Lifebandit666

It's Christmas and I'm not at work but my bloody alarm clock automation was set up wrong so my alarm went off at 6.30am and my body wouldn't let me get back off to sleep.

So I made a coffee and sat down at my PC and went "What project am I sorting out now?" which is a typical thought when I'm out of bed before everyone else.

Today I knew my Wife wanted me to get the house tidy for Xmas so what better time to get my head around ToDo lists?

Incidentally I have just made a bed sensor so at some point I hit "Deploy" in Node Red and all my lights got brighter, which was odd because I wasn't tinkering with them, but it turned out my Wife had just gotten out of bed and that turned off the night lights.

So I've made separate ToDo lists for each of us and made specific Lovelace pages for each of them. At certain times of the day Node Red will check if there's jobs outstanding on the list and send an actionable notification if you're home. The notification has a button that will open the Lovelace page with your list on.

I've then added a check of the number of jobs in the list and if they increase you get a notification. If they hit zero you get a congratulations notification.

Turns out it was a great project to set up. I've been adding jobs to the kids lists all day, they've been knocking them down again. Wife has added jobs to my list. Happy Wife happy Life eh?

So hopefully going forward there will be less conflict in the house over housework as they jobs will all be handed out with this method.

I've yet to set up recurring jobs like washing up or changing the cat litters, but theoretically I can add these automatically.

I've since taken what I've learned from this project and applied it to my shopping list. I've managed to import my Google Keep shopping list into HA and can now get actionable notification when I hit the supermarket, and still use Google Assistant to add items.

What do you use Todo lists to do? Is there some cool tricks I'm missing?

I have all the usual Home Assistant stuff, including a Goodnight Routine.

I also have 3 cats, one of which has only known the house with automation.

Now these cats seem to have a hierarchy, and the Top Cat sleeps in the bedroom with us. This is now the Cat that only knows automation.

So when I say "Hey Google, Goodnight" she meows, she's genuinely excited.

Now a lot of the time my Wife falls asleep on the sofa while I watch TV or game, and I have to wake her up to go to bed. It's "Goodnight" then wake up the wife.

Last night I had a brainwave. What if I can get the cat to do it? She wakes my wife up at 4am by cleaning her face already, maybe I can get her to wake her up on the sofa too.

So last night I did the usual "Hey Google, Goodnight" then started saying "Goodnight" to the cat, then softly calling my wife, "Wifey, goodnight, goodnight" until she woke up.

When she woke up the cat put her front paws on the sofa and sniffed my wife's face and meowed.

So I plan on waking the Wifey up this way in the future in the hope that the cat will cotton on, and instead of just meowing in excitement, actively participate in the going to bed process.

Thereby giving me a Biomech automation.

She's an intelligent kitty so I have confidence it'll work. Today she (indoor cat) managed to get out while I gave a delivery guy directions and she sat outside in the garden meowing to be let back in, and another of my cats was inside the door meowing too.

It's been written by a self_admitted noob at integrations, but it effortlessly pulls in all data from my Sleep As Android alarm clock and even introduced me to features of the app I didn't know existed, and I've been using it for years.

By following his instructions (I skipped the watch bit) Home Assistant now know when I'm sleeping and awake.

I've been considering some kind of bed load esp board for a while but now I don't have to. I know when I fell asleep last night and even when I was snoring.

More importantly, Home Assistant knows these things and I can now have a more reliable Good Night automation that knows when I'm sleeping, even when I get kicked out of bed and have to sofa sleep.

I woke up this morning at 6 am with IBS cramps. I tried to go back to bed but I'd woken fully up so by half 7 I was sat at my PC with a brew for some uninterrupted tinkering.

My espresence has been a bit finicky since ai set it up. I've been moving the nodes around to find better positions with slight improvements but nothing making it properly stable.

Well this morning was even worse than usual. I'm sat in my front room with my sensor flitting between the floor above and below me but never on the floor I'm on.

I moved the sensors again. I played with dwell time. I changed "wait until" up. I even dived into the rabbit hole of tuning the base stations by increasing rssi and absorbsion, which actually seemed to do the best at improving it.

So at this point my phone has been sitting on the desk for a few hours while I fine tune all this, when my wife comes down the stairs. Her beacon is firmly set to "frontroom" when she sits down but mine is bouncing around the house. Odd.

Then I finally figured it out!

The damn phone is sat on a wireless charging stand on my desk. This must be interfering with my Bluetooth!

I take my phone off the stand and voila, it's in a stable place in espresence.

