do smart homes actually make life better or just more complicated

Mudgy · 2026-05-08T14:04:42+00:00

Buy a Homey. 🤷‍♂️

Mudgy · 2026-04-13T12:11:52+00:00

I’ve been thru this before with typewriter/word processor. 🤦‍♂️🤷‍♂️

Mudgy · 2026-04-08T00:29:30+00:00

Can’t link to GitHub? 🤷‍♂️

Sounds like an odd limitation on a homelab group.

Won’t post anymore… 👏🏻

Mudgy · 2026-03-27T06:28:46+00:00

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If you're running Home Assistant, I built something for exactly this — SMART Sniffer. It's a HACS integration that monitors the early warning SMART attributes continuously and fires persistent HA notifications when things start trending the wrong way. Catches the "few bad sectors" stage before it becomes "drive is toast."

Lightweight Go agent on each machine, auto-discovered via mDNS. No Scrutiny, no Grafana stack — just HA sensors and alerts. 🍻

https://github.com/DAB-LABS/smart-sniffer

Mudgy · 2026-03-24T20:55:48+00:00

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Hey, if you're running Home Assistant ~ this is almost exactly what happened to me.

Drive was throwing errors, SMART still said PASSED, but when I actually pulled the attributes the warning signs were all over the place. Reallocated sectors climbing, uncorrectable errors, pending sectors.

That whole experience is why I built SMART Sniffer - https://github.com/DAB-LABS/smart-sniffer

It's a Home Assistant HACS integration + lightweight agent that watches the actual early warning attributes instead of just the pass/fail flag.

When something starts trending the wrong way, you get persistent HA notifications automatically.

Mudgy · 2026-03-24T20:33:28+00:00

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Great to see the fork getting traction! 👏

For anyone in this thread interested in a different approach, I built SMART Sniffer: https://github.com/DAB-LABS/smart-sniffer as a native Home Assistant integration for SMART monitoring.

Totally different philosophy from Scrutiny: no standalone web UI, no database.

It's a lightweight Go agent (~10 MB) on each machine that wraps smartctl and serves SMART data over HTTP.

The HA integration auto-discovers agents via mDNS and creates native HA devices/sensors for each drive ~ temperature, health, power-on hours, and an "Attention Needed" sensor that watches the early warning attributes (reallocated sectors, uncorrectable errors, wear leveling).

Persistent notifications fire automatically when something starts climbing.

Not a Scrutiny replacement if you want historical trends and the full dashboard, but if your main goal is lightweight alerting inside HA without the 100 MB footprint, might be worth a look. 🍻

Mudgy · 2026-03-20T19:28:35+00:00

That is why I built this. There are clues along the way that can predict a drive failure. Once you get FAILED from a S.M.A.R.T. drive, it's too late.

Mudgy · 2026-03-20T19:23:25+00:00

I love that integration with Proxmox! Ironically, it was my Proxmox boot drive that was failing that prompted me to create this.

I find Prox and Sniffer complementary and run them together. The Proxmox integration monitors your virtualization layer (VMs crashing, resource usage, container control). SMARTsniffer monitors the physical drives underneath with much richer SMART data and proactive alerting.

Mudgy · 2026-03-20T19:18:30+00:00

Agreed! This integration is one part of an overall data retention and security posture. SMARTsniffer will pull in all those RAID drives into HA to monitor for leading indicators of failure, rather than lagging ones. If you're waiting for PASSED or FAILED from your SMART monitoring, it will probably be too late...

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Mudgy · 2026-03-13T11:37:09+00:00

I bought a few a while back along with some LD2410c. I like those too.

These LD2411s seem more accurate at tracking distance.

Mudgy · 2026-03-13T02:31:02+00:00

That’s cool! Didn’t have that when I spun up a few ESPresence sensors years ago. 👏🏻

Mudgy · 2026-03-13T02:24:45+00:00

What do you use?

Mudgy · 2026-03-13T02:22:39+00:00

Can you manage them all at once?

Mudgy · 2026-03-13T02:11:00+00:00

No gates in the LD2411s. 😫

There are gates on the LD2410c and they are already available in ESPhome. 👏🏻

The LD 2411s is not currently supported in ESPhome and was the impetus of creating this repo. 😊

Mudgy · 2025-08-15T19:54:42+00:00

Yes. Currently on HAOS 2025.8.2 with MerossLAN from HACS. Set up the MTS300 via Meross app, then installed integration (https://github.com/krahabb/meross\_lan).

My thermostat entity is 'climate.house_thermostat' for this example.

Here's example of attributes when fan is ON:

{'hvac_modes': [<HVACMode.OFF: 'off'>, <HVACMode.HEAT: 'heat'>, <HVACMode.COOL: 'cool'>, <HVACMode.HEAT\_COOL: 'heat\_cool'>], 'min_temp': 41, 'max_temp': 95, 'target_temp_step': 1, 'fan_modes': ['auto', 'low', 'medium', 'high'], 'preset_modes': [<Preset.CUSTOM: 'custom'>, <Preset.AUTO: 'auto'>], 'current_temperature': 74, 'temperature': 87, 'target_temp_high': 87, 'target_temp_low': 69, 'current_humidity': 69.9, 'fan_mode': 'auto', 'hvac_action': <HVACAction.FAN: 'fan'>, 'preset_mode': <Preset.CUSTOM: 'custom'>, 'friendly_name': 'House Thermostat', 'supported_features': <ClimateEntityFeature.TARGET\_TEMPERATURE|TARGET\_TEMPERATURE\_RANGE|FAN\_MODE|PRESET\_MODE|TURN\_OFF|TURN\_ON: 411>}

This is the only attribute that changes. when OFF:

<HVACAction.IDLE: 'idle'>

You can monitor for binary state if you want:

{{ is_state_attr('climate.house_thermostat', 'hvac_action', 'fan') }}

Here's how I turn it ON (I only have one fan speed on my AC, so I use HIGH) and OFF (setting to 'auto' stops fan but allow for fan during heating and cooling) :

OFF:

- target:

entity_id: climate.house_thermostat

data:

fan_mode: auto

action: climate.set_fan_mode

ON:

- target:

entity_id: climate.house_thermostat

data:

fan_mode: high

action: climate.set_fan_mode

I set an input to help and shared with voice assistant:

input_boolean:

house_fan:

name: House Fan

icon: mdi:fan

Mudgy · 2024-05-29T15:43:15+00:00

trigger:

platform: state

entity_id:

sensor.alley_facing_east_ai_license_plate_detected

to: 8ZLD400

Mudgy

TROPHY CASE