Just wanted to update everyone on the plan for the next meeting. In the last meeting, @Iammikecohen said it would cool to bring in a Home Assistant box and demo what it’s like to add devices to it. I really like this idea, but I would rather do it at the October meeting. I’m going to be out of town for the two weeks right before the September meeting, and I think the Home Assistant one deserves more preparation than I have time to give it this month. @jamesfreeman and I discussed starting simpler this month, just going over networking and routers. So instead, here’s my plan for the next two months:
9/16
I’ll give a short presentation about home networking basics, since a lot of the jargon might be new to some folks
I’ll bring in my tiny OpenWRT-based router, and we can poke around the settings with it, to see what it can do, like whole-house ad blocking
We can chat about how we do networking in our homes, and go over any challenges we’ve faced trying to get things working the way we want
10/21
Show screenshots and videos of cool things any of y’all do with your existing Home Assistant setups
Please message me if you want to share pics/videos, so I can get them all on one laptop!
I’ll demonstrate installing Home Assistant from scratch on a Raspberry Pi, including:
Setting up a z-wave USB stick
Adding some z-wave devices a like a light switch and a door lock
Making a simple dashboard to control these things
Create an example automation to turn off the light when the door is locked
After that, we can try adding devices any of you bring to the meeting
In order to avoid any one device being a big time-sink, I’d like to meet a day or two before the meeting with anyone who is bringing devices, so we can do a practice run
In the meeting, it’s totally fine to try out devices we didn’t get to try earlier, but I’ll do any we did get to try first (since those should go quickly) and then any untested ones afterwards
For both of these meetings, I plan to bring my own hardware, so I’m familiar with it and won’t burn time in the meeting troubleshooting. One thing to emphasize: Knowing how to troubleshoot and not being afraid to do it is very important for tinkering! I just think it’s nice to see cool new things working first, and then learn about what problems you might encounter after you’ve seen the end goal.
@Jon, @jamesfreeman, @andrewl, and anyone else already running Home Assistant: I added a thing to my plan for the beginning of the Home Assistant meeting in October: “Show screenshots and videos of cool things any of y’all do with your existing Home Assistant setups”. If you have time/interest, think of anything you want to show, and grab some pics/videos to send me! This seems like an easier way to do show & tell than bringing in your whole house. Photos of LCD screens (e.g. James’s setup with a screen mounted right on the computer) are fine as long as the text is readable, but the best would be to use a web browser from a PC/Mac or the Home Assistant app on your phone, and screenshot or screen-record while doing stuff in your Home Assistant dashboard. If you run Windows, you can use the hotkeys Win+Shift+S to screenshot and Win+Shift+R to record. I’ll collect all these on a laptop before the meeting, and then we can just take turns presenting them to the group. This seems like a fun way to introduce folks to what Home Assistant can do before getting into the details of how to do it.
I’d love to hear more about the air quality sensor we didn’t get to last time. I was daydreaming about home sensors and wondering if a humidity sensor could be added to the quality sensor?
If you just want temperature and humidity, there are a bunch of cheap wireless options available. Choices will be dictated by which radios you run – Zooz seems to be a leading recommendation for z-wave (though the one in textiles right now is being annoying). I have an Ambient Weather console at home (which I would generally not recommend, but it has its pros and cons) and those sensors have been very reliable though a bit… utilitarian
Thanks for the detailed plans @torchedguitar. I’ll see what I can have ready for the next meetings. I’m still interested in a hardware software mini house, but maybe that’s further down the line.
Good to know. My first use case would be triggering a dehumidifier in our room that has an aquatic turtle tank. Because it had an open top with Basking shelf and light, I believe it raises the humidity in that room. Using cheap non smart sensors, I’ve verified that and tracking how much it affects the whole house.
I’m not sure bringing in a Home Assistant was my idea, I did suggest the BYODevice potluck.
I’m having issues with connecting my Switchbots to HA through Matter. I may bring one of those to see if someone can help. If anyone has experience please chime in with what integration you used and if you had to go through another hub or app (Apple Home possibly) to get this working.
I have been doing this since the SIG. I started by adding the Switchbots to my Android phone app. That allowed setting up the wifi on each Switchbot. Once I did that, HA found them with no problem.
I am not going to be able to make the 9/16 meeting but should be able to make the one on 10/21. I will work on getting some screenshots of my Home Assistant Dashboards for it.
Here’s the link to the zoom meeting. Sorry for not sending this out earlier – just got back into town late last night. This link will work tonight and also be the same for every future meeting for the SIG, so feel free to bookmark it:
I set up Google Drive permissions so anyone can access the “Asmbly Outreach > SIGs” folder, and each SIG gets a folder there, and then the individual events get dated folders under those. That way we can easily share files related to SIG meetings with anyone.
Photos of LCD screens (e.g. James’s setup with a screen mounted right on the computer) are fine as long as the text is readable, but the best would be to use a web browser from a PC/Mac or the Home Assistant app on your phone, and screenshot or screen-record while doing stuff in your Home Assistant dashboard. If you run Windows, you can use the hotkeys Win+Shift+S to screenshot and Win+Shift+R to record. I’ll collect all these on a laptop before the meeting, and then we can just take turns presenting them to the group. This seems like a fun way to introduce folks to what Home Assistant can do before getting into the details of how to do it.
