits down but mine is bouncing around the house. Odd.

Then I finally figured it out!

The damn phone is sat on a wireless charging stand on my desk. This must be interfering with my Bluetooth!

I take my phone off the stand and voila, it's in a stable place in espresence.

So that's how I wasted 2 hours this morning.

I say wasted, I did manage to get it more stable on the charging stand before I realised, and this seems to have helped it's stability when it's off the stand. In fact, all my messing about this morning has made espresence correctly report my location ever since.

Summary:

This video is about creating better smart home automations. The video introduces 6 heuristics that the creator uses to evaluate automations. These heuristics are:

• Insider Knowledge: Automations should not require users to have any special knowledge to use them.
• Anti-ambiguous: Automations should be clear and easy to understand what they do.
• Failsafe: Automations should not cause any harm or negative consequences.
• All or Nothing: Automations should allow users to easily opt in or out of the experience.
• Accessibility: Automations should be usable by everyone in the household.
• Learnable: Automations should be easy for users to learn and understand how to use them.

The creator argues that automations should be designed to be used by everyone in the household, not just the person who created them. The video uses the example of an automation that dims the lights and closes the blinds when a TV is turned on. This automation would be inconvenient if someone wanted to watch TV during the day, and it would violate the All or Nothing heuristic.

The creator proposes a solution to this problem by adding a toggle switch that allows users to enable or disable the automation. The automation also includes a voice message that announces what actions can be taken. This solution satisfies all of the heuristics and makes the automation more user-friendly.

The video concludes by asking viewers for their feedback on the heuristics and whether they can think of any other important heuristics that should be considered.

I’m solidly leaning towards a Schlage Connect Lock due to its local only Zwave capabilities (which has the benefit of also extending battery life). I was strongly considering the Aqara U100 for its many features, but based on what I’ve seen I can foresee it being a nightmare to get working locally with home assistant and the need for a phone app makes me fear for long term support.

I use the Schlage Encode for other houses and love the way it looks and how easy it is to setup and use. I really wish they would make a Zwave version with the same hardware.

So before I jump in and buy the Schlage Connect, is there anybody who has experience with either of the locks I’ve mentioned? Feel free to chime in if you have a different lock that you think beats out these.

I'm trying to automate my dumb roomba. For this I ideally need a couple of buttons. I'm lost at how to add another button, that would have a different name and a different sent byte.

Additional question - to get info from the roomba (charging, battery, etc.) I need to send a similar byte series and then receive two unsigned bytes. I have no idea how to do that.

Roomba documentation: https://efcms.engr.utk.edu/ef230-2021-01/projects/roomba-s/create_2_Open_Interface_Spec.pdf

Since my air fryer notification I've bought 2 more Esp32 Dev boards from The Greal Mall of China- AliExpress. A couple days later I'd read about MMwave sensors and purchased a couple of those too.

A week later and they land a day after each other. I got home today and found 2 MMwave sensors on the kitchen table.

I had half an hour before I had to pick the kids up so I tried to wire and flash it.

The first problem was the writing. I'm 40 now but always had awesome vision, so shit like this just shows me how much it's actually deteriorated. I had to get my phone out and zoom in to work out where to plug in my wires.

I managed to plug shit in and flash the basic firmware on the board, and managed to add some basic code I'd found for my board when I searched using it's full AliExpress name.

I left with a sensor running in HA happy it was that easy. But...

I did some digging, because all I was getting in HA was an occupancy On status, no variance or info.

I found that when I just searched for the sensor without HLK at the beginning or whatever was at the end, there was loads of info. I found a GitHub full of code for my sensor and happily added it to my esp32.

First I had an issue OTA flashing with some password issue, so I flashed it over USB and it worked, I had new sensors in HA! The problem was that they were unresponsive.

I'd positioned it at this point and figured the Dupont wires I used had probably come loose. When I unplugged and replugged it all, success

This thing is awesome. It could see me at my computer and I must have been only just visible to it, I was sat kinda beside it, must have amazing peripheral vision.

Since I've got it going it's detected occupancy throughout. I was watching it pick up my wife just watching TV, unlike my aqara ZigBee one.

