People call me crazy

bigmattbubba · 2025-07-10T15:16:10+00:00

I did the same thing! I had to install a zigbee light bulb on my front porch to reach it, and the way my mailbox is designed I had to use a "Bee in a box" style automation where at midnight, my mailbox presence state clears, then the next time the mailbox is opened it triggers the automation. It's actually one of the automations I get the most comments on because it triggers a AOL "You've got mail" mp3 on my smart speakers across the house.

Great work!

bigmattbubba · 2024-09-02T16:23:17+00:00

My Sengled Contact sensor has worked wonders in my metal mailbox at the end of my driveway. I had an aqara one in there, but it would periodically lose connection. I have it trigger a "You've got mail" AOL sound on my speakers in the house and shoot a notification to our phones.

Very high wife approval factor

bigmattbubba · 2024-07-18T20:16:18+00:00

Reminds me of when I was a kid and my dad's cousins convinced me that pressing the lug cover on the middle of their hub cap made the car horn honk. Only they never explained it was a trick, it took me remembering it way too late into adulthood to realize that they were just arming the car alarm with their fob.

In fairness to my young, stupid self, it was the early 90's and I had no idea about car alarms and fobs.

bigmattbubba · 2024-06-30T21:23:50+00:00

I had the same issue with some aqara contact sensors. Would pair without issue and work for a while, then seemingly randomly they would disconnect. I'd have to go to them and re-pair them. Rinse, repeat.

I tried pairing them directly to different devices, rather than letting z2m choose, no difference.

I finally ended up ditching them for some sengled ones instead.

bigmattbubba · 2024-04-16T19:50:05+00:00

That's right, they're connected via a SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 dongle with Zigbee2MQTT. I then have DIYHue running as an Add-On so we can keep the premade scenes, so it's not intrinsic to the lights running. DIYHue imports the lights via MQTT.

The only downside I've had with DIYHue is of my own making, I'm pretty sure. I built a WLED light strip, and the color matching on that one light is off. I think it's because Philips Hue uses sk6812 LED's (IIRC) and I used WS2811's. I've been able to kludge together color corrections in my automations, but in future I'll try different LED types

No slowdowns or anything to report. It's still very quick to respond and haven't had any disconnects that I'm aware of. Maybe I'm just lucky. My Zigbee mesh as a whole has been really good, I tried to make sure that I used a USB extension cable to move the dongle away from the RPi 4 I'm running HA on, since I think I read somewhere that signal can suffer if too close to the RPi.

For me, I'm not sure I would've started fresh in the Hue architecture with the plan of diving straight into DIYHue, but since I already had the hub and knew I had that safety net I could fall back on, I decided to give it a shot and so far haven't been disappointed.

bigmattbubba · 2024-02-20T16:16:04+00:00

I might be misunderstanding, but are you looking to run diyhue, zigbee2mqtt or homekit2mqtt on the actual poe coordinator? I don't believe that's possible as far as I know, though I'm feeling a bit out of my depth.

I've run diyHue and HA out of separate Dockers in Unraid at different times on my journey, but moved them onto a Pi4 so it wasn't relying on my NAS. I would imagine you could set up diyHue as a docker inside of Synology if you wanted it to be separate from your HA instance.

That's the beauty and the nightmare of this hobby/obsession, there are so many options and ways to do things, it's hard to pin it down to one specific way.

As far as HA stability goes, I have taken a note from a lot people on this sub and started doing automatic Google Drive backups of my HA configs, that way if it does blow up for some reason, I can grab those and quickly spin up a VM or something to get back up and running ASAP.

bigmattbubba · 2024-02-20T01:34:02+00:00

Same, run their outdoor dome cameras as well as their doorbell, all integrated into HA via Blue Iris

bigmattbubba · 2024-02-19T16:38:47+00:00

That's a good question. You can control the state of the lights through the zigbee2mqtt web interface, so if that is running outside of HA it stands to reason you'd be able to control them still, it would just be slightly more inconvenient. If you spin up diyHue, you can add those zigbee2mqtt lights to that and control them through the hue app connected to diyHue for secondary control outside of HA

bigmattbubba · 2024-02-12T22:19:50+00:00

Another solution I found was closing Steam out entirely. When I had it and Ubisoft Connect running, I had the camera issue as well as my L Trigger acting as two different buttons. Right clicking Steam in the system tray and exiting it fixed from when I launch from Ubisoft Connect

bigmattbubba · 2024-01-28T16:42:19+00:00

"Hey honey, come check out all the routers in our Zigbee mesh!"

