Home Assistant Presence Simulation

https://github.com/slashback100/presence_simulation

by edward • 2 years ago

144 100 2 years ago

github.com

enobrev2• 2 years ago

Simulated presence in our home: Motion-triggered lights and a cat

starxidas• 2 years ago

Sure, but cats sleep around 35 hours a day.

drdaeman• 2 years ago

Fortunately, presence simulation is only needed at dusk/night - when cats have their zoomies.

nurettin• 2 years ago

I need some of those cat-sensitive motion triggers.

reaperducer2• 2 years ago

Old school hardware stores have them. They screw in between the lightbulb and the lamp.

bobchadwick• 2 years ago

I used this last week! I was out of town and a friend texted me letting me know the lights in my house were on. I got such a sense of joy in knowing that it was working as intended.

dharbin• 2 years ago

Can it automate a cutout of Michael Jordan attached to a model train set?

jeroenhd• 2 years ago

You jest, but with an ESP32 flashed with ESPHome and a few dollars of electronics to regulate the power, I think controlling model trains would actually be quite doable. Your biggest challenge is probably dealing with network/scripting latency for events that need to happen in quick succession, like when dealing with switches.

Or, if you consider Lego DUPLO trains to be model trains, there's this: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/lego-duplo-train-contr...

Edit: there's also this https://github.com/aaron9589/esphome-for-model-railroading for the more serious model railroad enthusiast, though I'm not 100% sure if that actually controls the trains themselves (or just the switches and lights)

shimon• 2 years ago

In many cases, a simple off-the-shelf smart plug would suffice.

sofixa3• 2 years ago

Awesome. The Home Assistant and related (ESPHome, Voice Assistant, Music Assistanc) communities are amazing and there is just a crazy amount of projects one can just pick up and use.

moandcompany• 2 years ago

It could also automate ordering pizza delivery and the tipping process to "Keep the change, ya filthy animal"

paradox4602• 2 years ago

There's a dominoes pizza integration in home assistant

paradox4602• 2 years ago

There are dcc systems that run on Arduino or raspberry pi, and expose an API interface. Could control one via home assistant

bloopernova• 2 years ago

Slightly related, please forgive the offtopicness: has anyone implemented a DIY UWB location base + beacon/tag?

I ask because my neurodivergent wife loses things, and often Tile either doesn't work or isn't load enough. I read that UWB promises 10cm² or 10cm³ accuracy, which would be ideal for finding lost stuff.

I've seen a couple of commercial offerings, but they didn't have pricing.

__sy__• 2 years ago

I don't know if it will count as DIY, but take a look at LEGIC and their devkit for this. We (seam) work with them and I recall seeing a couple of startups doing demo's of their UWB solution at their LEGIC Connect conference.

Rebelgecko• 2 years ago

I used some Decawave kits ~a decade ago and they worked pretty well... however if you want to DIY something as usable as Airtags I think the main struggle would be getting the package compact and with low power consumption (unless you want to track large things and are fine with a chonky battery)

jitl2• 2 years ago

The generic stuff in the "Find My" ecosystem works quite well. It's not DIY, but most things have UWB finding that works whole-house for me.

Fokamul• 2 years ago

Hm I'm not sure if this helps. Because thieves will first knock on doors, even for tens of minutes. Ring etc. Normally people will open and thief will say some BS and go away.

Cameras with backup power and backup internet connection is your first priority.

Geezus_42• 2 years ago

Funny because I never answer my door when anyone knocks. If you're knocking on my door it's because I don't know you, which means I probably don't want to talk to you. Anyone who knows me knows to call or text before they come by.

baq• 2 years ago

I have kids, neighbors have kids, door is knocked on all the time.

sofixa3• 2 years ago

What if it's like, a utility company trying to warn you they'll cut off power/water/whatever in a few minutes because of emergency works?

joshstrange• 2 years ago

Just a note to anyone interested in trying out Home Assistant:

It's amazing _but_ do NOT use a raspberry pi to run it. Save yourself a ton of headaches and buy a mini pc (there was a list of used mini pcs posted here yesterday from ebay). Also I recommend using HAOS (or whatever the "we install and run the whole OS" option is called) so that you can use things like plugins without messing around with docker. I love docker but trust me, life is easier on HAOS.

