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Adding Proxmox to the equation

 I ended up going down the Proxmox rabbit hole. Reading about it, I could see that a homelab is part of a larger picture in the home automation experience. Running Home Assistant on a Pi felt fragile after awhile, as I added more and more functionality to it. I wanted more processing power than on my older Synology NAS. VMs and LXCs would add more solutions to solving perceived problems. Actually Getting Started  I picked up a Beelink EQ14 for $200 on Amazon, added a 2TB nvme as extra storage for another $100. The first couple of things were easy wins, after setting up Proxmox - retiring two RPis (Home Assistant & Pi-Hole). Back up home assistant, spin up a HA instance using a script, a minor edit to allow USB passthrough for the Zigbee/Z-wave dongle - it was really easy. I re-used the old IP address as well. A quick LXC for Pi-Hole, also easy. Connecting Storage for Backups  Attaching storage from the NAS was slightly more complex, but NFS was not too hard. SMB didn'...
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Temp-Humidity Sensor on the Cheap - DHT22, ESPHOME, Wemos D-1 Mini

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I picked up some DHT22 and Wemos D-1 Minis for a bathroom-vent project - if it gets too humid from the shower, turn on the fans. When the humidity drops, turn off the fans. This is the story on how they were actually used. A kitten-based project. Frida developed dry coughs this past week. Environmentally, nothing had changed. Food was normal, litter box normal, no chaos. We took her to the vet - no lungworm, no asthma, no cancer in the xrays. Maybe the house is just too dry? Step One: Find the components DHT-22 Sensors - I bought some "HiLetgo 2pcs DHT22/AM2302 Digital Temperature And Humidity Sensor Module" from Amazon. These have three connections: power, sensor, and ground. Some other DHT-22's have 4...one apparently is just not connected. The AM2302's have an advantage later as we will discover, but will an extra line of code. Came with appropriate female-female wires. Wemos D-1 Mini: I found 5 for $16 on Amazon. Not the actual Wemos brand, but they worked. They c...
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TryFi integration with helpers, scripts, and automations

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This article is being written on August 29, 2022 using Home Assistant 2022.8.7, HACS 1.27.1, and TryFi 0.0.17.  First and foremost: TryFi integration devs - thanks for your hard work! This is also not strictly a "home" automation, although all of the data and actions are being handled on Home Assistant. This home project is tied to my dog's Fi collar - I am not receiving payment of any kind from Barking Labs/TryFi nor am I claiming any kind of license/trademark over anything mentioned here. There are two projects - a basic notification automation if Astrid hasn't met her step goals for the day by a certain time, and a more complex automation mimicking a "Safe Zone" in TryFi terms, or something similar to a "Zone" in Home Assistant. What the Projects Need Nabu Casa, or some method to reach your Home Assistant instance remotely. HACS (to install TryFi) TryFi integration (through HACS) Your Fi login & password, and an active Fi collar subscription...
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Zones and Automation

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Project Overview Turn on door alarm alerts to the phone when not at home, and turn off door alarm alerts when at home. Receiving alerts outside of the home assistant's network requires some kind of remote access for your phone app. Nabu Casa is an easy and secure way, but there are other methods. The Panel This is from a dashboard. "Door Alarm Notify Only" is an input boolean. When this is on, doors being opened will trigger an automation to message users whenever a door sensor turns on. When it is off, no messages are generated. This is called Door Alarm Notify Only, as opposed to when the security alarm is engaged. (Code was removed from this blogger post.) "Smoke Alarm Notify Only" [clear] is not part of the automation. (When it is not clear, it uses an automation to send a notification.) "Door Ajar Notify" is an input boolean. When on, if a door sensor is open for more than 15 seconds, it generates an alert. (This is always on, but if it is generat...
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Troubleshooting a broken Octoprint Integration

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A situation came up - my Octoprint/printer page wasn't working like it should. Power could turn on and off - not a problem Sensors would show temperatures and status - not a problem Buttons that sent commands back to Octoprint no longer work - PROBLEM The electrical power for each printer is managed by a TP Powerlink, each plug is managed by a different entity. It does not use Node-Red, and buttons for the power worked for both printers. This was not helpful. The Octoprint integration shouldn't be touching the button flows. The sensors were live, so the HA integration was probably not the case. This is using Home Assistant Core 2022.5.3. With a recent release, the developers changed things up. For example, to check your configuration.yaml and restart your server - previously it was found at Settings>System. (As a caution, the "help" text for that option still indicates the reboot is found there.) Instead, it is found under Developer Tools>YAML - both the confi...
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More Octoprint Integration Issues

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Sadly, I didn't take screenshots of the immediate issue. But fortunately the solution is simple once you find it.   Temperature Problems Temperature numbers from printer bed AND printer nozzle, for both printers were no longer registering any data. (Instead, they read -18 degrees, which is what the Farenheit-to-Celsius template sensor returns when it doesn't have any data.) It had been working several weeks ago, the last time I printed. It could have been a Home Assistant or Octoprint update, or some kind of data corruption. Regardless of the cause, it needed to be fixed. Start in Configuration Go to Configuration>Integrations>(Choose a printer)>(Select the entities).  In my screenshot, you'll notice 7 exclamation marks in red circles. This is normal, as the printer is not connected - it doesn't have any temperatures to report or printer states. When I was working on the problem, the 4 temperature rows - instead of an exclamation mark in a circle - there were e...
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Fixing Octoprint Integration in Home Assistant

So, Home Assistant has an integration for Octoprint. Seems like it would be really solid - a great thing! Well, it is, unless you already have two printers set up in Home Assistant. I considered tearing it all out and rebuilding it. Delete it, and see what it comes back as. That probably would have been more sane. If you go this route, skip to Octoprint side fixes. Identify what needs to get changed The first step was that none of my sensors were correct. Fortunately, my input booleans (buttons for turning things on and off, retracting - those all go through MQTT topics in Node Red and were untouched.) Octoprint side fixes First, I went to two Octoprints and their Home Assistant Discovery plug-ins and changed the device name to be unique. (The names of the two printers showed up as "Octoprint", resulting in "Octoprint****_2" for some of the entities.) Next, you do NOT need to change anything in MQTT. These are untouched. Back in Home Assistant In the configuration.y...
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