Home Automation - Smartkit

powermzii said:
Am thinking of moving to Unifi for APs - still undecided if i will keep my Mikrotik router or go either EdgeOS or Unifi in routing as well
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Unifi Routing and Switching plays well with Unifi Wireless, and the setup becomes easier when you blend the ecosystems together.

That being said, the Edge line is more 'hardcore' in that the GUI is quite barebones and you can do everything using the CLI - if you're familiar with the Tik then you'd feel at home with the EdgeOS powered equipment. They are a bit more flexible than say the Unifi Dream Machine or Unifi Security Gateway if you like getting your hands dirty.

I'd say you should keep your Tik, if it's a fairly recent model to do your routing and switching, and go with just the Unifi AP for now. The important bits are hardware agnostic anyways and the OSI model is valid no matter what flavour/brand you prefer.

You could always move to Unifi at a later stagetfeerghhgfhjjeeetfgfff
 
PhireSide said:
Unifi Routing and Switching plays well with Unifi Wireless, and the setup becomes easier when you blend the ecosystems together.

That being said, the Edge line is more 'hardcore' in that the GUI is quite barebones and you can do everything using the CLI - if you're familiar with the Tik then you'd feel at home with the EdgeOS powered equipment. They are a bit more flexible than say the Unifi Dream Machine or Unifi Security Gateway if you like getting your hands dirty.

I'd say you should keep your Tik, if it's a fairly recent model to do your routing and switching, and go with just the Unifi AP for now. The important bits are hardware agnostic anyways and the OSI model is valid no matter what flavour/brand you prefer.

You could always move to Unifi at a later stagetfeerghhgfhjjeeetfgfff
Click to expand...
Yeah i do enjoy the Tik - its a hAP AC2 so plenty grunt for all I need and i am enjoying learning more about it and networking in general. Will get the APs then re-look at my entire network in a year or so when funds permit
 
Keyboard malfunction aside - one more thing with Unifi is that for some features to work you need a Unifi Controller running on the network. You can run it on most popular OSes and it even runs on a Pi (although it is a RAM hog). It's easier to just spin up a docker instance and make changes from there and shut it down when not required.

The main reason to keep the controller running is for statistics, user groups (ie. Putting guest devices into a group that throttles their bandwidth) and guest portal access. Oh, and firmware updates.

Just something to keep in mind should you go this route. Good luck! :)
 
PhireSide said:
Keyboard malfunction aside - one more thing with Unifi is that for some features to work you need a Unifi Controller running on the network. You can run it on most popular OSes and it even runs on a Pi (although it is a RAM hog). It's easier to just spin up a docker instance and make changes from there and shut it down when not required.

The main reason to keep the controller running is for statistics, user groups (ie. Putting guest devices into a group that throttles their bandwidth) and guest portal access. Oh, and firmware updates.

Just something to keep in mind should you go this route. Good luck! :)
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Hass has a Unifi controller add-on
 
PhireSide said:
The two gang Eachen light switch arrived today from Geewiz and I finished installing it a while ago.

The setup is a bit strange as the switch itself resides in the living room, and controls the lights in the living room (4x GU10 LED) and the adjacent garage (1x CFL).

Initially I had some troubles where the switch would just freeze and turn all the lights on and needing a reset at the circuit breaker. I decided to put the CFL on the first gang and also installed the capacitor on it as the LEDs had some flickering when they were turned off.

I saw the neutral wire was touching the CFL bulb holder's metal casing so I'm not sure if that had anything to do with the erratic switch behaviour from earlier on. I remedied the neutral wire that was touching the housing and installed the capacitor and it seemed to be behaving again.

I made a separate SSID for the switches as they weren't happy with the dual 2/5GHz SSID I was running. At a later stage I'll drop them into a VLAN and isolate them from my internal network.

There is a lead time of 14 days for the 1 gang switches that I need for the rest of the house, so once they arrive I'll get them installed and working. By that time I should have the VLANs up and running too.
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So it's recommended to go with the 2 gang. You can always use the extra button for automation.

I just can't get myself to install these for aesthetic reasons.
 
alqassam said:
So it's recommended to go with the 2 gang. You can always use the extra button for automation.

I just can't get myself to install these for aesthetic reasons.
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What about them don't you like?

I did consider keeping an extra button for automation but honestly our house is pretty simple and our goal isn't going to be very advanced ITO what we want to do. Maybe I should have, what with the long lead time on the single gang switches but it is what it is:D
 
ebendl said:
You should be able to buy any cheap doorbell that works with 433 Mhz. E.g. https://www.takealot.com/bbl-wireless-doorbell/PLID49433587

Reason why I think this should work is because I was able to use that transmitter with my 433 Sonoff RF bridge as an 'input', so I would imagine that the bell part should also work with the RF bridge?
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I could've just bought a wireless doorbell then... what do I need RF button and Sonoff bridge for? (sigh!)