I liked HA but felt like it wasn't really "stable". I used a Pi 3 for a while, then a Pi 4 decked out (highest ram, NVME storage, super nice case, etc) and still felt like it was unstable. I chalked this up to HA but then rolled the dice on a Beelink mini pc and it has been rock solid ever since. Also don't be misled by the lower price of the Pi, I paid more for my Pi 4 setup than the Beelink (or about the same).

I blamed everything from the Zigbee/Z-wave dongles, to HAOS, to HA itself, etc but in the end it was RPi. The 4 was the last Pi I'll ever buy.

EDIT: I was in a hurry and didn't add my normal disclaimer when I talk about the RPi's:

Yes I know some of you have a Pi 1 that been running you entire life since it first came out and you think I'm full of crap. I've owned every Pi 1-4 and never been truly happy with them. I bought them "raw" and sourced all the parts myself, I bought high-end (at least in price) kits with everything included, I bought all official accessories (like power), they always were just that little bit unstable.

It would work great for days/weeks then randomly not be reachable (wired or wireless). I spent just shy of $200 for my last "builds" which included a NVME drive (240G, lest you think this is where the cost was), RPi case, RPi NVME hat, RPi 4 8gb model, SD card, power, etc and the result was still instability. I don't know what to tell you. Maybe I'm a moron but my experience with them has not been great. That said I want to love them and I loved my RPi 1B even with all it's warts, a $35 "credit card sized" computer was awesome. Maybe I just don't want to tinker as much anymore and value stability.

vaindil• 2 years ago

Counterpoint: I've been running HAOS on an RPi 2 and 3 for several years without a single issue, and I do use a z-wave dongle but no Zigbee. I only do basic stuff with it (a few automations for my z-wave thermostat and switches, AdGuard Home), but it's been rock solid for me.

I only had issues once, when I tried to run the Unifi Network Application addon. A RPi is not strong enough for that, but I just uninstalled it and moved on.

gedy• 2 years ago

I mostly agree, but found that HA isn't too bad on Pi if you don't continuously update the versions even if it suggests. I had a lot of trouble keeping a stable system until I just ignored them until I really needed to install on new system, etc.

domrdy• 2 years ago

Or a 2012 MacMini, $~90 on ebay. Quiet, small form factor, runs Linux.

rockbruno• 2 years ago

I've been running it for a year on a RPi 2, via WiFi, from a SD card *and* a Zigbee dongle, which is basically what everyone seems to say you should not do, and never had a single issue with it. I don't think these issues have anything to do with HA itself but rather the extensions people install on it.

chime• 2 years ago

I think it also has to do with how many devices you have on it and how often they update state. I have 300+ IP devices and have to run it on a mini PC because RPi was too slow. No custom plugins or extensions, just a few basic integrations.

punnerud• 2 years ago

The problem is often that people use small MicroSD (8-16GB) that don’t support the number of writes to SQLite3 that HA does.

Have been using Western Digital purple 64GB MicroSD for years without problems (support the same number of writes as SSD)

kayodelycaon• 2 years ago

I've been using a raspberry pi 4 for 2 years with no issues. You need a good, clean power source or you can have all kinds of issues. Having good ventilation won't hurt. You also need a good sdcard that can handle a large volume of writes.

delichon• 2 years ago

I'm about to buy a Pi 5 for a Pi-hole. Does the same advice apply to that?

import2• 2 years ago

You can get a mini pc for the same price and it would be more comfortable.

