Metbril's 🤓 Home Assistant Configuration

This repository contains my configuration for Home Assistant.

NOTE: I have decided to no longer maintain my configuration with git. Home Assistant is moving outside YAML more and more. Larger parts of the configuration are stored outside these files. This is the last commit before the repository is archived.

Table of Contents

Configuration principles

I used to be an avid user of packages. That provided an easy way to keep funtionality together, enable or disable it, and share with others. However, Home Assistant is slowly phasing out YAML configuration and adding more and more features to the UI. This has pros and cons, but the main advantage is, that you don't need a real computer, ssh or a Samba connection to edit the configuration.

The biggest drawback of using the UI is, that editing using the interface usually takes more time than editing a text file. But on the other hand, I have spent a lot of time fixed yaml syntax and formatting errors.

So for now I have decided to move as much configuration as possible to the UI.

Automations, Scripts & Scenes

Since using the UI editor for automations, scripts and scenes, I have noticed that I change those a lot. These means that changes are scattered around the files. Since I want to track changes through git and be able to revert to old versions, I have again decided to split these files automations.yaml, scripts.yaml and scenes.yaml into separate files. I will continue using the files for quick one offs or testing.

HASS.io

This file contains specific details about my HASS.io installation.

Host hardware

The system is currently running on Hardkernel Odroid-N2 (like Home Assistant Blue). Previously, I have used a Raspberry Pi 3B and before that a Raspberry Pi 2B.

Add-ons

I recently switched to [Home Assistant Cloud][cloud] from a self-managed proxy setup. So I closed the port on my firewall and no longer need the add-ons that made this possible: Nginx Proxy, Duckdns and Certbot.

SSH

Samba

Backups

I create backups with the Home Assistant Google Drive Backup addon.

Custom Components

HACS

To manage my custom components, I use HACS.

Z-Wave

I am using Z-Wave. I started using it as a reliable, secure and 2-way alternative to cheap 433 MHz devices (mainly Klik-Aan-Klik-Uit). This was before Philips Hue and Ikea Trådfri became large and mainstream, and thus the Zigbee protocol.

Until the end of 2019 I have been using the standard Hassio Z-Wave integration, but have migrated to Zwave2Mqtt since.

The reason to switch to Zwave2Mqtt was, to de-couple Home Assistant from my Z-Wave network. This should provide me with a healthier and more stable Z-Wave mesh. Using the Z-Wave integration, you will restart your entire network with every restart of Home Assistant, which can lead to unexpected results. And you need to wait minutes for all entities to show up.

Somewhere in 2023, I moved to the Z-Wave JS integration.

Hardware

Connected (smart) hardware:

• Sonos speakers
• LG WebOS TV

Sonos

Sonos speakers are added through discovery. This is more convenient than configuring manually.

Neo Coolcam

Template sensor to fix a bug in some Neo wall plugs. The applied constant is the equivalent of 0x7FFFFFFF. Device precision is 2 decimals. The original sensosr is renamed to "...raw_energy" The template sensor then gets the old name.

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/energy-consumption-for-neo-coolcam-plug/219844/26

Dashboards

Themes

I only use themes from HACS. These are installed in the themes folder, but are never uploaded to this repo.

Mushroom & Tile cards

I really like Mushroom and Tile cards. However, they do not (yet) have the flexibility of the entities card in combination with some custom cards.

Custom cards

I use several custom cards for displaying a nice and tailored dashboard. Among thise are:

• Mini Graph Card
• Mini Mediaplayer
• Fold Entity Row
• Multiple Entity Row
• Template Entity Row

Tips & Tricks

Editing your configuration

• Tracking your lovelace UI file
• Testing and debugging automations with automation editor

Database

• Limit database growth

Tracking your Lovelace UI file

To start tracking the lovelace UI file .storage/lovelace, you need to force-add it to git:

git add -f .storage/lovelace

Testing and debugging automations with automation editor

Using the automation editor is an easy way to test automations or to create temporary automations for debugging.

To use the automation editor in combination with packages, there needs to be a separate automations.yaml file in the root of the config directory, with a least one properly formatted automation. My config has a dummy automation to prevent that the configuration becomes invalid.

Limit database growth

To limit database growth, I limit recording as much as possible and purge the database daily for values older than 3 days.

Outside Brightness

Use a template sensor to calculate outside brightness. This takes into account the sun elevation, cloudiness and radiation.

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/virtual-light-sensor/31975/24 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance#:~:text=Average%20annual%20solar%20radiation%20arriving,level%20on%20a%20clear%20day. https://gps-coordinates.org/coordinate-converter.php max elevation https://www.suncalc.org/#/40.1789,-3.5156,3/2022.09.13/17:15/1/3

Maintenance

For the maintenance of my configuration, I use these tools:

• Visual Studio Code, with extensions:
  • Home Assistant Config Helper
  • YAML
  • markdownlint
  • UUID Generator
• yamllint
• pre-commit

To use yamllint with pre-commit, execute these commands:

brew install yamllint
brew install pre-commit
pre-commit install

Credits 🙏

• Frenck's yamllint action
• Frenck's home assistant configuration checker

Contributions

If you have suggestions or improvements, please submit an issue or pull request.