My worry is that it'll take a while fine tuning it to filter out the cats. I'm hoping to use it with my espresence setup to make sofa-sleeping more chill. I don't want lights popping on and off when I'm snoring and my wife gets up, but I do want the lights off when we're both in bed.

I need to fine tune the espresence though, or rely on it less. It seems like it's more like Room Assistant than I thought and I flit around the house in Bluetooth Land. I've managed to improve it by moving the sensors and turning my HA beacon to High from Medium and up to Low Latency.

I can set up another MMwave sensor but I'm gonna move my front room aqara to the bedroom and see if I need any.

I might try a pressure sensor for the bed next, or maybe see if I can run a Squeezebox node from it.

"Hur Hur that's what a timer on your phone is for dude"

Yeah but this was a smart plug that was going dusty in a drawer!

Anyway it's not the notification that makes my brain tickle in that special way, but the fact that my HA takes note of who was in the kitchen when the air fryer was started and only notifies the floor with that person on when it's done.

Now I've worked that logic out with a silly Air Fryer notification I can reuse it in all my other automations.

It was a long running project, but I finally did it. I built what I'm calling a smart mailbox that communicates the presence of mail locally with Home Assistant via ESPHome.

Parts:

• Pine plank roughly the width of my mailbox
• Treated pine plank for mounting
• Thin sheet of perspex or similar transparent plastic
• 2x VCNL4010 proximity sensor
• ESP32 dev board with antenna
• Bigger antenna
• Prototype board
• 2.54mm pitch JST connectors
• 2.54mm pitch pin header sockets
• 18650 battery
• 18650 Type-C charging module
• Battery holder
• 2x 5V 1.5W solar panels
• MCP1700-3302E LDO regulator
• 100uF electrolytic capacitor
• 100nF ceramic capacitor
• Resistors... I think I ended up using a 1 MOhm and a 330 kOhm
• Weatherproof junction box
• Nylon screw spacers
• Cable glands
• 12mm waterproof button
• Various cables and wires
• Paint and polyurethane spray to weatherproof the wood

Tools:

• Soldering iron
• Router for cutting grooves in wood
• Drill and hole saw bits
• Various files and sandpaper

For a start, I followed this guide to get me started on the power delivery portion, but I ended up using much higher valued resistors since I found that I was losing more battery charge through the voltage divider than I was from the ESP32 or proximity sensors.

Once I'd tested the concept with the parts just laying in a jumble on the table, it was time to get to work.

I started by cutting a plank of pine to fit my mailbox, chamfering the ends to make space for the metal joins. I routed out some spaces for the tops of the bolts that hold the mailbox down.

Measured out where the sensors should go, along with a surrounding space to screw down some little perspex windows to cover them. The idea I wanted was for the mail to be able to slide over the sensors without getting caught on them, as well as to protect them from dust.

Routed out the dents and cleaned them up with a chisel and sandpaper. Cut the perspex to shape for a test fit.

On the other side, I routed out a notch for the cable to access the sensors.

I had originally planned to just solder wires into the sensors, but then I realised JST connectors would fit perfectly into the sensors. This meant I had to widen the holes somewhat, which I did with a small chisel and file.

I got a bit lazy with making screw holes to hold down the perspex, so they're not in as neat a place as I'd like. If I did this again I'd measure properly for their placement. Still, with countersinking they hold down the perspex well and nothing sticks up for mail to get caught on.

I also got started on making a housing for the solar panels. I used the router to carve out a 1-2mm area for them to sit in, and a much deeper ditch linking the two terminals, which you'll see in a later picture. For now, here's how they look sitting in it.

Wiring up the prototype board was next. Again, see the article I linked above for how this works. I used pin headers to allow the ESP32 dev board to be slotted in and out, just in case I ever needed to take it out for replacement or reprogramming. Also the JSTs on the prototype board are for connecting the battery (top left), connecting the solar panels (bottom left), providing power to the sensors (bottom right) and clock and data lines for the sensors (top right). Since the sensors are both using the same I2C bus address and cannot be configured otherwise, I had to run two clock and data lines, but if I'd found sensors that could have different addresses I could have just used one of each. I didn't take a photo of the board at this stage, but I later added another header to connect a button to reset the ESP32 from the outside.

