Home Assistant - am I missing something?

Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 35 points – 12 months ago

I decided to spin up Home Assistant on a VM on my server yesterday, and so far I'm not having much luck getting to to much that is actually useful.

I'm wondering if it's me doing something wrong, but I can't see what that would be.

I've signed up for the free trial of the cloud services which all seems to have gone fine, and I have a couple of integrations working (Roomba, printer ink levels, Sonos and a couple of others) but mostly everything else I've tried just doesn't want to play ball

Apple TV - won't pair - I press the pair button in HA but the ATV doesn't respond with a pairing code
Ring doorbell / cameras - these are found but won't display a live feed
Ring alarm - not recognised at all
Netatmo thermostat - widget displays but doesn't sync correctly with thermostat and if I try to adjust temp it sets the target temp to 137 degrees C
Hue lights - having issues but this one might be my hub not HA

I was really hoping I could set up automations to, say, turn off my TV, turn off the lights, arm my house alarm - all with one press of a button but it looks like currently this isn't going to happen.

Is it just me? Am I doing something wrong perhaps? Maybe I'm missing something obvious but it just seems like the integrations with these devices just isn't quite there? I'd really be interested in other people's experiences and whether they were able to solve these issues (if indeed they had them at all).

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Do you use it as a docker container or the full Home Assistant OS?

I want to get it to play around but cannot really justify buying a separate raspberry pi jhst for HA?

I do all docker containers on a pi3, running on USB Stick as drive

Awesome thanks. Thats pretty much my setup so Ill definitely give it a go

I ran it in Docker initially and it's annoying because you can't use HACS, which brings in a lot of custom integrations and features. You also can't use any addons that spin up containers either. I ended up getting a thin client and running it on there in a VM.

My add-ons are in containers. EspHome, Node Red, PiHole, zigbee2mqtt, mosquito etc

How do you go about integrating it with HA?

I installed them via HA add-ons, so they appear within integrations etc. The wiring of logic I do mainly in node-red, with HA just being a pretty frontend with buttons and cards essentially.

I think we're talking about different things then, addons are not supported when running HA in a container.

https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/#compare-installation-methods

I set this up maybe half a year ago. Maybe docs don't support it anymore

Huh, very cool!

Maybe try find hassio, but maybe it's not the fully recommended way anymore, but least it's all containerised

I may consider it. I hate that I have to have an entire other VM running for HA. Thanks for the insight.

You can use HACS in Docker. I definitely had that working in Docker before I moved to Home Assistant OS on a dedicated machine. You're right about add-ons though, maybe you had the two confused?

Eh, I'm not sure tbh, it was too much of a pain to do and the pi3 wasn't powerful enough to handle it either so I moved to a VM on Debian.

I just run HAOS on the hardware, yeah. Have considered making it a container on my main home server, but I have the RPi and I just want my home assistant to work. My home server is more of a tinker project so it's nice to keep them separate.