SirYandi• 2 years ago

Pi5 is plenty, even overkill for a pihole. I run a pihole on my old pi2 and it's absolutely fine

teamonkey• 2 years ago

I run Pihole on a Pi Zero W and it’s fine.

arkmm• 2 years ago

I've been running off a Raspberry Pi for years and it's been very stable. The main things for me were to use a good SD card, to use Ethernet instead of Wifi, and to also reboot the Pi daily via an automation.

amscanne2• 2 years ago

It’s not stable if you need to reboot daily.

password4321• 2 years ago

Low Cost Mini PCs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41389931

kkfx4• 2 years ago

I've pip-install it in my homeserver (a small celeron with enough ram and storage) BUT I have a note to all HA users and devs: why the hell keep insisting on the WebUI for configuring, it's NOT reproducible nor simple.

Oh, of course, for a casual user it's simple, unfortunately no casual users know about HA or how to physically integrate HA in a smart home, so the idea of making a generic end-user system it's a failure in principle, no matter the implementation. Aside nothing is forever so even if for some it's easier to go for a WebUI, when it will break, because it will (and with HA I've experienced issues various time, an update at a time) you need to waste big time instead of simply adapting a damn simple config.

Hell, even NixOS with it's damn nix language is enormously simpler than the YAML hell + WebUI of HA. And yes, NixOS is far more stable and simple than playing with an entire distro just to run a Pythonic app.

xd1936• 2 years ago

what?

mixedCase• 2 years ago

I've given up on Home Assistant because of this. Particularly because since I've switched to NixOS I really don't want to be arsed reconfiguring stateful crap from the start every time I make some change that requires a reinstall.

Sadly, I've yet to find a viable alternative.

import2• 2 years ago

I ran it on RPI 3 and 4 with SSD for years and had zero issues. Now moved to the mini pc but RPI still hosting other stuff and works rock solid.

sockaddr• 2 years ago

I've also found pis to be unreliable in the long term. Even buying good SD cards doesn't help. It's always something. Broken storage, brown out (I'm using the recommended power supply), sudden lack of communication over the eth port, etc.

I've found that just getting an old toughbook is much more reliable for projects that don't require miniaturization.

Cheer2171• 2 years ago

Counterpoint: my Pi 4 4gb booting a USB3 SSD drive has been working fine for years. The SD cards are what kill Pis

scubbo• 2 years ago

Another "Been using RPi 4 for HAOS solidly for multiple years" anecdote chiming in here. Typically the SD cards are the unreliable bit, not the Pi itself.

m463• 2 years ago

You can boot and run a pi from a USB ssd, and now pi5 has easier nvme.

But yeah, then you're competing with a minipc. The pi5 now has niceties like a power button and you can battery backup the clock with a wired coin cell, but then it is more time and expense to get to what minipcs had basically forever.

drumttocs8• 2 years ago

Recommend just running it on a VM in proxmox or similar

asveikau3• 2 years ago

HAOS is absolutely terrible when it faces filesystem corruption. I faced this a few times when my HAOS image crashed. You can't even get it to fsck on boot when it happens. I think that's one big reason people on RPIs have issues. The FS is on an SD card, SD cards are flakey, and there's no good rescue path when the FS has issues.

I guess USB power is also historically not great on RPI. I haven't played with them in a few years but I remember needing powered hubs. That might explain issues with Zigbee and Z-wave dongles. Note also the '700 series' z-wave dongles have a lot of issues. You can update the firmware to fix some. Mine's been flakey and I'm on the latest firmware from ~2 weeks ago that's supposed to fix all of that.

I was running HAOS on VirtualBox, with the disk image on ZFS. I switched to running docker out of the same ZFS filesystem and it's much faster and more reliable, notably I don't get random filesystem corruption. Anecdote. YMMV.

Modified3019• 2 years ago

I’m not familiar with virtualbox, do you have any idea why HAOS on VB+ZFS was corrupting vs Docker+ZFS?

gregmac• 2 years ago

HAOS is absolutely terrible when it faces filesystem corruption. I faced this a few times when my HAOS image crashed. You can't even get it to fsck on boot when it happens.