I also made the data and power cable for the sensor board.

The solar panel housing and 'sensor plate' were both painted and treated with polyurethane spray to protect them from rain and humidity.

And the panels themselves were sealed in with a tonne of silicone. It made a real mess, but I'm confident no water is going to get in there.

I drilled holes in the weatherproof box to fix the cable glands and the weatherproof button. In the case of the solar panel wire, I had opted to buy speaker wire since I figured it would be easier to run in the channel between the two solar panels, being flat. But that also made it not really fit the cable glands that great. I ended up stripping some of the outer sheath off some 2 wire power cable I had, and wrapping that around the part of the speaker wire that gets clamped in the glands, just to make a reasonable seal. These all were on the side I decided I would mount at the bottom, so water wouldn't be able to easily fall into the box.

Final test fit. I later used epoxy glue to glue down the nylon headers and the battery holder inside the box. This means the prototype board can also be easily removed, as can the ESP32 dev board and the battery, but the battery holder cannot. Let's hope I never have to get that thing out.

The mailbox itself also needed a hole in the bottom for the sensor cable to come out. After drilling a hole and filing it into a square shape, I cut some rubber grommet strip to size and fitted it around the hole, with some marine silicone adhesive to protect the sharp metal edges from water and to hold the grommet strip in place.

I'd drilled some holes in the brick wall my mailbox sits upon for masonry anchors, and this piece of treated pine got the last of my polyurethane spray, just in case.

Using a two pieces of the leftover perspex glued together, I made an internal mount for the antenna, figuring it would be best to not have the thing either floating around freely inside the box or sticking out the side where people could potentially break it off.

Finally, after weeks of off and on work, it was ready to install.

The ESPHome coding used my VCNL4010 component, and if anyone is interested I can share it but it's kinda a large file. I had originally planned to just use Arduino IDE and talk directly to MQTT, in order to keep things simple and just use the Adafruit VCNL4010 library, but in the end elected to use ESPHome. For, among other things, its support for over the air updates.

This is surely common knowledge for some of you but I thought I'd share a story, as this just made me cringe

I never understood the point in the option to "run actions in parallel" I thought if I had a list of actions to complete, HA makes it through them almost instantly, and with the varying latency of each action they wouldn't complete at the same time anyways.

Then I tested my smoke alarm notification that I have had running for over a year.

It went-

If: list of smoke alarms detects smoke Then: Turn on the lamp next to my bed, then Send a notification to my phone.

I had made an error when setting up the lamp entity. (I made it full brightness on both scales, can only use one) this stopped the automation before the notification went out to my phone.

If it's important that the automation makes it to the end, run in parallel!

Talk about a false sense of security

I've got some decent window blinds at my house (tilt as well as roll-up and -down), but I didn't want to shell out another couple hundred per-window to make them "smart", let alone being tied to a cloud service that could spontaneous combust any day now...

I've done numerous searches, but have not found anything decent that I could use to retrofit to add any sort of automation to these blinds. The best I could find were purpose-built and/or roller shades.

Is anyone here aware of any projects or products that can be added to a set of blinds to locally automate any of their features? I'm running latest stable Home Assistant in a container, with HACS, if that helps.

TIA!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15144957

Can anyone help me figure out Frigate/go2rtc

I have two cameras in Frigate.

One is a Raspberry Pi 3 running Monocle server, and this stopped working in Frigate some time back (driveway). The second is a Galayou G7 (nursery). The nursery camera is the one I am concerned about with this post.

Problem: Up until a month or two ago (I must have ran an update but I don't know) the audio from the Galayou camera worked in Home Assistant. I'd like to get that working again. Some searching led me to try setting up go2rtc in my config.

Here is my config before making any changes:

mqtt:
  host: 192.168.1.10
cameras:
  nursery:
    ffmpeg:
      inputs:
        - path: rtsp://redacted:redacted@192.168.1.241:554/live/ch1
          roles:
            - detect
    detect:
      width: 1280
      height: 720
  driveway:
    ffmpeg:
      inputs:
        - path: rtsp://192.168.1.240:554/recording/7824851880350319106/replay?trackid=8836591
          roles:
            - detect
    detect:
      width: 1920
      height: 1080

This currently provides only jsmpeg video in Frigate. If I add something like this to the end:

go2rtc:
  streams:
    nursery:
      - rtsp://redacted:redacted@192.168.1.241:554/live/ch1

this adds mse and webrtc as options in Frigate. But, mse plays only video, no audio. And webrtc loads neither audio nor video. I have tried adding lines like - "ffmpeg:nursery#video=h264#audio=aac" and also with opus but to no avail.

