I also have an oil boiler, and a tank in the garden. The tank was fitting with an Apollo Ultrasonic oil level sensor, which sends a signal to base station with a very basic LCD display in the house via 433Mhz radio.
I use an RTL-SDR USB radio dongle, a cheap 433MHz antenna and the rtl_433 software to monitor the signals from the ultrasonic sensor, which transits roughly once an hour. The level measurement transmitted is a fairly accurate centimetre value (I compared it with manual measurements with a dip stick for a few months).
The base station only showed a vague level indication with 10 bars, but now I have more a more precise smart display of the tank level, without any extra modification to the tank system.
I’m starting to wonder if there are white label ultrasonic sensors out there since this looks like the Beckett. It also looks like this won’t support 120 AC. I’m in the USA and our namby pamby grid can’t handle it.
It’d be a lot easier to work with more conventional hardware.
First of all you downloaded the wrong version, your device is not amd64 but arm64. OSMC for Vero provides an img, so you can install an OS like you would on a raspberry pi. Though you’d probably have to make your own image since afaik it’s not really an rpi?
You can probably run hass in docker or install hass core instead.
I tried the hass route instead, but can’t get it to work due to dependency issues once I try to install the supervisor package. Even though the aarch64 OS agent seems to install without issue. I’m tired of getting it to work.
I have managed to install HASS on a Mac mini m1 through a Debian vm in UTM, that is serving its introduction purposes right now. Likely I will end up getting a home assistant Green at some point, but I don’t find the price that appealing for what it is. Or I need to shell out even more for a n100 mini pc.
Awesome thanks for the advice. Id seen conflicting info on zwave vs zigbee for switches. One of the main things was wifi interference, but i live in a remote place and dont have a ton of wifi devices or outside interference. Also ill most likely be running a ubiquiti ap cause i use ubiquiti at work and am comfortable with it. Should be super solid.
I have oil heat too and I struggle to imagine how you would add a sensor to it. That tank is solid and thick, trying to get anything inside it is a horrible idea and trying to sense through the metal is going to be prone to problems. In the past I’ve just pointed a camera at the main gauge.
My tank came with a mounting point on the top of it where you can fit an ultrasonic sensor. You just configure it with the depth of your tank and that’s it. I have a unit inside that shows how much oil I have left.
Apparently, it uses an RF protocol that can be intercepted and interpreted in HA with the right dongle but I haven’t done that.
Edit: mine looks like this although with different branding.
The only option I could think of would be integrating an industrial oil tank sensor.
A wire sensor that uses Time-domain-reflectometry would likely be the best, but expensive. This uses a corrosion resistant cable and uses wave reflections when a pulse changes mediums (air to oil) in order to give a level reading.
More difficult to DIY though. You have to know what you are doing.
Ultrasonic sensor might work, but it depends on if oil for home heating gives off fumes that would interfere with it.
Otherwise another DIY solution would be optical sensing like a ToF sensor. Maybe the most realistic for easy integration in ESPHome, but like the ultrasonic sensor, you would have to protect it from a full tank contaminating the sensor with oil.
If the tank is plastic, a capacitive sensor could work too.
ESPHome has support for a few sensors that might get the job done… would weighing the tank be an option, or are you looking for something more off-the-shelf?
I’ve yet to mess around with any of the liquid level sensing tech, so I don’t have any specific recommendations… but ESPHome has a huge array of different sensor filtering options which should really help. I think sensor noise and settling time are a lot of what complicate the task.
I don’t but I have a couple of the presence sensors from the company and like them a lot. They sort of require some tuning but have been quite reliable since.
As a side note, I really wish folders were implemented for devices and automations and such. Especially since I have a scene controller (and another on the way) with several buttons, each of which can have 6 different triggers (pressing 1-5 times or holding the button down). Oh, and more for the LEDs.
Yes! Especially automations! I would rather have tags than folders, so an automation could fit into more than one category (eg. Location, action) but I’d take anything over alphabetical!!
I thought this was implemented on the dashboard. I don’t recall what exactly it’s called (context cards?) but I recall you could click a button to show a separate card or click and have it open a second ‘tab’ on the dashboard to control more things like with your scene controller.
Before areas was a thing in HASS I would name things with an area name. ESP32-5-Bedroom. Now I just leave it what ever it defaults to, then use HASS to name them, and then put them in an area.
How do you et HASS to name them ? i,e. what names does it chose ? So basically you leave the location out of the name as that is shown in the area anyway ? Thing is, that sometimes you need to choose a device from a dropdown, and in these dropdowns they don’t show the area, so having the location sometime gives more information that is missing
I may be wrong, but I think best practice says it doesn’t matter how you name your whatevers, so long as the convention you use is consistant. Within HA I tend to use the format <DeviceType>.<Room>.<WhereOrWhat>.<NumberIfRestMatches>.
For example, the plugs that control my space heaters in my livingroom are switch.livingroom.heater.1 and switch.livingroom.heater.2. The controls for the lights in the livingroom is button.livingroom.wall. Please don’t ask why I call plugs switches and controls buttons, I don’t have an answer, I just do. 🤷
I just tried and I think they are limitations on numerous android OS.
It isn’t exactly a widget but what I have been able to do is create a shortcut when long pressing home assistant app icon on my phone
To do so, go to home assistant app settings/compagnon app/shortcut Give it a name and description, not too short according to documentation (see below), next add under dahsboard
Edit: added another screenshot from settings (sorry in french but that should help). This was just a quick test, this is why I named it assist_widget. You can also change icon type
Luckily I’m insured. I’ve contacted my legal expenses insurance and they’re covering a lawyer for the case. I will seek advice and see how an expert assesses the situation and then proceed.