I don't see this as being unique to HAOS, if a filesystem is corrupted in a certain way then _no OS_ is going to be able to boot.

There are distros that are specifically optimized for the Pi (with, eg specific logging choices [1]) that try to avoid problems (with trade-offs).

I've used something before (can't remember/find it now, but maybe thought it was in Yocto?) where there were 3 partitions: one was read-write used for persisting user data, and two were for the OS/apps. One would be live and mounted as read-only, the other was for the next system update using a blue-green deploy strategy. I think it also used RAM for log and temp files.

[1] https://dietpi.com/docs/software/log_system/

ziml77• 2 years ago

I had problems when running HA on an RPi as well. It was never very snappy or stable in its connection with the Z-Wave network. I don't know if it was too much power being drawn by the dongle or what, but switching over to a mini ThinkStation that I got for cheap on Ebay solved the problem. Not only perfectly stable with the connection to the Z-Wave network but also just overall more responsive.

Sleaker• 2 years ago

Had rpi3b with HA for nearly 4 years now without any problems at all, not sure where your issues come from but I feel like mine is cake.

NiekvdMaas• 2 years ago

Or buy an officially supporter Home Assistant Green for $99: https://www.home-assistant.io/green/

lannisterstark2• 2 years ago

Honestly, to be fair, You can buy two more powerful 1L dell optiplexes or HP prodesks for this cost. i5-7/8xxx with 8G/16G ram often go for $40-50 on eBay.

Install proxmox and HAOS and you can use the rest for other stuff.

ThatPlayer• 2 years ago

I've been using a Home Assistant Yellow, which is running on a Raspberry Pi CM4. Bit more specialized than the Green I think.

Fabricio20• 2 years ago

I want to go the other way and say DO NOT use HAOS if you know anything about docker. If you have ANY experience working under linux/docker just don't bother with HAOS and save yourself the headache. You will have an incredibly better experience just running your HASS docker container by yourself.

HAOS caused so many issues for me while it tried to set up the other containers (such as Node Red), specially during home assistant updates, and it also made the whole UI extremely confusing because it would "redirect" some things to HAOS while others would be done inside HASS itself. With it auto trying to manage the containers it was also never clear when things were still booting/loading or crash looping and when you had issues the extremely limited access HAOS gives you was painful to deal with.

As with other personal anecdotes in this thread, it may not be relevant to you, but I'd share my own experience as well, as someone that has had HASS running for 6+ years now.

hunter2_2• 2 years ago

I haven't used Docker much at all, but I use Proxmox for everything at home (LXC containers for various web servers, Zoneminder, Plex, Pihole, etc. and the occasional VM for stuff like pfSense) on decent hardware. Which HA installation method would you recommend in this case?

My only prior HA experience was around 2017 before they had multiple options; I used a RPi which burned through microSD cards and it was pretty miserable. Gave up by 2019. Not making that mistake again.

lhamil64• 2 years ago

I run with Docker and it has been fine for me, but one issue I have is that certain things aren't documented well. For example, when I played around with the voice assistant stuff, the documentation only explained how to set it up via addons. It took a decent amount of digging and trial & error to figure out how to set it up manually. Looking again, it doesn't seem much better now.

xur17• 2 years ago

As a counterpoint, I am very familiar with docker (I use it at my job as a backend developer / devops engineer), and I originally went with the docker based install, but eventually swapped to haos. I switched because addons are vastly simpler to install in haos, and any documentation you find typically assumes that is what you are using.

fignews• 2 years ago

As a Linux systems engineer I’ve looked behind the curtain at HAOS and was very impressed by how well things are implemented. Been running it for years in KVM and have never had an issue.

sebazzz2• 2 years ago

I want to go the other way and say DO NOT use HAOS if you know anything about docker. If you have ANY experience working under linux/docker just don't bother with HAOS and save yourself the headache. You will have an incredibly better experience just running your HASS docker container by yourself.

If you don’t use HAOS you miss out on Home Assistant add-ons, which themselves sometimes integrate in Home Assistant.

