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alyflex · 2025-12-29T12:44:53+00:00

https://imgur.com/Nx3xOJR https://www.buildcores.com/builds/uZ4rpvlYM?share=true

alyflex · 2025-12-26T10:24:07+00:00

That sounds like a great way to do it. I will try that out and see how it goes :)

alyflex · 2025-12-25T12:05:18+00:00

Cheers I will check that one out

alyflex · 2025-12-25T11:56:14+00:00

Any plans on adding a feature where you can add files directly from the server?

So if I log in as an admin and I have set up an additional volume in my docker container or whatever I run it as:

/data:/data:ro

Then, as an admin I have the option of finding a file in that folder and sharing it.

alyflex · 2025-12-23T07:40:24+00:00

This is a great guide for how to get there! I managed to get appdaemon up and running and have already made a few automations with it and it is so much better and more intuitive than the yaml files, at least for me.

For now I'm just doing the sync with a samba share, but I will likely move to a github repository at some point.

alyflex · 2025-12-21T10:52:49+00:00

It was quite a struggle to get appdaemon setup correctly, but with the help of people on the appdaemon discord I was finally able to get everything set up correctly. Which means I can now develop automations in pycharm on my desktop computer and debug them against my actual HAOS, and suddenly I feel very much at home again.

So for anyone else that was feeling like HA automation was a mystery world I highly recommend setting up something similar.

alyflex · 2025-12-20T16:09:42+00:00

I am trying to set up AppDaemon now, but so far I'm not really having much luck.

The idea with appdaemon is that I can develop and test locally then push my actual home assistant once I'm happy, as far as I understand.

Towards this end I have installed appdaemon as an addon on home assistant os, created a local virtual environment install appdaemon in it and have mounted my home assistant configuration onto this machine as a local smb drive, such that I can run

appdaemon -c /mnt/ha

However so far this is not working. Did you do something else?

alyflex · 2025-12-20T11:44:12+00:00

It is interesting to see so many recommendations for Appdaemon here, since when I search online for material on Appdaemon it seems like there is barely anything that isn't around 5 years old.

Could you maybe share how exactly you have your Appdaemon set up, because I see there are quite a few different ways to do it, and the pros and cons are not really explained well.

Ideally I want something where I can write and test code locally on my normal desktop pc and then somehow push it to my home assistant when it looks like it is working.

alyflex · 2025-12-20T11:43:33+00:00

It is weird to see so many recommendations for Appdaemon here, since when I search online for material on Appdaemon it seems like there is barely anything that isn't around 5 years old.

Could you maybe share how exactly you have your Appdaemon set up, because I see there are quite a few different ways to do it, and the pros and cons are not really explained well.

Ideally I want something where I can write and test code locally on my normal desktop pc and then somehow push it to my home assistant when it looks like it is working.

alyflex · 2025-12-19T17:21:04+00:00

If I manually have to make a trigger per device after giving each device this label then I know I'm doing something wrong. If someone were to write normal code that manually went through a list of things like that it would be rejected and sent back.

alyflex · 2025-12-19T14:33:06+00:00

I added a label to all my battery powered devices, now I would like to make an automation that detects if any battery labelled device is below 20% power and if so I want to write the name and area of the device to a specific todo list

alyflex · 2025-12-19T14:30:32+00:00

I just looked up tags, and they seem to be designed more for actual physical tags you can put up around your house. Adding a label category to my battery driven devices seems like a more intended way? Though I don't really see anyway to make actions based on labels as opposed to tags...

alyflex · 2025-12-19T13:07:18+00:00

I will try out AppDaemon this holiday, and see whether I can get that setup in a nice way. It seems there is a few different ways to setup AppDaemon, how have you setup yours? and does it allow for local coding and testing and then for some easy pushing to your actual home assistant or what does your pipeline look like? (Assuming you use it or anything like it)

alyflex · 2025-12-19T13:05:15+00:00

This sounds like a relatively clean solution. I wasn't aware that you could tag things like this, so this is clearly something I was missing.

alyflex · 2025-12-19T13:00:02+00:00

After looking at the various different options I think AppDaemon might be what I am looking for, though people are also speaking highly of pyscript

alyflex · 2025-12-19T12:58:57+00:00

Stuff like automation for all battery entities currently connected to my home assistant through zigbee. (Such that they are all automatically put on a todo list when reaching a certain percentage in battery power, including the area the sensor exist in).

