homeassistant

ArgonOne NVMe Expansion

This weekend I upgraded the Raspberry Pi that hosts my Mastodon instance and Home Assistant (among other services) with an NVMe drive.  Previously it was using an old mechanical USB hard drive, so the performance increase with the NVMe is huge!  

It runs a bit hotter than with the microSD card + external HDD, but it’s nice to have everything in one case without worrying about SD card wear anymore.

I also finally got around to upgrading from Ubuntu 20.04 to Ubuntu 22.04, just in time for the next LTS release later this year.

Water Level Measurement

Last weekend I mounted an @adafruit VL6180X distance sensor underneath the grow platform. It uses a laser to measure how far away the surface of the water is, and then I subtract that from the height to determine how full the tank is.

I previously tried this with a RCWL-9620 ultrasonic distance sensor, however condensation would start to build up on the speaker grills and produce inaccurate readings. Hopefully the laser will be more accurate in this environment!

I’ve also started to use the built-in status LED to indicate when it’s time to add nutrients and when the water level is low.

#project #projects #gardening #AeroGarden #microcontroller #esp32 #ESPHome #HomeAssistant​

M5Stack Atom Lite

I recently bought a couple of #M5Stack Atom Lites to use as bluetooth proxies for #HomeAssistant around my apartment. Much easier than trying to work around the issues with USB device forwarding on my Linux VM.

Shot on Olympus E-m10 Mark II camera with 40-150mm lens and 10mm extension tube

#MacroPhotography #esphome #esp32 #em10mark2 #40150mm​

ESPHome Garden Monitor

Over the weekend, I converted my garden monitoring microcontroller from #MicroPython to #ESPHome.

The controller is a M5StickC-Plus with temperature, humidity, air pressure sensors, and IR thermometer attached via I²C. The button on the front records the timestamp when plant food is added. #HomeAssistant adjusts the LCD backlight automatically using a nearby Zigbee motion sensor.

Firmware is on Github: https://github.com/c99koder/m5stickc-aerogarden​

ESPHome makes it much easier to add additional sensors in the future, I’ve already got a few ideas already! I was hoping it could work as a Bluetooth proxy for #HomeAssistant too, however the device doesn’t have enough RAM to run the display, WiFi, and Bluetooth scanner at the same time.

#gardening #microcontroller #esp32​

Home Assistant OS on KVM

Migrated my #HomeAssistant server to the new Home Assistant OS ARM64 image running in #Linux KVM on my #RaspberryPi 4.

I was previously using a docker installation on #Ubuntu that is no longer officially supported, and various things stopped working properly recently.

Haven’t noticed any performance difference between docker and the virtual machine, and now it’s officially supported and much easier to maintain!