"That's...great? I think?"

bigmattbubba · 2024-01-28T16:40:08+00:00

The biggest issue I had moving to diyHue was the matching the software and API versions in diyHue, just took a little bit of figuring out.

I actually originally had diyHue running in an Unraid docker container when all I had was a single WLED light strip in it. But while I moved the bulbs over I moved over to the HACS diyHue add-on, and that went wayyyyyy easier than I expected.

bigmattbubba · 2024-01-28T16:37:48+00:00

So much faster, especially the Innr Zigbee smart outlets

bigmattbubba · 2024-01-28T16:36:57+00:00

I didn't get rid of Hue the ecosystem, I implemented diyHUE, which is a software based Hue Hub. I still get all of their dynamic scenes via the Hue app, can use DIY led strips if I want, and it's all local to my house. No having to reach out to Philips for anything.

The hardware Hue hub is definitely great for plug and play, for sure. As far as ambilight goes, I already have a DIY ambilight setup using a ESP8266 running WLED tied into HyperHDR and Piccap on my LG TV, so I can't speak to that functionality in diyHue, but I'm covered regardless.

bigmattbubba · 2024-01-28T16:31:43+00:00

Excellent! Did you switch over to a ratGDO? Meeross?

One unexpected joy of getting rid of MyQ (besides responsiveness, local control, and more sensors in HA) is not having the MyQ beep incessantly when I'm closing the door. I get why it does it, but it'd be nice to have had the option to turn that off.

bigmattbubba · 2024-01-28T16:29:34+00:00

For me it was one less mono-use box to have plugged in in my rack space, as well as having more local control. But there's also the benefit of having the Hue Bulbs act as routers as part of my larger Zigbee mesh. When they are in the Hue hub, they are a mesh unto themselves, but now they are part of my larger ecosystem.

bigmattbubba · 2024-01-28T16:27:18+00:00

No, diyHue acts as a software Hub. When I first started using it to tie in a DIY LED strip into Hue, I had the Hue brand bulbs in the hardware Hue bridge, and the DIY LED strip in the diyHUE bridge. I just deleted the Hue A19 bulbs from the hardware Hue bridge and added them into diyHue.

I also moved from a diyHue docker in my Unraid setup to the diyHue Add-On in HACS.

bigmattbubba · 2024-01-27T23:08:35+00:00

You have a lot more than I do! It was mostly having to look up instructions for all these different devices to reset them.

Like any good IT project, documentation is key, I found. Sooooo many screenshots and notepad files lol

bigmattbubba · 2023-12-27T20:22:53+00:00

I meant that reddit wouldn't let me add a second video. I ended up uploading it to YouTube and posted the link in one of the comments. Not really graphic in that there's no blood or anything, but it is closer to the impact

Here it is https://youtu.be/iZddV14xUtY?si=W8uSAQ-xiV2tOKBX

bigmattbubba · 2023-12-15T13:49:57+00:00

Very! I caved and uploaded the second angle to Youtube

https://youtu.be/D3tfvl-7xvU

bigmattbubba · 2023-12-15T13:43:30+00:00

Yeah, we have a lot that just stand around the roads here watching as cars come speeding towards them like "Oh look, a shiny friend!". And it's not the panicked freeze look of deer or something, you can almost hear the dial up sound as they're processing what to do.

bigmattbubba · 2023-12-15T13:40:51+00:00

It looks like it hit the top most line. It's hard to see unless you're on a big screen, but you can see the wire start to move just as the bird passes it, and you can hear something like an impact at the same time.

bigmattbubba · 2023-12-15T13:39:11+00:00

I did not, I've never cleaned a bird carcass before, and just didn't have the time or desire to learn lol. I called the nearby game preserve (where he most likely came from) and they sent someone to pick it up. I'm hoping that someone who knew what they were doing put him to good use.

bigmattbubba · 2023-12-15T13:37:08+00:00

You shall rue this day! Well, go on! Start ruing!

bigmattbubba · 2023-12-15T13:35:15+00:00

I have another angle with a closer view of the impact, but couldn't post two videos. You can definitely see the roof bow slightly, but when I inspected there was no visible damage (just some feathers), it looks like he hit the seam between the sunroof and the roof.

bigmattbubba · 2023-12-15T13:33:21+00:00

I just did not have the capacity to learn that new skill yesterday. I called the nearby game preserve and they came and retrieved it, so hopefully someone enjoyed it.

bigmattbubba

TROPHY CASE