Finally, if I ffplay rtsp://redacted:redacted@192.168.1.241:554/live/ch1 it loads audio/video without a problem. I'm also able to connect via ONVIF at onvif://192.168.1.241:8899 from onvif-gui.

So, something is wrong in my Frigate config, and I don't know what. I'm hoping someone here is a little more familiar and can give me a pointer or two here?

Update: Here is the fix, in case anyone comes across this later:

go2rtc:
  streams:
    nursery:
      - "ffmpeg:rtsp://redacted@192.168.1.241:554/live/ch1#video=copy#audio=copy#audio=opus"
  webrtc:
    candidates:
      - <server-ip>:8555

The webrtc section got webrtc to work in the Frigate and video back in HASS. The #audio=copy#audio=opus got audio working in webrtc.

This week I've been playing with Espresence, which for anyone that doesn't know, is a program that runs on an ESP32 and tracks Bluetooth. It then has a guess where you are based upon the strength of the signal.

So a little backstory, I recently wiped out my HA server and didn't have a backup so I've started from scratch. Since I've started from scratch I've been avoiding Node Red and just using the HA automations, but I am a NR boy at heart.

Previously my bathroom light automation in NR was a massive flow of door, motion, leak sensors.

When I added espresence I decided to reinstall NR to add these new sensors into my automations, and found the Binary Sensor node, so I had a play and managed to make a Front Room Presence binary sensor.

"This is pretty good" I thought and made another for my bathroom, taking in all the sensors I used previously. But this time they triggered a binary sensor instead of the lights.

Now I have the binary sensor triggering the light automation, with extras here and there (like guest mode being on, trigger the lights from the hallway sensor instead of the bathroom sensor. The light automation looks much cleaner and presence is all done on one page.

So I'm using the binary sensor in 2 ways here, as an addition to the motion sensor in my front room, and as a replacement for a full blown automation.

Functionally it's not really any different to using an input boolean helper, but I can make this binary in NR itself.

Edit: Gotchas

So I should probably tell you about the big Gotcha in creating a Binary in Node Red.

You need to set the msg. from string to Boolean. So for each binary you need a Boolean true and a Boolean false nose to set it off and on. Everything else was pretty simple

Next school year, my son will be left home after school for a few hours while my wife and I are at work. I'm looking for a way to detect when he's home and have the front door unlock (among other automation scripts that are in place).

I came across this post and was going to get the Tile Pro as it seemed to check off all my requirements:

• I could put it in his backpack where it can be forgotten.
• long battery life.
• Through the Home Assistant integration, it can trigger when it gets in range.
• It also has a few other beneficial things, so I was thinking of putting one on each of our bicycles in case they're ever stolen. Hell, I could look into putting one on my cat's collar in case she ever gets out.

Then I came across some concerning articles regarding data harvesting. The whole reason I started self-hosting was to prevent data harvesting, so it seems like the Tile is a non-starter for me.

Has anyone been in this (or a similar) situation? Mainly, I'm looking for a device I can put in my son's backpack that can trigger when he's within range, so the house will open for him. BLE seems like it might be a solution, though I run my server on an old Dell r720 enterprise server in my basement, so I don't currently have Bluetooth functionality (and it's pretty far away from the front door, 20+ feet), though getting that is not a dealbreaker for me.

• Addendum: To people saying just get a key: we have a key for him. I have a monolith sized server in my basement that automates most everything in my house these days, and was curious if anyone had set up something similar to what I was thinking. Home automation is very much a hobby, and I'm using it to learn new things.

I tried my hand at rigging a proximity sensor to the water meter in my house. Sadly it doesn’t have the spinning magnet for the sensor to pick up.

I looked into other options for pulling data from the meter, but for each method, my very antiquated meter had a complication that would prevent it from working.

