Who shot Mr burns, part 1!

I started with ZHA, but moved to Z2M because there was an automation blueprint I needed that was only coded for z2m.

Gotta say, I’m a much bigger fan of the z2m interface. There’s nothing wrong with ZHA but unless something major changes, I don’t see the need to ever switch back.

RatGDO can do this without the need for a magnetic switch. It’s a simple ESP32 board with easy-to-terminate wire terminals. It also lets you control the lights on your opener, see the current status of the door, and even open the door to an exact in-between position (if your door supports it).

You can program your own ESP32 if you like, or buy one from the guy that made it directly for ~$40.

Still - props to you for making your own solution! I know it’s extra satisfying when you can homebrew your own smart home solutions from scratch - just wanted to share another solution for people who don’t have the same skills.

I’ve never dug into this personally but can’t you set certain dashboards to be admin only? That way you can hide those entities on a dashboard only you have access to.

I assume this wouldn’t prevent someone from going into the full list of entities in the settings menu though.

This was a surprisingly well thought out and educational article - thank you! Was expecting a super basic article for the masses, but this had a number of quality suggestions, pros and cons of the different options, and even the authors personal opinion on preference of Z2M in case the reader wanted a real suggestion.

Thanks so much for this!

Only thing I think I noticed that could be corrected is OTA updates are no longer exclusive to Z2M - ZHA recently added this too, though I haven’t tried it yet and don’t see a reason to ever switch back from Z2M.

FYI- I received an email the other day that sonos officially added voice control for Spotify!

lol I like that pause button idea!

Agreed to not overdo it. I’m trying to coach my SO on every automation so she can appreciate the added convenience too, which means keeping the automations logical and simple.

My one exception to this is two light switches that will turn all lights in the house on or off with a quadruple press, in case I’m on my way out the door or to bed and want to make sure I turn off any lights I forgot about. That one I figure has to be hard enough to press that someone can’t accidentally turn on the bedroom lights in the middle of the night.

The only thing inovelli is missing is presence detection. I have two of their upcoming mmWave switches on preorder that should take care of that though!

Fingers crossed! I know one YouTuber I follow mentioned it in his “2024 predictions” - wasn’t sure if he was pulling ideas out of his butt or if there had been actual commitment to this idea. Your comment gives me hope it’s the latter!

This is what I went with and god they are amazing. Automations can be made for pressing up, down, and the configure buttons for a hold, single, double, triple, quadruple, or event quintuple press.

The only challenge is remembering what all of your automations are! But I use the double press automation daily to save me from running downstairs to turn off the lights and could not be happier with this product!

I don’t have an answer for you, but this comment reminds me how badly home assistant needs to add subfolders for organizing and grouping our automations

I never thought I’d be the kind of person to use voice commands, but it is so nice to tell it to turn on the radio while I’m cooking dinner!

I had something similar (although probably unrelated) happen last week. All of a sudden my router went offline and nothing was getting an internet connection. Sonoff coordinator lost connection with all zigbee devices went unavailable at the same time. Tried rebooting my home assistant pc, router, unplugging sonoff antenna, switching Ethernet ports, etc without luck.

Power cycling my Ethernet switches fixed it immediately. No idea why that did the trick. This has never happened before. I’m on Verizon fios if that matters.

Posting here in case it helps someone identify a common thread/root cause for OP and me, because I thought it was bizarre that an Ethernet switch would ever need to be power cycled!

Can confirm timer works - set a 5 minute timer for playing music in the family room).

Spotify does work with Sonos now (I don’t use it but I have my account set up with it), but voice control does not work with Spotify.

Ok - agree to disagree! Just wanted to share my experience with the community on a quality local voice control that’s available today while the home assistant community works on these exciting developments.

I think an important correction here is that they say they will only commit to a minimum of 5 years of software updates after they stop selling a particular model.

Even then, there is no reason the speaker wouldn’t still work. To me, that sounds perfectly reasonable. There’s posts about a 15 year old play 5 speaker getting a firmware update within the last year even, so I think Sonos deserves credit where credit is due. They have a proven track record so far, but no doubt it’s something to keep an eye on going forward.

