Any suggestions for someone tech savvy enough to run a proxmox server for a handful of services, to get started with home assistant?
Can you replicate something like a Google home with voice commands?
I may or may not be getting a new house soon.
I’m good with electrical to replace switches with wireless ones. But what do you get? Where do you start and where do you end?
What about the WAF?
I saw LTT did smart switches in his house and it was a mess of incompatibilities.
Any good resources?
I don’t even know what I don’t know haha
HAOS literally has a proxmox iso for home assistant. Slap that baby on.
There are homebrew voice units, but you’ll need a beefier system than normal to process in house. If you have apple devices you can expose certain elements from HA to apple home (and keep others obscured) to use your watch / voice etc.
There are a lot of home assistant communities and they are all very very friendly. It’s a massive learning curve and we’re all working together
Look into ZWave and ZigBee mesh networks. I run Home Assistant with a couple hundred devices and integrations. ZWave tends to be my hardwired switches, and ZigBee tends to be my battery operated motion sensors, remotes, etc.
Personally, I run Home Assistant on its native HAOS on a raspberry Pi. In addition to Home Assistant, I have lots of automations running in Node Red, a no/low code orchestration addon.
For voice control, I’m playing with the Atom Echo.
Part hobby, part time and energy savings. One thing I love about Home Assistant is the integrations with so many devices and services. I have smart switches., remotes, smart plugs, energy monitors, RGB bulbs, thermometers, etc.
It’s a slippery slope of wanting to integrate absolutely everything! My doorbell, alarm system, thermostats, garage door, door locks, and so on.
Many are local “smart devices” using ZWave and ZigBee, and others are cloud integrations with other services.
I’ve gotten to a point where the Home Automation routines I rely on are so useful that I get annoyed if I ever have to do things “manually”.
Couple examples:
I have a remote by my bed that, when the goodnight button is pressed, turns off all the lights, sets the HVAC back to programmed mode, puts our computers to sleep, arms the alarm, locks the doors, and closes curtains.
I have a button by my garage door that sets an “auto arm” toggle that opens the garage door, unlocks the door to the garage and the waits for me to close the garage, at which point it arms the alarm, turns off the lights, locks my computers, turns off the HVAC, closes curtains, locks doors, etc.
I’d recommend using matter over thread, as I’ve had issues with ZigBee, although that might just be incompetence. I use smth by aqara for a thread bridge, and it all works great with home assistant.
I’ve been looking for some smart outlets, and it seems impossible to discover which ones can be used with normal well-known protocols and which can only be used through a phone app locked into a cloud service.
You will need an antenna /hub though. I use a sky connect antennae, it’s all locked into my house.
If you have to go wifi, tplink /tapo literally have a “local only” mode when you firewall them out. The only issue is they warn you you can’t operate them unless you’re connected to your home wifi. Which is rather the point.
I have several US V2 plugs from athom.tech and they work great via home assistant. They just sit on WiFi don’t call home and are reliable through hoke assistant
Local control, most use very little power and can either be plugged in or use a 1-3yr battery you swap out sparingly, and they communicate on a separate set of channels from your internet at low-latency so they don’t eat up internet bandwidth.
My favorite smart outlet switch though was recently sold out and it’s an Aeotec smart switch 7. Zooz makes something similar though I think.
I’ve got it set up on Home Assistant so that whenever certain devices in my home are detected on or off via watt usage minimum changes I monitor on those smart switches, it toggles the Lutron Caseta (best smart light control there is) lights via commands for different rooms in my house.
I also have things like waterproof outdoor gate sensors made by Zooz that are smaller than a single stick of gum where the small flat watch battery in it lasts for almost a year and it will alert me when the gate opens or closes, but only when I’m a certain distance away from the house’s geofence I’ve set up.
You will also need an overall little USB stick to connect to your Home Assistant server device (like a NAS or Raspberry Pi) to control everything, but there’s one that’s made by Aeotec that does both Zigbee and Z-wave long range protocols. Z-Wave LR (long range) works really far too… like I think around a mile potentially, if you have a nice clear line of sight signal.
Check out the new IKEA Matter over Thread stuff. They have two smart plugs (an indoor single plug and an outdoor double plug). You can flash one of the esp-idf example images to an ESP32-C6 and plug it into your HA server to turn it into a Thread Border Router for under $10. Everything on Thread uses a fully local encrypted mesh network that by default has no Internet access (leave NAT64 turned off in the HA border router add-on).
P.S.: Make sure to update the firmware on the devices (which HA can do), as several don’t act as routing end devices until after the first upgrade.
None of the devices I bought for it talk to the internet! Home assistant can control and even update the Shellys completely over the local network.
As it should be
Remember Home assistant =/= smart home nonsense
I dont need some AI assistant to automatically manage my thermostat, I just want to be able to control it all using my own local server.
There are people who tie gemini into their HA instance
These people are insane.
Any suggestions for someone tech savvy enough to run a proxmox server for a handful of services, to get started with home assistant?
Can you replicate something like a Google home with voice commands?
