Internet Of Things / IoT / Connected Home / Smart Houses

Yeah, when I have experienced it, there has been quite the grace period.

Does anyone remember the TRV thread size that works with Tado units without the need for an adaptor? @TW?

Wickes bog standard £3 valves work - M30 x 1.5 (iirc), or 15mm x 1.5.

I just took a head unit to wickes & tried it on.

Thanks, might go Drayton and get the £15 set from Screwfix.

Anyone using Shelly circuit/switch boxes?

@Colm89 is I think (based on posts in this thread).

Only the relays, not the pro models

I have ordered a Shelly 1+, have you used one of these?

No just the 1pm, been running my central heating for the past year

I've had a Shelly dimmer 2 since June and I'm very happy with it.

That's not a Shelly Plus 1 either though.

From what I know all their stuff is decent, except for the original bypass, which kept blowing up. Once the bypass v2 is widely available and hopefully cheaper I'm planning on putting 1L's in all of my light switches long term.

Extending / filling out Zigbee mesh networks - Is an Ikea Outlet or an Ikea Repeater going to give me better range / signal?

Any wired ZigBee node should provide meshing/range improvement.

Yes, I have ikea outlets dotted around my house and they work perfectly extending signal from my hub at one end of the house to lights at the opposite end

Given the choice, though, which have the better range?

A google says that the repeater has a 3dBm powre output, but I can't find anything for the outlet.

Although the outlet does have the advantage that it won't take a socket out of action.

I didn’t even consider range because I just put one in every room and use them to power plug in lamps

Before I go down a rabbit hole on wifi weather stations. Has anyone been there?

Needs:
Historic data storage
Temp in/out
Pressure
WiFi + good app

I've picked up the latest intel nuc i7 12th gen for a beefy do-everything home/media server and will be running everything in docker containers (plex etc) on ubuntu.

I've been meaning to jump on the Home Assistant bandwagon and thinking now is the time but a couple of googles of HA and docker shows it was a bit funky and limited in how it works in stuff I see from 2019.

wondering if anyone here is running it in a docker container and can speak to how it handles itself?

Not docker, but managed in a virtualbox environment.

I tried docker (and vagrant) but struggled with passthrough of USB & Serial ports (for zigbee & whatnot)

Running natively was a no-no, as it would not have been supported with Supervisor, and led to all sorts of dependency clashes.

I use systemd to manage the vbox (basic stuff - start / stop / status), but otherwise all the config for the environment (NAT / port forwarding) is done in the VM software.

I've always found docker to be a bit opaque when it comes to that sort of thing.

Other than that, I've never had any unexpected downtime in a few months now, and as the image is a supported image, updates are painless.

cf. running on a Pi, which can get in the sea.

I tried it very briefly but couldn't get my usb zigbee stick to work so gave up after about 10 minutes but I've never really got on with Docker whenever I've attempted to use it and I've never really bothered to try and learn it.

I just run it on a pi which has been perfectly stable for the past few years.

doing a bit more reading I think I might pivot to running proxmox on the nuc as the base system so I can containerise the plex stuff as needed and also put HA in a VM both handled by proxmox.

I planned to do a similar thing with Unraid. Never got round to it though

wondering if anyone here is running it in a docker container and can speak to how it handles itself?

I'm not running it in a docker container because IIRC that places some fairly major limitations on it (but don't ask me what they were now).

cf. running on a Pi, which can get in the sea.

This has also been a very good experience for me, super stable and no issues. But I'm using a Pi 4 8Gb in a proper case with cooling (Argon ONE M.2), an SSD and a good PSU (Anker thing).

throwing proxmox on the nuc from a bootable usb and standard install instructions was easy as pie.

using the post install proxmox script and then the home assistant os vm script from here to setup HAOS in it's own vm took about 5 minutes:
https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/

torn between a pure docker/portainer lxc container for my media server or putting it in an ubuntu container and rolling it myself with docker on top.

things were going so well until I wired up HA to alexa and it dumped 93 duplicate items into my alexa devices hnggggg.

luckily turned them all back off. guess I'll need to recreate all my hue and alexa automations in HA, then I can remove all devices from alexa and turn on just the HA stuff instead... not looking forward to that.

I'm sure that I am preaching to the converted, but I would advise to document all of these things well.

My bete noir with whenever I setup home infrastructure is that it usually works flawlessly for long enough for me to forget how it all works, before promptly breaking, leaving me unable to recall the port numbers for admin websites or whatever.