Home Assistant : Q&A, Tips & Tricks, Your Configs

[Durran]

@blunt your automations seem onpoint!! Have you managed to control a Nemtek electric fence energizer with Home Assistant and sonoffs at all?

 

[Steamy Tom]

@blunt your automations seem onpoint!! Have you managed to control a Nemtek electric fence energizer with Home Assistant and sonoffs at all?

what are you planning to do? you could easily use a sonoff sv to turn it on and off remotely and likely also get the status if it is alarming.

 

[Durran]

Thanks Steamy Tom, thats exactly what I want to do, just not sure how. Any advise?

 

[Steamy Tom]

Thanks Steamy Tom, thats exactly what I want to do, just not sure how. Any advise?

do you have any other home automation setup or will you use the eWeLink app?

 

[Durran]

do you have any other home automation setup or will you use the eWeLink app?

I have Home Assistant running with Tasmota sonoffs, just need to know what you recommend I do with the SV to turn on/off (should be easy enough) but also send alarm state?

 

[blunt]

@Durran don't have electric fencing so haven't really looked at any of that stuff. Assume the alarm output is just some kind of reed switch that turns on when the alarm goes off? I imagine you could wire it up the same as if you were wiring a gate with open/close reed, obviously just dont need to set the "gate" switch to pulse as you want to keep it on.

 

[Steamy Tom]

I have Home Assistant running with Tasmota sonoffs, just need to know what you recommend I do with the SV to turn on/off (should be easy enough) but also send alarm state?

what energizer do you have?

first make the sonoff sv run in isolation mode:

then flash it, configure it and add these setting:

Switchretain 1
Powerretain 1
PulseTime1 1
switchmode1 0
switchmode2 2
switchtopic2 [mqqttopic]state - replace mqqttopic with whatever you have made your mqqt topic

then you can wire the sonoff relay output pos and neg to the switch contacts (i can be more specific here if i get a model and make)

then the monitoring will depend on some things, with my wizard 4 i see a constant voltage (12v) when the siren is activated, so i would make a small circuit using an opto-isolator (https://www.communica.co.za/products/4n35) and a resistor.

you connect that to the GPIO14 and GND.



Cover:

- platform: mqtt
name: "Electric fence"
state_topic: "cmnd/[mqqttopic]state/POWER2"
command_topic: "cmnd/[mqqttopic]/POWER"
payload_open: "ON"
payload_close: "ON"
payload_stop: "ON"
state_open: "OFF"
state_closed: "ON"
optimistic: false
device_class: [select appropriate]

that is it.

 

[Durran]

Thanks Steamy Tom, great instructions, Ill give this a bash!!

 

[Durran]

what energizer do you have?

that is it.

..its a Nemtek Wizord 4

 

[Steamy Tom]

..its a Nemtek Wizord 4

so the sonoffs now isolated relay positive and negative go to the two switch terminals furthest right of the six (orientation doesnt matter). and then adjust the jumpers accordingly, for me i would do JMP1 out and JMP2 in.

 

[Durran]

Awesome, let me try it

 

[Vaughankzn]

Guys,
Is there a way I can connect IDS X86 controller & IP connect to Home Assistant? Has anyone been able to get the IDS alarm systems to connect to HA,
thanks

 

[Tinuva]

So new to home assistant but not home automation, I was a bit disappointed with the tips for configs here.

However I walked into a great config, which is advanced enough to give me some really good ideas to organise my HA configs.

1. I didn't know about includes, its amazing to separate configs.
2. Secrets, this made me happy so its easier to share configs.
3. There some ideas here that I will use.

This is the HA configs: https://github.com/basnijholt/home-assistant-config

Hope it helps someone else as well.

 

[patrick123]

So new to home assistant but not home automation, I was a bit disappointed with the tips for configs here.

However I walked into a great config, which is advanced enough to give me some really good ideas to organise my HA configs.