So that's how I wasted 2 hours this morning.

I say wasted, I did manage to get it more stable on the charging stand before I realised, and this seems to have helped it's stability when it's off the stand. In fact, all my messing about this morning has made espresence correctly report my location ever since.

Since my air fryer notification I've bought 2 more Esp32 Dev boards from The Greal Mall of China- AliExpress. A couple days later I'd read about MMwave sensors and purchased a couple of those too.

A week later and they land a day after each other. I got home today and found 2 MMwave sensors on the kitchen table.

I had half an hour before I had to pick the kids up so I tried to wire and flash it.

The first problem was the writing. I'm 40 now but always had awesome vision, so shit like this just shows me how much it's actually deteriorated. I had to get my phone out and zoom in to work out where to plug in my wires.

I managed to plug shit in and flash the basic firmware on the board, and managed to add some basic code I'd found for my board when I searched using it's full AliExpress name.

I left with a sensor running in HA happy it was that easy. But...

I did some digging, because all I was getting in HA was an occupancy On status, no variance or info.

I found that when I just searched for the sensor without HLK at the beginning or whatever was at the end, there was loads of info. I found a GitHub full of code for my sensor and happily added it to my esp32.

First I had an issue OTA flashing with some password issue, so I flashed it over USB and it worked, I had new sensors in HA! The problem was that they were unresponsive.

I'd positioned it at this point and figured the Dupont wires I used had probably come loose. When I unplugged and replugged it all, success

This thing is awesome. It could see me at my computer and I must have been only just visible to it, I was sat kinda beside it, must have amazing peripheral vision.

Since I've got it going it's detected occupancy throughout. I was watching it pick up my wife just watching TV, unlike my aqara ZigBee one.

My worry is that it'll take a while fine tuning it to filter out the cats. I'm hoping to use it with my espresence setup to make sofa-sleeping more chill. I don't want lights popping on and off when I'm snoring and my wife gets up, but I do want the lights off when we're both in bed.

I need to fine tune the espresence though, or rely on it less. It seems like it's more like Room Assistant than I thought and I flit around the house in Bluetooth Land. I've managed to improve it by moving the sensors and turning my HA beacon to High from Medium and up to Low Latency.

I can set up another MMwave sensor but I'm gonna move my front room aqara to the bedroom and see if I need any.

I might try a pressure sensor for the bed next, or maybe see if I can run a Squeezebox node from it.

"Hur Hur that's what a timer on your phone is for dude"

Yeah but this was a smart plug that was going dusty in a drawer!

Anyway it's not the notification that makes my brain tickle in that special way, but the fact that my HA takes note of who was in the kitchen when the air fryer was started and only notifies the floor with that person on when it's done.

Now I've worked that logic out with a silly Air Fryer notification I can reuse it in all my other automations.

This week I've been playing with Espresence, which for anyone that doesn't know, is a program that runs on an ESP32 and tracks Bluetooth. It then has a guess where you are based upon the strength of the signal.

So a little backstory, I recently wiped out my HA server and didn't have a backup so I've started from scratch. Since I've started from scratch I've been avoiding Node Red and just using the HA automations, but I am a NR boy at heart.

Previously my bathroom light automation in NR was a massive flow of door, motion, leak sensors.

When I added espresence I decided to reinstall NR to add these new sensors into my automations, and found the Binary Sensor node, so I had a play and managed to make a Front Room Presence binary sensor.

"This is pretty good" I thought and made another for my bathroom, taking in all the sensors I used previously. But this time they triggered a binary sensor instead of the lights.

Now I have the binary sensor triggering the light automation, with extras here and there (like guest mode being on, trigger the lights from the hallway sensor instead of the bathroom sensor. The light automation looks much cleaner and presence is all done on one page.

So I'm using the binary sensor in 2 ways here, as an addition to the motion sensor in my front room, and as a replacement for a full blown automation.

Functionally it's not really any different to using an input boolean helper, but I can make this binary in NR itself.

Edit: Gotchas

So I should probably tell you about the big Gotcha in creating a Binary in Node Red.

You need to set the msg. from string to Boolean. So for each binary you need a Boolean true and a Boolean false nose to set it off and on. Everything else was pretty simple

I'm about a month in to playing at self hosting.

I'm currently trying to get a great media server solution going on. I'm trying to containerise as much as I can and have everything sharing a NAS for content.

The last few days I've been adding music to my NAS for the Music server, LMS aka Squeezebox.

