Yeah, I know I’m very tired with Home Assistant when I’m supposed to be a fan to the death of HomeKit.. And it’s completely true, of all the domestic ecosystems I’ve tried HomeKit is the one I like the most by far. It works very well, it is simple to configure and automations are not too complicated… But he’s missing a few things and, in my case, I never got the full elimination of the delay between Aqara surface switches and Philips Hue lights. With Home Assistant this
delay has disappeared since minute 1.
Home Assistant is not perfect. You will remember what I told you a few weeks ago when I was talking about all the limitations I had found on Home Assistantsome for lack of knowledge and others for lack of maturity, as even though it is a super active project with a large community behind it there are still things that it lacks to polish or implement.
One of these limitations is what I want to talk about today: high availability and failure tolerance. Some of the colleagues of the Compatible Domotics Discord Server or through Twitter I have been suggested to reduce the number of logs to the maximum so that the memory card of the Raspberry PI can hold as long as possible. The ones that you have a little bit of a mess with Raspberry PI will know that the endemic evil they have is the corruption of data from SD memory card. Yeah, you can do the ap.
year to put a standard SSD hard drive or a USB storage brush, but If you trust only the SD card before or after you have problems.
This problem of data corruption is easily solved: you just have to have another memory card and a cloud backup of all Home Assistant settings which you can do smoothly with the plug-in to save copies on Google Drive (we talk about it after the) But when I get the card, you’ll need a few minutes to run this procedure and, in the meantime, the automations won’t work… neither the lights… nor the sensors… nor the switches in my case… nothing. It is true that the process is fast and almost transparent, the copy is PERFECTA and you can restore it, restart the IP and fly, but those
10 minutes are going to make you very long if you have your wife waiting with her head spun in the bathroom with the light off because she has jumped the differential and the PI has taken advantage to ruin the SD card by sudden cutting of light. Yeah, this is a vibe, like Buenafuente and Berto Romero would say.
That’s why I decided to do this week. the migration of Home Assistant to an Intel Nuc from the Raspberry Pi 4 I was using. The Intel Nuc is a small Intel computer with a very similar consumption to the PI but with a standard SSD hard drive that you can expand or change at any time, just like the RAM. Much more ‘scalable’ than a PI.
In addition, it is based on life-long processing technology (x86) and not on mobile processing technology (ARM) such as IP, the overall performance and reliability of the system is much better. It’s not that there’s a spectacular speed change as the IP works perfectly, but for some demanding tasks it can be significant… if I ever do some demanding task with the xD thing
Backup to Home Assistant
Many of you have told me that you run Home Assistant on a virtual machine. This obviously greatly simplifies the backup process as you can make a complete snapshot of the system or copy the entire virtual machine and take it to the other device. 0 problems and a very simple process. But I don’t run Home Assistant on a virtual machine., that would make sense if you wanted to use the host system (in this case the Nuc) for other virtual machines… and in my opinion this introduces a new layer of failure, as Home Assistant in this case is working on one hypervisor of another
manufacturer, i.e. operating system on operating system… and of course so much VMWare, like ProxMox as the virtualization system you use has its own bugs and updates. As in my case I do not need the host system for anything else, I can dispense with that extra layer and install directly Home Assistant as the operating system of the cache.
In this case, the best solution I’ve found to back up is a so-called Home Assistant Google Drive Backup which is installed in Home Assistant by adding the repository to the Home Assistant’s add-on shop. No, don’t worry, it’s nothing complicated, you go into Adjustments, Supplements, And-on Store and on the 3 points up to the right you go into Depositories and add the repository https: / / github.com / sabeechen / hassio-google-drive-ba
ckup.
This complement use your Google account to automatically upload the backups There’s nothing else to do! You just give her your credentials and you tell her how many you want to store, which depends a little bit on the space you have… but every backup in my case takes over 200Mb, so you can have a few.
So before I started migrating, the first thing I did was create a new backup and synchronize it with Google Drive from this same complement. Then you just have to restore it in the Nuc and he just fits in with a couple of restarts, but I’ll tell you a little bit later.