1. I didn't know about includes, its amazing to separate configs.
2. Secrets, this made me happy so its easier to share configs.
3. There some ideas here that I will use.

This is the HA configs: https://github.com/basnijholt/home-assistant-config

Hope it helps someone else as well.

Packages are also great.

 

[Tinuva]

ok slowly but surely working on this whenever I get time. Only been in the house for 5 weeks now since moving in and there a bunch of non-tech non-homeassistant stuff that also needed to get done...and still needing to get done.

So I haven't checked out "packages" yet mentioned by patrick123, but I am definitely struggling to get custom components working for who know what reason.

My HA install is a supervisor based install so it kinda looks like hassio (now known as HA where HA is known as HA core).

I really want to get some of the custom cards going but alas will have to figure out what I am missing when adding the code, because I want to remove most of the stuff at the top which is just messy and even in the cards I want stuff to only show up if needed.

Got 1 automation going which sends an alert that works, so thats a start, but still have to test some of the normal alerts I configured which didn't work.

Also....loads of switches that still need to be installed. I still have to figure out, what do you do when there 4 light switches in a single panel.

Also need to make a plan, have 3 geysers and only 1 geyser switch in the DB, thats problematic for me.

Anyways, this is what it kinda looks like now:

 

[SauRoNZA]

What do you mean 4 light switches in a single panel?

I’ve fortunately used includes from the very start. Seemed obvious to me as there were a few by default.

 

[Tinuva]

What do you mean 4 light switches in a single panel?

I’ve fortunately used includes from the very start. Seemed obvious to me as there were a few by default.

This.

 

[SauRoNZA]

This.

Oh sorry, brain fail I was thinking grouped inside HA.

Sonoff Mini in the roof for each light rather than replacing the switch I reckon.

 

[TedLasso]

I think the combination of crazy hours working from home and all other stress is frying my brain. It looks like my hass.io setup on a Pi is about to die. I have a NUC type PC available and am thinking about potentially just starting from scratch on this. It has a mechanical disk, and I would swap to a SSD when lockdown ends.

Now this is the reason my brain is fried. I don't know what I need to install because I want the the version of Hass where I can install add-ins easily from HACS/store e.g. like letsencrypt, etc, etc.

I also want to use the opportunity to get rid of all my PIs. I have another PI running UBNT and would appreciate input as I have no experience with Ubuntu/Docker.

Network Environment:
3 VLANS at home:-
1. Private (all our devices, UBNT controller (Pi), Ubiquiti gateway, NAS, printer, etc in here)
2. iOT (Has all the media streamers, Sonoffs and the Home Assistant (Pi)
3. Guest

My plan is as follows (will this actually work):-
1. Install Ubuntu on PC. Install on VLAN1
2. Install Docker (VLAN1)
3. Install Hass Supervisor inside Docker running in VLAN 2. This is so all the iOT devices continue to talk to the same IP as the Pi that it will replace.
4. In Docker also install standalone Ubuquiti controller (VLAN1) - I don't want to run the one that comes via HACS. I prefer to keep UBNT seperated from HASS.

Questions:-
1. What flavour of HASS do I need to install inside docker to get the same experience the Hass.io image that runs on Pi? Is it Hass supervisor?
2. Is my planned Ubuntu setup with Docker valid?. The PC has one NIC, but based on what I read, I can make it tagged so that traffic for both VLAN 1+2 can be handled
3. Is 4GB of Ram on the PC enough to keep this all running well. The PC has 250GB HDD but will swap to SSD. I may install Plex inside docker itself and some DB like grafana or influx ??? (sorry still a newb on this topic).

Thanks. Hoping to get this all done during this lockdown period.

Cheers in advance (sorry I have no alcohol left except for what may be in the sanitisers)

 

[SauRoNZA]

I believe only Hass.io for Pi and then the NUC package do what you want.

But things have also changed recently so who knows.

If your Pi setup is dying it’s likely the SD card flaking because you have too many database writes due to logging too much stuff you don’t actually need.