Perhaps my mistake for wanting to use Alexa as my notification device...unfortunately eWeLink only partially talks to Alexa. Perhaps there is a IFTTT applet that could link the two... thinking... or I could see if Takealot will refund me for these two items with reason "I changed my mind" ... sigh... facepalm...

Could also be time to finally start a Home Assistant setup but eish!, after spending the whole day in front of my laptop coding, the last thing I want to do when I get home is more computers! LOL! ... and it seems HA has become hungry: min requirements is 2GB of RAM and seems like not too shabby pprocessor?! I was hoping to use an old 2 Core Duo laptop for this but it seems I'll need something bigger..eish!... Expensive doorbell! LOL!
 
I had to reload my HA as the bloody HDD in my laptop went POOF so that was fun. There goes all my automations as I never did a HA backup on a USB -> note to past self - you are a chop

Anyway, new HDD and Win10 fresh install later and I tried to install HA via VirtualBox yesterday - for some odd reason, my bloody router doesn't see the VB/VM IP address so I can't access the bloody thing to start the automation and get things back up and running again! I went through the whole static IP etc etc etc and tried alles with nothing working...anyone have any tips?
 
I used this video to set up HA on a VM a while ago - as a total noob to HA - and it worked fine:

 
riscbroker said:
I used this video to set up HA on a VM a while ago - as a total noob to HA - and it worked fine:

Click to expand...
Yep it's the same one that I used originally but for some bloody reason my router isn't allocating/seeing my VM. As far as I can tell, it hasn't happened to a lot of people...
 
Was about to say the same - you need to use bridge networking.

I can say it is much bigger pain to setup bridge networking in Linux...
 
Mista_Mobsta said:
I had to reload my HA as the bloody HDD in my laptop went POOF so that was fun. There goes all my automations as I never did a HA backup on a USB -> note to past self - you are a chop

Anyway, new HDD and Win10 fresh install later and I tried to install HA via VirtualBox yesterday - for some odd reason, my bloody router doesn't see the VB/VM IP address so I can't access the bloody thing to start the automation and get things back up and running again! I went through the whole static IP etc etc etc and tried alles with nothing working...anyone have any tips?
Click to expand...
Not exactly related to your issue (which I hope you can get sorted) but have you looked at installing Docker and running the HA container instead?

It's a little more lightweight than a VM, plus easier to keep updated and segregated and you can even map the data and config to a different volume or drive, if you wish.

And don't feel bad, I think 90% of people on here have lost data once before in their lives...me included :(
 
PhireSide said:
Not exactly related to your issue (which I hope you can get sorted) but have you looked at installing Docker and running the HA container instead?

It's a little more lightweight than a VM, plus easier to keep updated and segregated and you can even map the data and config to a different volume or drive, if you wish.

And don't feel bad, I think 90% of people on here have lost data once before in their lives...me included :(
Click to expand...

I'm assuming you mean just running the Docker container and not the Supervisor? Of course he would then lose access to the HA add-ons.
 
ebendl said:
I'm assuming you mean just running the Docker container and not the Supervisor? Of course he would then lose access to the HA add-ons.
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Correct. I wasn't aware of the add-ons, so that thought didn't cross my mind. I was just curious as to why the OP was choosing a VM, but at least now I know :)

/goes off to Google for HA Add-ons
 
Mista_Mobsta said:
I had to reload my HA as the bloody HDD in my laptop went POOF so that was fun. There goes all my automations as I never did a HA backup on a USB -> note to past self - you are a chop

Anyway, new HDD and Win10 fresh install later and I tried to install HA via VirtualBox yesterday - for some odd reason, my bloody router doesn't see the VB/VM IP address so I can't access the bloody thing to start the automation and get things back up and running again! I went through the whole static IP etc etc etc and tried alles with nothing working...anyone have any tips?
Click to expand...

Setup automatic Google Drive snapshots.

As for Virtualbox you probably set it up as a NAT device instead of Bridge.

But why the hell Virtualbox in the first place?
 
PhireSide said:
Correct. I wasn't aware of the add-ons, so that thought didn't cross my mind. I was just curious as to why the OP was choosing a VM, but at least now I know :)

/goes off to Google for HA Add-ons
Click to expand...

Quite honestly there is nothing special about the add-ons, I don’t know why people are obsessed with them.
 
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