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Home Assistant

A long time ago i setup & wrote my own home monitoring system using wireless temperature sensors and a current clamp across the incoming feed to the house for electricity monitoring (take a look at the projects section for flask socketio) Using it i was able to educate the step-son about taking 90 minute long showers without contributing to the bills1 i then moved house leaving the current clamp hardware in place duh then what with getting the house sorted, travelling for work and subsequent long hours on my return i never set it up again besides the long shower taker had buggered off saving me loads of cash :-)

Still i had the temperature sensors lying around and the knowledge/program was still lurking so i decided to restart it but then i found HomeAssistant and realised then and there to ditch trying to do it all myself.

Using a raspberry pi, MQTT and HomeAssistant i had everything i had before and much more….

Although I had set the Pi up once more recording just temperatures adding the excellent MotionEye to capture video of movement on my drive/garage the visual interface, graphs, weaather forecast etc was all gone so i was just recording for its own sake. Pretty pointless. But now using HomeAssistant i am once again making use of the data with nice visuals

and much more with all the integrations that the software offers i think it could end up being like an emacs init.el constantly being added to or tweaked for example i have;

  • daily report of the cost for gas & electricity
  • live streaming of the camera feeds from motioneye
  • info on all my hardware (server status, temperature, network and processer loads etc)
  • weather forecast
  • calendar
  • radio (this is work in progress but it will be playing a Polish radio station on command)
  • historical data if i want to check

all the above is in a nice interface accessible via web browser with my longer term goal to use an old Android tablet as the always on interface maybe even replacing Alexa. I havent even scratched the surface yet what with scenarios, events, automation theres lots to look into. Dont just take my word for it, a short google search will throw up tons of info and links to other people on their HA journey.

  1. The electric shower used the most power in the house so was easy to monitor, hence when the ampage was excessive for a period of time that i defined, at first the program emailed me a report of time length & amount, that i used hoping that showing the data would educate and change behaviour … it did not. HOWEVER turning off the internet to a specific IP address when a shower exceeded a set time :-) well surprise surprise teenagers love the internet and its loss was galling. Shorter showers here we come! ↩︎