I don’t think Sonos gets enough credit for their local voice control capability. It can’t be integrated into home assistant to do anything beyond controlling the Sonos speakers, but I have been ABSOLUTELY blown away by how responsive the voice commands have been. Literally a 100% success rate after using it for a couple months now. It correctly interprets if you want to start/stop playing, can find music by the artist I want from Apple Music (not sure about other streaming services), and will correctly adjust playing status for a specific speaker if you say to adjust music on that speaker only - even if you command it from another room.

The best part - no bullshit worst responses about “by the way….” Like on Alexa. At most, you get a short response like “good choice” or “ok”.

Sonos isn’t cheap, but I would 100% buy them again every time because it just works.

Thanks for confirming you had no issues (along with everyone else’s responses!). I took the plunge and updated yesterday and so far no issues apart from my inovelli switch triggers still missing. Luckily someone made an automation blueprint that circumvents this issue but it would still be nice to have that back! And to be fair, idk if that’s an MQTT issue or an issue with the 2.15 firmware on the switch.

Seems like a big update - do most Z2M updates include this many fixes/additions? I’m new to Z2M and am hesitant about updating unless I see a fix that will directly affect me positively.

Can anyone here report if they’re having any issues after updating? Looking at the comments, a number of people are reporting their devices not working shortly after updating, but idk if10 or so people posting is a large or small percentage of the user base.

Adding another vote on the inovelli blues. Zigbee network has been rock solid for me. Integration with homeassistant has been flawless too - could not be happier with my purchase. It also helps that the company has a great track record with transparency and working with the community to improve their product.

One detail I don’t see mentioned often is the zigbee switches are a little smaller than the zwaves, making them easier to fit into the junction box. My house is old and has very small boxes - not sure these would have fit in some places if they were any bigger!!

4th vote for Reolink, with one caveat: the live video feed takes several minutes to load in home assistant for me, but is pretty instant when viewing through the Reolink app. I’ve spent several evenings trying to get it to load faster without luck, so for now I’m content just using the Reolink app.

Replying in case it helps another lurking lemming one day:

I ended up replacing the tag with an OEM AirTag in the end.

I spoke with the manufacturers tech support, and they said they were not able to reproduce my issue.

After factory resetting it and replacing the battery multiple times, I was able to get it to load into find my again - but it stopped working again shortly afterwards…. Not at all worth the hassle.

Any idea how I can update the airtag if I can’t connect it to my phone? Trying to search for it in FindMy doesn’t pop up. Tried resetting it by pulling out the battery.

Found something online that says you can fully factory reset by pulling out the battery and reinserting it 10 times and it’ll beep 5 times instead of the normal 3 - I will try that when I get home tonight and will update this post if it works.

If that doesn’t work, any chance you know of anything else I should be checking?

I looked this up a while back. Someone wrote code to try to replicate it in homeassistant on their forums. If I recall correctly, it didn’t work quite as well as the hue version but I haven’t have a chance/reason to try it yet. Maybe someday soon.

In my last house, I had the hue bridge implemented into homeassistant. All light bulb names and rooms/groups and scenes synced with whatever was established on the hub. Gave me the reliability of the hue hub and the flexibility of homeassistant.

It definitely requires more patience to tinker with and get set up, but I highly recommend anyone who is motivated to give it a try!

So far I’ve only purchased hue bulbs. I’ve been absolutely thrilled with every single one. Based on the reports I’ve seen I will 100% be investing solely in their products for smart bulbs/lamps unless another product steps it up.

Honestly, what else are we going to post about in here? I think the bot posts are a nice way to categorize conversations here on the only real talking points 99% of the time.