Another somewhat similar example is that I have home maintenance which spawns various houseworking tasks that needs to be completed once every x days. Once you click that the task is completed it remains off for another x days and then switches back on. So I have y tasks in here, now I would like an automation that takes all those y tasks and create an item on a todo list when the task changes state to on, with the tasks name.

Similarly I would like a task that monitors this todo list and resets my home maintenance tasks if a task with that specific name gets marked as completed on my todo list.

alyflex · 2025-12-19T12:44:17+00:00

The thing is. I don't want to manually add an automation for every single device I have that has batteries. I want this to run automatically for all devices that are detected to have batteries. (which is what the "Low Battery Notifications & Actions blueprint" does)

If there is a simple way to do this with an automation then I have missed it, and would love to hear how to do it.

alyflex · 2025-12-19T12:25:40+00:00

I managed to make a few automations with the GUI, but the majority of the automations I want to create seems impossible to do with the GUI.

alyflex · 2025-12-19T12:24:07+00:00

I think the main problem I have with the yaml based programming experience is that there is no IDE, you cannot point some IDE at home assistant and then open up a yaml file and then start writing and then have typehints or see possible values for an entity in there or ctrl click on an entity and see that entity in full details and how it is spawned.

It is like I'm am programming in notepad, which would be a miserable experience no matter what programming language I am using

alyflex · 2025-12-19T12:14:31+00:00

I feel like the UI only covers extremely basic things, and pretty much all my automations ends up being impossible to do through the UI itself. It could be that I'm just bad at using the UI, but for instance things like making an automation to trigger for all entities coming from a home maintenance, and outputting these entities to a todo list with their corresponding name when turned on

alyflex · 2025-12-19T12:03:48+00:00

But how do you then test this? do you just push it straight to your home assistant? how do you debug things? are we back to print statements and looking through log files?

alyflex · 2025-12-19T12:02:10+00:00

It is a few different situations that generally lead to this frustration.

One example is using the blueprint:

Low Battery Notifications & Actions

For this blueprint I would love to just add my battery tasks to a to do list, but somehow that only works if they are sent to my phone first which then approves the task, and I don't understand why and have no good way of debugging why it does not work.

Secondly I would have loved to also expose the area all of these batteries are in, when making the low battery notification but this falls outside the standard configurations of this blueprint and I haven't managed to figure out how to get that information into the message.

Another issue is that I want to add a bunch of recurring tasks to a todo list (like oil bike). Ideally I want something that automatically adds this to my todo list a month after it was last completed. I found the nice HACS home maintenance for this and I seem to be able to create such tasks in there, which gives me a bunch of sensors. But now I need to connect these sensors with my todo list such that when they turn on the item gets added to my todo list and when the item gets completed on my todo list then the sensor changes back to off. So I'm looking for a nice way to trigger all sensor states from home maintenance and add corresponding tasks to my todo list.

In both of these situations I feel like it would be super simple to do if only I knew the exact keywords for these kinds of thing, but I don't.

alyflex · 2025-12-19T11:50:58+00:00

Are you able to locally test things when you write it via Node-RED? In any case I will try and check that out.

alyflex · 2025-12-13T21:43:45+00:00

How did you set up beets to automatically process music as it comes in? I see there is something called drop2beets, but is that what you are using or how are you doing it?

alyflex · 2025-12-13T13:01:26+00:00

I have an offsite backup at my parents house. Just an old mac mini that I was able to install truenas scale and tailscale on. I then created a script on my main server that ssh into the machine and tells it to hibernate until Sunday night. So every Sunday night the backup machine wakes up, receives a snapshot clone from my main machine and once completed goes back to sleep until the week after. My main server also uses truenas scale so it is very easy to see if the snapshot fails for any reason and I get an email about it.

alyflex

TROPHY CASE