Home Assistant

Electric gates currently driven by an old fob, or unrelated new hikvision doorbell/opener.

is there a way to have HA help me automate gate opening as I come within range of house eg 300metres, or pass a local point, or other trigger?

The world and their wives have made HA beginners videos, I'm not sure which is the best though. Best have a click around.

The install guide for RPi seems fine to get you up and running.

One piece of advise that I can offer to a noob is to take your time to read about YAML and how it works in HA as that's the most confusing part if you're not au-fait with that structure of configuration. My configuraton.yaml is 700 lines long, but I should really have used the sub-files such as sensor.yaml and binary_sensor.yaml a bit better to make it all easier to read.

Best get VSCode working and use that to edit the files directly.

I have my HA up and running for a year and half on a Pi4b and never once did I have to mess with the YAML files (bar the initial user name and password) with the UI you can do practically anything

Want to open a gate automatically when approaching. for example automation to "when iPhone comes within 300m of home, and is connected to car Bluetooth, activate open gate/garage button once". New to HA so basic guidance appreciated.

You haven't mentioned how you'll trigger the actual gate. You'll need some way to get Home Assistant to be able to actually send the signal to the gate which depends on how your gate works. You might be able to use a relay wired into the gates power supply (Sonoff or Shelly do good ones), or you might be able to use some sort of RF repeater that will send the same signal as your fob.

Automations in HA should make this pretty easy. The state of your person tracker will change when you enter the zone, so you'll want the automation trigger to be a change in state of your person entity, from away, to home. That should just trigger once.

When you exit the state change will be from home to away, so it wouldn't trigger in that case.

I ripped mine out once it became obvious their z wave openness talk was marketing and they hadn't an actual clue about it.

Got a Ring alarm which is fine for HA integration via an add on but I'm considering just connecting all the sensors directly via z wave and being rid of the ring base station.

Aren't the HomeSecure alarms Ajax systems? Or perhaps yours was an older version?

Speaking of Ring equipment, do you still need a subscription with them to be able to use all functionality of cameras in HA?

As far as I know yes.... I plan to eventually migrate to reolink doorbell and cameras.... the alarm is just a matter of pairing the ring sensors to HA via z wave.

video emaherx?

Anyone with gates? what triggers work for opening gates when leaving house? I am thinking the car starting - is that possible?

I need a steer on this lads if anybody has an idea:

I need to create a binary_sensor which changes state momentarily based on a trigger. So let's say that the humidity in a room is greater then 75%, I want the binary_sensor to change from on to off momentarily every 3 mins while the condition is true. I can't for the life of me work out how to trigger this in a loop, I've tried playing around with automatons but they all end up being once-off events 3 mins after the initial condition is true and don't repeat.

So: if humidity gt 75%, pulse a binary_sensor for 1sec once every 3 mins.

Not sure it's a great video demonstration but...

Basically if the bottle is turned upside-down the "Keppra Given sensor" changes from false to true and if not true by a certain time a notification is sent.

It can be a busy house in the morning with 2 parents trying to get 3 children to 2 different schools, the youngest has epilepsy and it's important that we medicate her before school and at bedtime. The Alert says check if medication was given if the sensor is false, so it's "check with other parent" as this is a backup/reminder and don't want to have medicated her twice either if HA for whatever reason didn't report correctly.

The sensor only reports true if turned completely upside-down which it needs to be in order to draw out the dose, so if someone goes rooting for paracetamol in the morning and moves the bottle out of the way they won't accidently trip the sensor.

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On your car idea, it's totally possible there are probably OBD2 attachments that could utilize or a simple sensor that plugs into the 12V socket or a USB socket that turns on/off with the car. Or just stick a smart button to the dash.

It's not and doesn't need to be, the dose is drawn up by a parent, but just sends a reminder if it's detected that the bottle was not turned over to draw out the dose. If it was needed for say an elderly person who is still independent but needs monitoring then I guess a weight sensor may make more sense.

😂

Well to be fair, that would be my usual form. Sometimes I build stuff for home too 😁.

I don't have a Tesla, but this suggests handbrake sensor might be an option.

Does it need to read the plate?

If car moves, open gate.

Or car moves to certain zone open gate. Could be useful for guests leaving too, presumably no unauthorised cars are on your property when the gates were closed.

Also depending on the gates it may well be trivial enough to over ride them manually once inside the property anyway meaning the smart button is not that big of a security risk. Plus can be hidden under dash.

no, tesla have that locked, that would solve many issues. I must check via browser though!!

It's a control for a dehumidifier within an ensuite.

It has three inputs:

1. If the RH is rising quickly (using a trend sensor).
2. If the RH is above a set level (77%).
3. If the absolute humidity in the ensuite is more than 10% greater than the average absolute humidity of the other rooms upstairs.

If any or all of these inputs are triggered the dehumidifier will run for 15 mins on a resetable timer. It will shut-off if the RH drops to 3% less than the average upstairs absolute humidity. That way I'm not over-drying the room and I'm not battling with the ambient RH in the upstairs of the house.

I'm cheating somewhat in terms of how I manage the dehumidifier - I'm not using node-red yet so I have employed Blacky's Sensor Light blueprint script to take the three inputs and turn the dehumidifier on. It also allows me to set other controls such as date/time and over-rides, so it's handy in that respect.

How is all of this automation it better than just leaving the dehumidier to do it's thing? Firstly the dehumidifier sits on the floor and doesn't trigger until the moist air has come down to its level. That causes a very slow reaction time to showers and can also leave very damp air at head-height level for hours. Also the dehumidifier was cycling often and over-drying the room every 30 mins due to hysteresis, and this was causing it to consume around 1kWh per day. Now it's only switching on around 10 times per day and the consumption is down a bit (around 0.7kWh). But the key thing is that it's cycling a lot less.

I also have a simple trend sensor which is operating an (bathroom) extractor fan within the kitchen. It's wired up to a Sonoff with a temp/RH sensor and it's just the best thing ever. It can detect when a kettle boils at the far side of the kitchen within around 10 seconds and turn on the fan to remove some of the moisture. It has been rock-solid now for 2 years.

 - platform: trend
   sensors:
     humidity_kitchen_rising:
       entity_id: sensor.sonoff_kitchen_humidity
       sample_duration: 60
       max_samples: 30
       min_gradient: 0.01666
       device_class: moisture
       # Percent / seconds = gradient
       # 5 / 180 = 0.0277 (5% over 3 mins)
       # 5% over 5 mins = 0.016666667 
       # 7% over 5 mins = 0.023333333
       # https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/trend/

That's cool I'll have to refer back to this, planning on something similar for my own bathrooms.

As others suggested use refurb mini pc. A cheapo i5 with 8G ram and 120G ssd. Look on Amazon, adverts.ie, ebay etc

Wipe windows and install Debian.

Can then run supervise Homeassistant in docker.

Alternatively use Virtualbox, download the image for Homeassisant.

Or if you have an old pc use it.

In my case I moved from raspberry pi to my old pc. Have Homeassistant running in Virtualbox.

Also have sdr dongle running. This pulls data from my Personal Weather station to Homeassistant using mqtt as well as a couple of docker images.

With a PC you have more options available.