Vaslo• 2 years ago

Love docker and have dozens of app containers running but so much easier to do the addins on HAOS

lurking_swe• 2 years ago

i’d recommend buying “home assistant green”, it’s plug n play:

https://www.home-assistant.io/green/

hughesjj• 2 years ago

100% this, my rpi3 kept running out of ram running all the services I wanted on home assistant so I moved it to proxmox and use the roi+touchscreen as a dedicated web client for the interface now

Be careful with the beelinks though, I have one with a nice ryzen API that's basically useless because the USB gave out and it's a chicken and the egg problem trying to get Bluetooth on it. Haven't gotten around to attempt manually configuring Bluetooth on the SSD yet (from another computer) or otherwise fixing those ports

jki275• 2 years ago

Pis are basically toys. They have a function, but it isn't running servers.

I use an old Mac mini.

stavros• 2 years ago

I've been using a Pi 3 for years and years, it's always been rock solid. The only problem was in the beginning, when I didn't use the official power supply, I'd get frequent brownouts, even with good bench power supplies. Apparently the Pi (especially older ones, not sure if they've fixed it now) had too much of a voltage drop, and needed a slightly higher voltage supply to work properly.

After that, zero problems.

n8henrie• 2 years ago

I've been running hass for quite some time, for years directly in a python venv on a Pi2, then Pi3, and now happily on a Pi4 4GB for several years. Runs so well I decided not to upgrade to a 5. Use both zigbee and zwave.

Currently running in docker, which was a godsend when I migrated from Raspbian to NixOS about 18 months or so ago with no issues.

Have used an SSD wherever possible, perhaps that's why it's been so stable.

I use the GPIO, which is one reason I've stuck with the Pi!

pawelduda• 2 years ago

Been running HA and a couple other services on RPi 4 with old SSD and DietPi as the OS, behind tailscale for 2 years. It needs a restart maybe once in a blue moon, and it's back online in 1 min, that's it.

jitl2• 2 years ago

I use a normal automation to turn on the lights every day at sundown, and to turn off the lights every night at ($BEDTIME + 1hr), just as part of daily life. I don't need anything tricky to simulate that pattern when I'm traveling; I just don't disable the automation. I wonder how many people using HomeAssitant for their lights are manually turning lights on and off all the time. I would think most people would set up a daily or weekday + weeknight schedule and be done with it.

closewith• 2 years ago

We have some automations, but mostly use homebridge and Apple Home scenes controlled by presence, smart switches, Siri, and the app. I'd imagine that's 10x-100x more common than pure time based automations based on the HA fora.

orev2• 2 years ago

I did this for a long time with timer switches that could be programmed similarly, and switching to HA wasn’t some huge change, it was just nicer. I had to periodically make sure the clock was correct on them, as they would drift a few minutes, and the interface itself was via small LCD screen and buttons.

HA is just a nicer experience, but I wouldn’t say it (or any home automation) is a “need”. It’s better seen as something for tech people to tinker with once they’ve settled a bit in life and are looking for something to do.

jjeaff• 2 years ago

I'm guessing you have to do a bit more in maintenance for your Home Assistant instance than set the clock every once and a while?

dostick• 2 years ago

Exactly! What’s the point of that if most of people have evening lights and blinds automated to run daily.

billfor• 2 years ago

I use a rule-based automation in OpenHab (similar to HA) to randomly pick a light from a group and toggle it after a random interval, and it repeats the process every 10 minutes from 4pm to 11pm. I find this better than relying on prior history since there is no guarantee that my prior pattern of occupancy would be applicable to a vacation period. Better to just randomly cycle random lights - that will confuse them ;-)

deadbunny• 2 years ago

This has been on my list of things to do for a while, saves me a job. Thanks for sharing.

hunter2_2• 2 years ago

Growing up, my parents always made sure the radio was on, slightly louder than a normal volume, whenever we left the house. Funny seeing how that idea of presence simulation has evolved.

Home Assistant Presence Simulation

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