There will be a few other threads from time to time, but I really don’t see any need to downvote bots - it’s not like the amount of video posts are amounting to spam

Homer gets kicked out of moes and is stuck in some other bar that only sells FUDD and not duff (don’t know the exact joke)

Is this the flaming moe? Idk if it’s the correct episode title

Episode 8 season 11: take my wife, sleaze

Not 100% confident, but this is the first time I’ve recognized one of these before someone else already posted

Loved hiking devils park when I lived there!

I see those types of coffee packets in almost all hotels across the us, so they’re around but I’ve definitely never seen them outside of that.

Fair enough, and thank you for posting these results. I think this confirms that this is not a community that I am comfortable being associated with.

Take care and I’m sure I will see some of you on the other related instances

This right here is the answer!

Omg measuring power to detect when the washer and dryer are complete is genius. Gonna flag this as a future project when I get around to finishing the rest of my smart home projects

Same thing happened up in Taneytown not too long ago. A little less unusual in that neck of the woods though!

I also have a megapot and love it.

I’ve been using a 120v 1800W induction burner for years, but will be looking to upgrade soon. It’s JUST powerful enough to boil 7 gallons or so, but it takes a long time to get there. If your setup allows for an electric brew, I think a 220v induction burner would be the bees knees personally. Extremely efficient, assuming you have electric rates in most of the US. Same might not be true for people in Europe.

That said, most setups (mine included) dont make plugging into a 220v receptacle convenient. For that reason, I’m going to a propane burner soon. Curious to see what others recommend here

Congrats!!! My first homebrew was also an Amber.

One thing to keep in mind is that the first one you open will always taste less than ideal, if you try to open them as soon as they’re done carbonating in a couple weeks. So adjust your expectation accordingly and enjoy experiencing how it improves with time!!

This post comes up fairly often, and I think it always narrows down to two options:

1. Yale/august locks: -More affordable, -can buy hotswappable modules for zwave, zigbee, wifi, etc but the availability seems to be hot and miss (seems like they stopped making the zigbee one last I checked, but YMMV). -Battery backup option seems cool but I’ve seen more posts about it not working that saving someone’s bacon, so I’d personally opt for the keyed version. -Some posts indicate the screens are somewhat prone to failure, but the quantity of these posts is not enough for me to write them off entirely. -integrates easily with homeassistant -has a door closed sensor for auto-relocking. Apparently it’s buggy though.

2. Schlage (specifically the encode plus, but they have a more affordable encode option) -Apple homekey integration is sleeeeek -more expensive -was almost impossible to find until a couple weeks ago -almost no reports of reliability issues, but time will tell I guess! This was the main reason I decided to spring for this lock over Yale -was supposed to get a free update to matter, but Schlage changed their minds and now said a separate model will be released with it. Supposedly due to requirements published about the standard, but I’ll cross my fingers that someone figures out how to make it work. -last I checked, no one has been able to integrate this directly into homeassistant. The best I’ve seen is someone posted a hacky solution for homeassistant to trigger an automation in HomeKit, but I think that post was lost in the Reddit blackout.

Someone told me that it would only be visible from annapolis, but I’m seeing a range of information online that suggests your likely hood of seeing them is correlated to light pollution.

Is anyone able to clear up which is more correct? I’ll gladly stay up to watch them, but would rather not deprive myself of sleep if I won’t be able to see them anyways!

Very nice! It looks like they are sitting behind a sheet of transparent glass on a window - do they get enough wind to self pollinate, or are you doing that by hand?

It’s definitely edible (safe to eat) but as other posters mentioned, it’s one of those ornamental anuum pepper varieties and are too bitter for most people. Other anuums include jalapeños, Serranos, shishito, and Jamaican mushroom. For contrast, the other common types at: chinense (habanero, ghost, reaper, etc), fructecens (tobasco), baccatum (lemon drop, Brazilian starfish, ají amarillo), and pubescens (rocoto, manzanas).

It’s usually impossible to identify the exact pepper species you have, but I’d bet dollars to donuts it tastes almost exactly like Bolivian rainbow, if you’d like to read other peoples reviews online.

Let me know if you have any further questions on the subject! Growing hot peppers has become a bit of a hobby of mine, if you can’t tell :)