Home Assistant installation in the Nuc
You’re not gonna believe it, but… This was the most complicated part! Home Assistant is available for Intel Nuc platform, but It’s not as simple as getting an ISO down on a penddrive., make it executable and start the installation process… In the IP it did, in a few minutes it was installed smoothly simply by lowering the ISO of Home Assistant on a SD card, but with the Nuc you have to do something else.
First of all, disable the SequreBoot., which tells the system what are the valid images to boot. Don’t worry that it has no impact on system security, this method was invented years ago so that someone with a Linux CD could not start any system, access the disk and format to install that Linux. Imagine that this could be done in an ATM and with your Linux already installed you could send messages to the dispenser to empty the cash box paste.
In order to boot the Nuc and install an image of an operating system like Home Assistant that is neither Linux nor Windows, this protection must be disabled. You just have to do that in the BIOS, nothing else, it’s very simple.
And since I was in the BIOS and I intend not to restart Home Assistant for a long time, I took advantage to update the BIOS firmware and thus have the latest version available with all your drivers and bugs solved:
To perform the entire installation process you will need 3 penders: the first for the Home Assistant image, the second for CloneZilla (the tool that will allow us to copy the image on the SSD disk) and the third (optional) to update the BIOS.
Since it doesn’t make any sense to reinvent the wheel, I’ll leave you a super curved manual. of Fertry Tech. Read it carefully because it’s a rather long process but following it step by step you can install Home Assistant in the Nuc without any problems.
Restoring backup
Once you have installed Home Assistant in the Nuc, you simply have to install the same complement that we discussed before for backup, download the one we did a while ago and restore it. In my case I took advantage of this moment to turn off the IP (also taking advantage of my wife’s absence) and click on the Nuc the Zigbee USB that all my devices connect toFor as you know I do not use any manufacturer bridge (or Aqara, or Hue) and all Zigbee devices are connected to this device.
I just did this. so that there were no problems in the reboot, whether the Nuc started complaining about installed drivers or that the devices said they didn’t find the Zigbee USB or any move.
With the dongle already punctured, restart the Nuc 2 times. Don’t ask me why but the first time he loaded everything without any problems but the devices were not able to connect with the Zigbee dongle. Time of panic thinking I was gonna have to re- match them one by one. Cold sweats looking at the clock and calculating how long I had before my wife came back and found that the light at the entrance didn’t turn on when you pressed the switch… But After the second reboot they started connecting smoothly!.
For a few days I thought about buying another Zigbee dongle and so doing the installation in parallel without having this’ cutting time ‘, but then I realized that if I did this I was going to have to re- match the devices with the new dongle, so the best solution and the fastest was the one I finally did.
Final location and production
And this simple way… It’s true that migration is really simple and intuitive: we back up, install and restore backup. Complication comes with the installation of the Nuc, which is not a simple process at least in the way I have. If as I mentioned earlier you are going to install Home Assistant on a virtual machine because the process is very simplified, but if you are going to install Home Assistant directly as an operating system then the thing has its miga and the best thing you can do is follow
l = «noopener» target = «_ blank» > the article on the Fertry Tech blog I was telling you before.
As you can see, I have all the cams in a drawer under the TV, I didn’t like to have them in the furniture or in the typical space to ‘put the video’ that was used before, I preferred it was all picked up. In this way all I had to check is that the cacarro does not heat too much (that it does not because the drawer behind has a ventilation hole) and that the zigbee coverage reached the whole house well, but you know that the Zigbee devices create a kind of Mesh network and are able to jump between them to reach the router, that is, that the Zigbee device that you have at the other end of the house is not directly connected to the antenna,
But that device is connected to another, and this to another, and this to another and the latter to the Zigbee antenna, so I have had no problems with coverage or delays.
And no, don’t worry because Home Assistant hasn’t become my new shepherd. I really want to go back to HomeKit, especially now that with iOS 16 the Home app is going to support Matter! But it’s true that with Home Assistant you can do many more things (not all simple, it’s true) and that for the moment I’m working very well, without delay and without big problems. The next thing I want to do is to focus on the aesthetic part because so far I had not given it any importance, I was’ dropped ‘to make it all work, but I want to see the possibilities of customization and if it can become as beautiful as Apple’s House app.
wp: block {«ref»: 1612} /