Sean Ferigan: Home Automation

I've recently moved from fixed trigger times for certain (mostly lighting) events to user-configurable. This provides me an easy way to configure via a Home Assistant dashboard. This is achieved by the use of some helpers and a simple node-red subflow: The subflow code can be downloaded here  for import into your node-red instance. The subflow outputs one of the following values: Morning Day Evening Night Unknown (if no matching timeframe is found) Based on matching the helper values in a cascade of time_range nodes in the subflow. To use it you'll need to create "time" helpers with the following entity ids: input_datetime.morning_start input_datetime.morning_end input_datetime.day_start input_datetime.day_end input_datetime.evening_start input_datetime.evening_end input_datetime.night_start input_datetime.night_end which can then be added to a dashboard for easy editing.

 My Google Coral Edge TPU arrived today which I'm hoping will make person detection on my CCTV fast and simple, and reduce the number of false positives I get currently. Here's a quick unboxing video. And if you're thinking to yourself "What the heck is that??" then here's a little blurb: The Coral USB Accelerator adds an Edge TPU coprocessor to your system. It includes a USB socket you can connect to a host computer to perform accelerated ML inferencing. The on-board Edge TPU is a small ASIC designed by Google that provides high performance ML inferencing with a low power cost. For example, it can execute state-of-the-art mobile vision models such as MobileNet v2 at almost 400 FPS, in a power-efficient manner. In simple terms (that I can almost understand) it takes Machine Learning (ML) tasks and runs them much faster than the HA Blue can do on its own. This means my little HA Blue can do things like detect people and vehicles in a CCTV video feed quickly an...

 I'll post a longer update once I've tidied up a few things and have time to write a more complete evaluation, but today I migrated from a Proxmox VM running hassio over to  my shiny new Odroid HA Blue! The process was painless, create a full snapshot, fire up the Blue and upload/restore. Shut down the old instance, change the IP on the new to match (to avoid having to change MQTT device configs) and reboot the Blue to pick up the correct IP address. I also had to move the ConBee II dongle from the Proxmox server to the Blue, and plugged in the Google Coral Accelerator that arrived today (keep an eye out for an unboxing video). Once I'd confirmed the core functionality was working fine I installed Frigate and created a simple 2 camera config to test that it was working (and using the Coral device, which it was). Result is that I now have the start of an improved CCTV solution that detects people/vehicles and doesn't just record any old motion event.

Yay, my HA Blue low-power computer arrived this morning. Here's an unboxing video to whet your appetite until I get time to try it out.

I was looking for a low-power dedicated server to run my Home Assistant instance on so last week I ordered a Home Assistant Blue. This is an ODROID N2+ with a fancy home-assistant branded housing. I just had notice that it's shipped and will arrive tomorrow!!! Can't wait to get it set up and migrate my HA config over to it.