this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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homeassistant

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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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Windows and macOS have similar clients (Hass.Agent for Windows and Home Assistant for macOS).

I've found these kinds of clients useful because I can remotely wake-up or sleep computers, track how long they are turned on for, and automatically pause my lights and music when my webcam turns on.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago

Ooooh! Finally. I have needed something like this to control the volume on my media PC.

I used to have an automation that detects when my HVAC turns on, and it bumps the volume of whatever I’m playing up a few clicks. Then turns it back down when the HVAC cycle finishes. Super handy due to the crazy loud HVAC in my house.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

Been using this for several months now and it's been great. I even set up scripts to set my next boot to be Windows when I know I'll be gaming with friends using a game on GamePass so it'll be booted and ready when game night is about to start.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

This is super useful, thanks for sharing!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

USER ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /bin/systemctl

That's concerning.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Oh neat!

I made a custom solution for WOL and remote shutdown using nodered and MQTT, but this is so cleaner than maintaining a custom solution

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If you're using it, Home Assistant natively supports Wake On Lan. This would only be able to handle the shutdown/sleep side of things.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Yeah the nodered flow on the target device is for handling shutdown(sleep) and status reporting back to HomeAssistant, so in HA the computer is a simple switch with on/off states

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Can somebody shed some light on why this doesn't create a systemd entry? It works when I manually run it specifying the config.yaml file but there are no systemd entries. I'm on Ubuntu desktop.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago
[–] Luccajan 2 points 4 months ago

I'm definately going to try this, I was using Hass.Agent before switching to Linux and am looking for someting similar.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This is so cool, first MQTT-based sensor I've set up. Already had a broker set up with HA, but how can HA automatically discover which topic to listen to, know the vendor name and how to interpret all the data?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

There's a set of special topics under homeassistant/ that devices also publish to that describe what each topic does and how HA should present it. HA will subscribe to everything under that root topic to discover all your MQTT devices.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I don't have mqtt in my home, so I assume this would not work for me, even though the computer is connected to the same network as the HA instance is?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Just set up MQTT in home Assistant, why not?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

But that requires a broker, right?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

It does. I use Mosquito but I believe HA has a built in one too. Mosquito was easy enough to set up though.

Honestly MQTT is like the nervous system of my HA setup. I started using it with Tasmota when I Tasmotised all my cheap WiFi bulbs, then opted for Zigbee2mqtt for my ZigBee setup.

But I also have things like my bedside clock (an old phone running WallPanel), my doorway tablet (a Nexus 7 running Fully Kiosk Browser), my PC and even my alarm clock app on my phone, all running through MQTT.

I even had Tasker on my phone communicating with HA via MQTT before I gave up on that. It's really useful