TLDR: Any recommendations for a home water meter that’s local and integrates well with home assistant?

I’m going to check with my water company first, but likely will remove the old meter and replumb a new “smart” meter and an automated shut off valve into the water supply. I believe the current meter is leftover from before the utility added new meters further upstream, so I’d rather get rid of the rusty piece of junk anyway.

Well I totally borked my ZigBee network, and it looks like I'll need to factory reset and re-pair everything. I ignored the warning, and attempted a channel change. Lost everything and can't get any device to connect.

So since I need to do this, what is everyone's preference of ZHA vs Z2M? I was on ZHA, but am I missing anything on the other side?

I've been in the HA world since the time the government placed the world under house arrest. Since then I've seen all sorts of amazing things people can do with an esp32 device.

So I'm late to the game. I always thought it may become a dangerous rabbit hole so I've just avoided it. But apparently I have 4 coming today so it's about time to ask you guys what you do.

My first project was gonna be getting some Bluetooth tracking going on around the house to get some room prescence going on.

I also read I can make some seat/bed sensors with a little wire, aluminium foil, paper and a folder-insert, that sounds like it could be fun.

I have a breadboard and a bunch of components I bought when I first got a Pi. I don't know how compatible these components are with esp32s or what the hell I can do.

I don't have a soldering iron (yet).

So basically: noob post, gimme some easy projects that don't require a lot, or wow me with your esp projects.

I'm struggling to find the easiest solution to connect a set of active speakers that have BT/Optical (Toslink)/Coax. I currently use a tablet to stream Deezer via BT, but I want to be able to use them in Music Assistant. I tried Bubblepnp on the tablet, but it's too slow for that, it wasn't reliable.

I don't want to spend 100s of dollars on e.g. Sonos stuff. I see Squeezelite as a good option, but I'm unsure how to connect an SPDIF speaker. The docs say you can connect to one of the pins. Do I just cut the plug of an SPDIF cable and then connect to it?

I don't have a 3D printer, ideally I want a box around it.

Ideally there's an out-of-the-box solution. Any tips or help appreciated.

More info https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt/releases/tag/1.37.1

This seemed more balanced and upbeat than other reporting on the topic.

I'm always happy to see support for Matter and increased awareness.

The more we expect matter devices and insist on them, the better things get for consumers.

I posted this issue to HA's forums and received no response, hoping someone here has some idea to help.

I have a lot of TP-Link Kasa devices in my home. When I first installed HA, it automatically discovered all of them. I was using a 4-year-old TP-Link Deco mesh system at the time.

For reasons unrelated to HA, I had to replace that system. I replaced it with a newer TP-Link Deco system, X55. Once that was installed, HA could no longer access the Kasa devices. It still sees all my other IoT devices.

First, I removed all the Kasa devices from HA and tried to rediscover them; no luck. I tried using each device’s IP address for the host to discover them. When I used 192.168.68.67, e.g., I got this error message:

Connection error: Unable to connect to the device: 192.168.68.67:9999: [Erno 113] Connect call failed (‘192.168.68.67’, 9999)

I rebooted at all places, including resetting a couple of the Kasa devices to see if that worked. My sneaking suspicion was that this new Deco system has a Smart Devices Manager in the app, which only recognizes my Kasa devices on my network (none of the other IoT devices), and somehow that’s interfering with HA’s access to these devices.

Since then, I managed to make some progress, but not much. I managed to remove my Kasa devices from the Deco app management by “removing” each one. This deleted the custom name for each so that now each shows as its generic model type on my network (e.g., KL110).

After I did that, HA found nine of the 14 devices automatically. It still won’t find the other five. Every week or so, it discovers a new one on its own, so maybe someday it’ll find all of them.

However, I still get the error “Failed setup, will retry” for all of the ones it has found. When I reload, it goes through the initializing stage, then right back to “Failed setup, will retry.” I have debug logging on, but I don’t see any logs for these devices in my logs. When I go to a specific device, it indicates “No logbook events found.”

I’m still able to control these devices via the Kasa app, but I can’t incorporate them into any HA automations.

Any help or suggestions is much appreciated. Thanks!

Finally we find out what the failure was