I've always liked that I can use LMS with my Google Minis and anything that can run it, and I've seen software for esp32 chips...

Anyway just ripping the 13050 tracks off my old iPod was a slog, and because I can't seem to get more than 4mbps transfer rates it's taken a couple days just to smb transfer the music to the NAS.

Now I passed a Tb HDD through to Open Media Vault so I thought I'd just learn to mount a network share to my Ubuntu container running the Squeezebox server using the same method, Fstab.

TWO DAYS I've been trying to mount in fstab and all I'm hitting is kernel errors or syntax errors. 2 days... It's time to give up.

So I've turned off the PC to get in the bath, and just had a quick look at PCP, the all in one LMS os. I once had it running on a pi zero...

It only has a goddamn dedicated UI portion for adding a samba share!

Tomorrow I will spin up a copy and get it working, THEN I just need to do all my current customisations to THAT instance instead... I'm already in Version 2 of my LMS attempts, so this will be Version 3.

But: my ARR/Plex stack is Version 2 too, version 3 is gonna be Version 1 (Docker) but better (with stacks, mount points and another go at Wireguard, but with NAS and Ubuntu instead of Windows.

Sometimes you've just got to go AFK and make a decision to burn it all down and start again.

Update: I've tried to get PCP running in Proxmox with no dice. Instead I've got Squeezelite running on a pi4b. That has freed up a pi3b which is now running PCP.

I'm using Heimdall to easily access my self hosted stuff ATM. I would like for my family to use them too if they're so inclined, but there's no way they will be able to remember the IP addresses, I know I can't!

Is it a DNS I'm looking for? If so, I'm already hosting a couple of instances of Adguard, can I just set it so that Plex is 192.xxx.x.47 and snapdrop is 192.xxx.x.53 and use that to resolve the request so my 13 year old can just type Plex into his browser and find it?

Or do I need something like Caddy or Nginx or something in between?

Thanks for any advice.

I'm a noob to all this, and love this server. I've recently set up Proxmox and Portainer, got Home Assistant transferred onto my new computer and set up an Arr stack on Windows VM.

I kept adding storage to that stack until it was talking half my internal storage so I bought a usb3 cable and hooked up an old 1tb HDD I had lying around.

I decided I wanted NAS storage with the HDD. I had already set up OMV but it was being a bit funny. Whenever I logged in to it I had no options, so I couldn't add the HDD to it.

So I did some looking around and found TrueNAS. Installed it and started fiddling. Jesus it's hard work to just add an SMB share from it!

After literally hours of tinkering I still was no closer so I gave up and went for a bath.

In the bath it occurred to me that maybe I was logging in to OMV wrong. I fired up the browser on my phone in the bath and instead of logging in with my name, I tried "admin" and lo and behold there is all the options I couldn't see before.

5 minutes later I had half a tb in an SMB share, and then it was a simple case of making network shared folders on all my windows machines.

Thought you guys may be amused by the noob error of logging in as Admin.

I'm new to Proxmox and have had Openwrt on an AP router for a while, but still am not all that good at it.

I followed a YouTube video yesterday to set up Openwrt as a Proxmox device. The idea being that I can patch all my containers through it and have a single IP address and many ports associated with it on my home lan.

But I'm also trying to get Mullvad VPN installed on it. When I've followed the instructions to install Mullvad I can no longer ping the outside world. If there's any pointers to getting that going I'd be grateful. I followed the instructions on their website.

Questions: if I get Mullvad working is there a way for me to route some containers through that and others through my own IP, or do I need 2 openwrt containers to get this? I noticed that during the setup I removed the WAN from the LAN and just left Mullvad as an exit route, so I assume I would need a second LAN with the WAN for me to be able to route via it. If that is the case, can I route some through one LAN and some through a second?

I've recently started a new job. It doesn't pay as well as the old one but it's less hours, longer breaks and within walking distance of my house.

This last is the main draw. When I finish the late shift I whip out my Dynavap M and try to heat it up without being seen by other pedestrians, and road users. It's fine once it's heated.

Anyway I have just enough time to cache a bowl before I get home. I absolutely love it, gives me something to look forward to at the end of my shift and completely changes my mental space, so by the time I'm home I've blown work out of my mind and I'm in relaxed mode, which was my main issue with my old job.

I had to take time off in autumn last year with mental health problems that were all work related. The way my employer dealt with me was the push I needed to leave. On paper they were doing the bare minimum to support me, but actually what they did was throw me in a corner to get dusty and forget about me.

That's all I have, a positive vape story.