The Jimmerness - Adventures in Home Automation

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...

I have a couple of 3D printers in a small crafting room - I've automated control of the printers through Home Assistant, but still needed to go into the craft room to turn on the printers. I found a smart power strip on Amazon for $27, where I can plug in my two Raspberry Pi 2B+'s into the two USB connections (always on). The three grounded outlets each have a button or you can control it through the Kasa app/Home Assistant. Kasa App angle I did not see a way to avoid installing the Kasa app...you need it to assign the network/password to your power strip. The Kasa app lets you control the power strip remotely, but I will continue to look for a way to strip the app out of the loop. (Once I have it working with Home Assistant, I don't want Kasa to remove it with an update.) The Kasa App itself was easy to install. It does ask you if you want to enable for Google Assistant/Amazon Alexa/Samsung SmartThings - but you can skip that. Once you add the device, in the Devices menu, ...

[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 ...

  I'm going to start listing 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 - this is the MQTT Broker) Octoprint 1.5.2 MQTT 0.8.7 (Octoprint plugin) MQTT-Subscribe 0.1.6 (Octoprintg 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'm running Home Assistant on a...