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. 🤷
Organize? Hahaha ohmygod best laugh I’ve had in a few days.
Some devices have the generic names from the manufacturer because I had issues and had to re-join them a few times, so I got tired of typing the “correct” names. Also I have a light switch labeled “front porch” which is really inaccurate because I’m not turning the porch on and off, it’s the lights! And those lights are now zigbee bulbs of their own, but they at least got more sensible names (“porch light doorbell side” and “porch light right side”).
But I may switch to zigbee2mqtt, so I’ll have a chance to redo all of it anyway.
In general I don’t have so many devices that knowing what is what isn’t a major issue. I name them better in Lovelace, of course.
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.
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.
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.
Adding another vote on the inovelli blues. Zigbee network has been rock solid for me. Integration with homeassistant has been flawless too - could not be happier with my purchase. It also helps that the company has a great track record with transparency and working with the community to improve their product.
One detail I don’t see mentioned often is the zigbee switches are a little smaller than the zwaves, making them easier to fit into the junction box. My house is old and has very small boxes - not sure these would have fit in some places if they were any bigger!!
I don’t know much at all about zigbee but I’ve got a house full of zooz zwave dimmers I’ve been mostly happy with. Thesmartesthouse has them on sale often.
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.
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.
In my extensive experience, use Zooz zen series for the bulk of your switches. Buy inovelli for special switches such as by your front door or anywhere you might want the use of the LED indicator strip and scenes.
Majority of other smart switches will give you issues with dimming flicker. Trust me, I’ve bought thousands of dollars of smart switches. Zooz and Inovelli are great choices.
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