The Jimmerness - Adventures in Home Automation

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...

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...

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...

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...

As someone living in the United States, we use Fahrenheit for temperatures and imperial measurements for measuring things. (Including measuring ingredients by weight or volume, depending!) Which is why my HA uses Fahrenheit/imperial. But in 3D printing, I use Celsius. Sometime in August/September 2021, Home Assistant broke part of my process. It could be that my customization.yaml file's "C" designation broke, or that Home Assistant figured out what was going on and decided to "help" me by converting Celsius from the printer into Fahrenheit. Doesn't matter - end result: my Octoprint sensors were reporting Fahrenheit temps instead of my desired Celsius. First step: Create conversion template entities I added this to my configuration.yaml file: sensor:   - platform: template     sensors:       octoprint_micro_actual_bed_temp_c:         friendly_name: "Micro Bed (°C)"         ...

Setting up an alarm system is fairly intrinsic to a lot of Home Assistant implementations. If you're looking at ADT, Simplisafe...other options, you get their system and their controls - and you pay a monthly subscription for the good stuff. Home ownership, you get a discount on your home insurance if you have a security system that hits a third-party reporting service. Home Assistant doesn't get you there until you add something like Noonlight. Noonlight will be a future addition - this is already a long process. Materials: Door Sensors (I used Ecolink Zwave Plus [DWZWAVE2.5-ECO], $30 for each set of sensors - so $60 for front/back door) A Z-Wave USB for Home Assistant (I used Nortek HUSBZB-1, $50) Speakers (I used some early-model Sonos speakers) Probably a tablet to act as a disarm/arm location (I used Amazon Fire 7 (2019) $50 on Amazon) - you can also use any phone with the HA app, or any computer. Steps to get it working: Get your door sensors connected to your Z-Wave coor...

 I managed to set up motion detection previously. Currently, there's a live feed of the camera on Home Assistant, as well as my Synology NAS. My NAS also saves 10 seconds around the motion event trigger - if I get a home assistant motion detection alert on my phone (or on my watch through my phone), I can boot up a connection on my NAS, browse over to security feed, look at the timeline...but that's time. If I'm asleep in bed, it's kind of crazy to boot up your computer just for that. There were different solutions for this - the Amcrest app or Home Assistant solutions through Node Red and/or automations. I want to keep solutions in-house as much as possible, so that left Node Red and automations. You will need to have the home assistant app installed on your phone. I hit a roadblock fairly early and often...how do I identify the picture taken, where is it stored, and how to send it. This solution came up as I was looking at blueprints for something else. Honestly, it w...

The setup of the basic Amcrest Wifi camera does require a non-HA interface to initially set up. In my case, I used their app on my Android phone. My experience was straightforward - Add a Device, walk through their steps. Done. Adding it to Home Assistant was more interesting. This is added to your base configuration file   If you've read my previous entries, using the !secret can be skipped if you just want to leave the host IP, username, and password in your configuration file. If you don't care about motion sensor triggers, you can skip those last two lines. Once you restart Home Assistant, BackdoorAmcrest will be visible as an entity. What I wanted though - if there's something triggering the motion sensor...I don't just want to record it for later, I want to know about it. So I go to Node Red. Two parts: the trigger & the notification You'll notice "motion-detected" is a binary sensor, which means true/false. If you had set up the motion-detected ...

Purchased online for $50, the Nortek Z-Wave/Zigbee USB dongle seems like the easy way to add Z-Wave and Zigbee functionality to Home Assistant.  What is Z-Wave? It uses radio wave frequencies to connect to each other, in the 800-900 MHz range. This means it's not going to interfere/be interfered with, from your wi-fi network (running either on 2.4 or 5GHz). The Z-Wave devices can (but not all do) repeat signals, creating a Z-Wave mesh. It's limited to 232 devices, which is plenty for my purposes, but allegedly opening up to more as time goes on. What is Zigbee? It is similar, but uses the 2.4GHz range. Zigbee devices can also create a mesh, but due to a multitude of different implementations, one Zigbee device may not link to another brand's Zigbee device. Zigbee send messages faster, and can have 65,000 devices on the network...which seems like overkill. To Choose, or Not to Choose Rather than pick one, and be limited to one type of device - the USB dongle seems like a fai...

[Nov. 3, 2021 edit: if you like Celsius for your printer feed, but use Imperial as your base measurement on HA, something broke the below process. I wrote a new post , adding some conversion templates to restore this feature. We now return you to the article...] So my title is a little misleading. If you want the dark-grey theme, and the little icons in the third set of rows...you need HACS. But otherwise it's just stock-HA white, which is totally fine.  Reading Home Assistant forums, browsing youtube videos - you hear the glory of HACS (Home Assistant Community Store). Home Assistant is free & open-source, done by volunteers, same with HACS. HACS comes with a disclaimer: it's risky. Don't use it unless you know a bit about Home Assistant. And then there's some common-sense directions on how to install it. I pulled myself in, because I wanted themes and Font Awesome icons. I really don't want to tackle adding HACS or fontawesome as a tutorial - HACS was easy e...

What I didn't mention in the previous post, was the struggle to get it working. I'm not a programmer or a savant that can pick up anything. The next part is wiring up other buttons for different commands, and that means using more of the Octoprint API, as of this writing, here: https://docs.octoprint.org/en/master/api/ Current issues Ongoing problem #1: I mentioned how I got connect to work. Using the same pseudo-code, it should be super easy to execute {"command":"disconnect"}. It even pops up the same area as the command: connect did...but it doesn't disconnect. Ongoing problem #2: Extrude/Retract - this happens frequently when changing out filament, or in some cases...the print fails to start after homing on the corners. Before the homing occurred, it retracted. If I were to just start again, it would retract again! (The nozzle needs to be preheated, extruded, and then turned off.) Ongoing problem #3: Preheat to 230/turn off - as I just mentioned in #...

I'm going to start listing software versions - sometimes I hit a wall, because of dated information. Home Assistant evolves continually...a year from now, this might have a different solution. Components and their versions: Home Assistant Core 2021.1.0 (HA) Operating System 5.9 (HA) Node Red 7.2.11 (HA) Mosquitto Broker 5.1 (HA) Octoprint 1.5.2 MQTT 0.8.7 (Octoprint plugin) MQTT-Subscribe 0.1.6 (Octoprint plugin) MQTT Explorer 0.3.5 (Linux, optional)  My goal is to create buttons in a Lovelace dashboard, to trigger actions for my two 3D printers. Actions like "connect/disconnect" to start a connection between Octoprint and the printer, "preheat nozzle" so I can have the nozzle go to 180 degrees Celsius to change filament, "Extrude" to extrude 10mm of filament, or "Retract" to retract 10mm of filament, and maybe a "heat bed" so I can heat up the bed to remove a print. I'll start with a "Connect" button for my Lulzbot ...