I may or may not be getting a new house soon. I’m good with electrical to replace switches with wireless ones. But what do you get? Where do you start and where do you end? What about the WAF?
I saw LTT did smart switches in his house and it was a mess of incompatibilities.
Any good resources? I don’t even know what I don’t know haha
HAOS literally has a proxmox iso for home assistant. Slap that baby on.
There are homebrew voice units, but you’ll need a beefier system than normal to process in house. If you have apple devices you can expose certain elements from HA to apple home (and keep others obscured) to use your watch / voice etc.
There are a lot of home assistant communities and they are all very very friendly. It’s a massive learning curve and we’re all working together
Look into ZWave and ZigBee mesh networks. I run Home Assistant with a couple hundred devices and integrations. ZWave tends to be my hardwired switches, and ZigBee tends to be my battery operated motion sensors, remotes, etc.
Personally, I run Home Assistant on its native HAOS on a raspberry Pi. In addition to Home Assistant, I have lots of automations running in Node Red, a no/low code orchestration addon.
For voice control, I’m playing with the Atom Echo.
Couple hundred?! Are most of those lights or something? Forgive me I’m totally ignorant about home automation.
Is it a hobby to you or have you found significant time/energy savings? Or both?
Part hobby, part time and energy savings. One thing I love about Home Assistant is the integrations with so many devices and services. I have smart switches., remotes, smart plugs, energy monitors, RGB bulbs, thermometers, etc.
It’s a slippery slope of wanting to integrate absolutely everything! My doorbell, alarm system, thermostats, garage door, door locks, and so on.
Many are local “smart devices” using ZWave and ZigBee, and others are cloud integrations with other services.
I’ve gotten to a point where the Home Automation routines I rely on are so useful that I get annoyed if I ever have to do things “manually”.
Couple examples:
I have a remote by my bed that, when the goodnight button is pressed, turns off all the lights, sets the HVAC back to programmed mode, puts our computers to sleep, arms the alarm, locks the doors, and closes curtains.
I have a button by my garage door that sets an “auto arm” toggle that opens the garage door, unlocks the door to the garage and the waits for me to close the garage, at which point it arms the alarm, turns off the lights, locks my computers, turns off the HVAC, closes curtains, locks doors, etc.
This video is a good starting point. If you’re already running proxmox you’re definitely ready. 👍
I’d recommend using matter over thread, as I’ve had issues with ZigBee, although that might just be incompetence. I use smth by aqara for a thread bridge, and it all works great with home assistant.
I’ve been looking for some smart outlets, and it seems impossible to discover which ones can be used with normal well-known protocols and which can only be used through a phone app locked into a cloud service.
Zigbee.
You will need an antenna /hub though. I use a sky connect antennae, it’s all locked into my house.
If you have to go wifi, tplink /tapo literally have a “local only” mode when you firewall them out. The only issue is they warn you you can’t operate them unless you’re connected to your home wifi. Which is rather the point.
I have several US V2 plugs from athom.tech and they work great via home assistant. They just sit on WiFi don’t call home and are reliable through hoke assistant
Z-Wave & Zigbee devices.
My favorites are made by Aeotec & Zooz.
Local control, most use very little power and can either be plugged in or use a 1-3yr battery you swap out sparingly, and they communicate on a separate set of channels from your internet at low-latency so they don’t eat up internet bandwidth.
So, if I’m reading things right, anything that runs on Z-Wave or Zigbee will necessarily run locally, because those are mesh protocols?
Anyway, thanks a lot. Those are really simple keywords to check.
Yep.
My favorite smart outlet switch though was recently sold out and it’s an Aeotec smart switch 7. Zooz makes something similar though I think.
I’ve got it set up on Home Assistant so that whenever certain devices in my home are detected on or off via watt usage minimum changes I monitor on those smart switches, it toggles the Lutron Caseta (best smart light control there is) lights via commands for different rooms in my house.
I also have things like waterproof outdoor gate sensors made by Zooz that are smaller than a single stick of gum where the small flat watch battery in it lasts for almost a year and it will alert me when the gate opens or closes, but only when I’m a certain distance away from the house’s geofence I’ve set up.
You will also need an overall little USB stick to connect to your Home Assistant server device (like a NAS or Raspberry Pi) to control everything, but there’s one that’s made by Aeotec that does both Zigbee and Z-wave long range protocols. Z-Wave LR (long range) works really far too… like I think around a mile potentially, if you have a nice clear line of sight signal.
The Hook Up had a great video on this. He compared a lot of different options and ranks them based on functionality with and without internet.
https://youtu.be/wnFoQ84SRL4
Check out the new IKEA Matter over Thread stuff. They have two smart plugs (an indoor single plug and an outdoor double plug). You can flash one of the esp-idf example images to an ESP32-C6 and plug it into your HA server to turn it into a Thread Border Router for under $10. Everything on Thread uses a fully local encrypted mesh network that by default has no Internet access (leave NAT64 turned off in the HA border router add-on).
P.S.: Make sure to update the firmware on the devices (which HA can do), as several don’t act as routing end devices until after the first upgrade.