#Home Automation

In this post, I will demonstrate to you the easiest way to evaluate Home Assistant on a PC. In the end, we’ll have a fully operational copy of Home Assistant (Hass.io flavor), which is accessible via browser in your home network. Terminology Home Assistant (HA) - a top ten’s fastest-growing open-source project (as of 2019) of home automation system written on Python language. It carries on a huge number of components to integrate with the most if not all devices and services on the market Guest - a Virtual Machine with Home Assistant installed Host - a computer with Microsoft Windows/Linux/macOS, with Oracle VirtualBox installed Hass. [Read More]

Assuming you are using Telegram actively for notifications and to control HA’s appliances, you may want to know as soon as possible if Telegram API is not available and your bot is out of operation. Even if you are not a “happy” citizen of a country who is trying to block access to it. The post also assumes that you know how to create a Telegram bot and get API tokens to control it. [Read More]

In the long-awaited second part, we will learn how to manually create InfluxDB queries and will use this knowledge to create Continuous Queries which helps us to save disk space for long-term data. On top of that, we will install telegraf agent to gather various system metrics from our network hosts and store them in InfluxDB. We will use Home Assistant 0.92.2 and Hass.io addon InfluxDB 3.0.5 (InfluxDB 1.7.6). [Read More]

In this post, I’d like to share my experience with InfluxDB as a long term storage and visualization facility for Home Assistant data. It also covers centralized logging, monitoring, and automatic error notifications. The article consists of three parts: Installation of InfluxDB as Hass.io addon, using Grafana for data visualization, embedding graphs into a Lovelace card (this post) Using Telegraf to collect various system metrics (e.g. CPU load and memory usage for all Docker containers both created by Hass. [Read More]

If you are a happy user of hass.io you probably know that your setup consists of multiple docker containers. There is a container for home-assistant itself, supervisor container which controls the process of installation and upgrade HA software, one or more dedicated containers for hass.io addons. On top of that you may have your own containers with additional software, e.g. zerotier-one for a private VPN or distinct mosquitto broker. [Read More]