It’s pretty common for freelance developers to have insurance like this - if I screw up and you get ransonwared, insurance pays for a lawyer to explain the contracts indemnity clause to you using small words
If you have already screwed up, you now get to play The Game of Litigation, where their lawyers try to prove that you are liable for billions of dollars in damages, and your lawyer tries to prove that you aren’t. The way the game works is whoever spends the most on lawyers wins. You’ve got more cash to spend than your clients right?
Most professions where action/inaction can result in damages will have similar insurance. Some insurance firms even specialize in coverage for professionals.
If your profession has an association or similar group, they should be able to help you find those firms if they exist.
Not sure if it’s really the freelance/professional thing others mentioned. Private legal expense insurance (Rechtsschutzversicherung) is fairly common in Germany, so might just be that.
The developer is German, in Germany it’s pretty common to have a Rechtsschutzversicherung. You pay them monthly or yearly and in exchange you can request legal advice from one of their lawyers af any time. It’s pretty neat.
Not getting the downvotes, a lot of those are quite stupid. The Rechtsschutz is basically required if you drive for example, only because of game theory, not because it actually brings anything
Wow, and it is a real lawyer? I e had employers with benefits that sound similar but I think only get things like templates for common documents like wills and contracts that you can get anywhere, or “free” co suits like you can get anywhere.
I actually do phage a upcoming minor legal need this year, and they couldn’t even tell me , using that as an example, what would the benefit cover?
Yes, typically you get to talk to real lawyers. They may not be the best lawyers on the planet, but if you just need some advice, you should be perfectly fine.
It almost assuredly was not escalated to global. I received the same canned answer from them earlier and asked to be put in contact with a person from the European company.
If you poke around, you’ll find that there is no effective way to contact anyone by email unless you’ve got a specific support question with a model number attached, so I sent an email directly to support.ecommerce@haier-europe.com
Will it matter for anything? Probably not. Will at least one guy have to read some stern words about an attack on open source development? Yep, and that’s good enough for me I guess :P
That doesn’t mean the issue wasn’t/won’t be escalated. It might even mean it’s more likely since someone bothered to make a response macro for it, they presumably got more than one or two emails about it. So it’s probably more likely to make it on a “list of issues we saw this week/sprint/month/quarter”.
I am in no way defending their behavior, but API calls will always incur some cost - either in backend resource consumption with “paying” customers, or legitimate costs if they’re relying on AWS infrastructure.
However, like the whole reddit debacle, API usage isn’t always well optimized at the client end, and it can become a negotiation rather than a C&D…unless you’re looking to make a competitor as well.
A few thoughts come to mind… 1) Some of their customers may only be customers because of HA compatibility. 2) HA does not require a cloud API to function - a LAN based solution is usually preferred anyway. 3) There are far more diplomatic ways to approach this issue.
To think, from a business perspective, that any notable portion of their userbase bought the devices with the explicit expectation that it would work with HA would be naive. We’re hobbyists, a niche market, the less-than-1% of their market evaluations. Losing those customers while reducing whatever burden or cost they’re incurring is probably worth it.
HA doesn’t - but while I don’t have any Haier equipment to say, the other smart devices in my house which aren’t either esphome or tasmota don’t connect locally to my devices, but to the vendor cloud API. Ecobee, Wyze, Traeger all do that instead.
Totally agreed. I think AWS API costs are a few cents to the thousand, so a discussion with the developer about the use would be the nice way instead of just kowtowing to the bean counters.
My argument to that would be if we are only a niche segment then where is the serious economic harm they are referring to? It sounds to me like API calls are happening either way but they don’t want to lose out on the ad and customer tracking revenue. Also, I as other have pointed out there is no reason it needs a remote cloud to change the thermostat.
It could be a case of disproportionate impact - consider that forecasting within Haier for their cloud API would probably be based upon X number of units in the field and Y number of average API calls per unit/user/premises. At 40,000 units in the field at 1000 calls per day (which they know because they designed the software, or at least had a hand in resourcing discussions), you have 40,000,000 calls per day.
If you have some third party app which is generating 4,000,000 calls by itself, and you see only 400 users doing this, then it’s a simple high usage target to hit.
Ad revenue, maybe. Tracking is still possible because it’s the same device, and if there’s any security at all, they’ll still have all the native API stuff they’d normally get, temperatures, weather, occupancy, etc.
I will say at a brief glance at the repo for the project that there’s some calls which imply it would get the local IP for the device, and may from there be able to issue calls direct to the device. That would make me think there’s only a few calls to their cloud to establish a relationship and product info, so the disproportionate load theory, barring bugs, doesn’t hold up. While it’s been a good brain exercise, we’ll be left guessing, and hoping Haier decides to be better.
I liked him for awhile, it was informative stuff. But the last year or so it’s just complaining all the time. Not just about how companies treat us, but just everything. I just don’t need all that negative energy, so I unsubbed. It’s not really anything that everyone else isnt reviewing already anyway. You won’t miss anything.
Being informative is one part to let people know what was going on, but I feel like the biggest part of his “bitching” is actually being one of the larger voices pushing for right-to-repair and consumer protection. And with that came new bills/laws that even Apple and Google are backing.
His messages are/sound aggressive because they are. We need that passion to actually implement change.
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