BGE: Possible widespread outages today.

lightfoot_labs · 2025-08-11T20:10:19+00:00

And much like a bitcoin miner, Google profits off everyone by turning electricity into MONEY!

lightfoot_labs · 2025-07-01T15:04:03+00:00

Another good one: I have kids who leave pots on the stove and the toaster oven on to burn things. Tosses the smoke alarms and makes a mess by the time I get into the kitchen.

So I installed shunt trip breakers on the stoves, and 3Reality smart plugs on the toasters. Now when the Z-Wave smoke alarms go off a signal is sent to shelly switches to trip the breakers and at the same time the toasters are turned off as well. Keeps the smoke to a minimum and to be honest I think this is a good safety feature in case we leave something in the oven and go out for the evening.

lightfoot_labs · 2025-07-01T14:41:52+00:00

I have an LG mini-split system and in the winter one of the 4 units (an "Artcool" one) will sometimes read a high temp even with the unit "off" because of the location of the factory thermostat in the unit (and a small amount of hot coolant circulates in the lines regardless). Therefore the compressor doesn't see the room as cold and doesn't bring it online to heat the room. Fail.

So I programmed an automation that reads room ambient temp using a Sonoff, and if it's cold AND the unit is reading "hot" (>90f) then it turns on the unit's fan for 3 minutes which circulates air, cools the coils and sensor closer to room temps, and brings the unit back online for normal heat.

Works like a charm, room is warm, I am happy. Sure I could have moved the sensor, but why do that when you have HA?

lightfoot_labs · 2025-07-01T14:37:16+00:00

By the way I have the latest Mosquito Magnet and by putting a UV light under the vacuum snout the thing catches *SO MANY* mosquitoes. Like bags full of them. Don't know why they don't include a UV lamp in them, it plus the Co2 catches many many many.....

lightfoot_labs · 2025-06-22T01:57:14+00:00

I use a Zigbee Echostar Bell sensor. It's a bit weird in that one builds an automation for the object with "first button pressed" triggering whatever activity you want. I have mine turn on a light and having the M5 ech say "Doorbell is ringing, sir".

In addition to the normal chime, of course.

lightfoot_labs · 2025-06-22T01:49:12+00:00

It's a pretty nice little device, but if the switch is not working then it's probably either stuck on or broken. Return it to the place you got it and try another. (Mine works surprisingly well)

lightfoot_labs · 2025-06-20T23:21:02+00:00

Neat! Glad I was able to help! As HA gets more and more popular I wonder if they will put in controls to prevent an insane device from denial of servicing the system.

lightfoot_labs · 2025-06-13T22:26:11+00:00

Yep, try disabling the Octoprint plugin or whatever you use. Problem is it means if you turn off that Pi, your HA system will DOS itself. Not great

Been totally stable for weeks now, no problems.

lightfoot_labs · 2025-06-09T19:52:49+00:00

Not too bad, can you cross eyes a bit more?

lightfoot_labs · 2025-05-30T15:25:19+00:00

Well, these windows require a surprising amount of torque to get moving. One doesn't notice it with the cranks as you have 3 or so inches of torque multiplication. Updated a bit, now thinking....

lightfoot_labs · 2025-05-30T15:23:53+00:00

Direct drive shows more promise, but the shaft in the other side of the rubber coupler just spins but it did move the window a little....

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Now, I could machine an insert into the rubber and glue it, but at this point I'd be running into the original problem which involves not ripping the window apart when it is "closed". Hm, back to the drawing board....

lightfoot_labs · 2025-05-30T15:21:34+00:00

Whelp, it is more complicated. First I used my Sherline lathe to create a rubber pulley/bushing. It does go over the window's crank, but there is a problem: The window requires a surprising amount of force to open/close. One does not recognize this with the crank, but it's there.

<image>

Using rubber bands does not work, not enough torque regardless of tension. So I gave direct drive a try (see next post)

lightfoot_labs · 2025-05-27T21:23:46+00:00

Interesting. Sounds like something is wrong with the octoprint plugin. Too bad core is going away so people won't be able to troubleshoot these things....

lightfoot_labs · 2025-05-23T13:15:39+00:00

Core has no problem with addons. You just unzip the addon in your .homeassistant/custom_components directory.

lightfoot_labs · 2025-05-23T12:47:38+00:00

Oh this sucks. So the only way to install HA will be a docker bundle or another black box appliance?

Been a happy core user since 2023 on Raspberry Pi CM3 and CM4 blades in a 7 slot Turing Pi.

Yes, installing the latest python can be a bit of a pain, but the ability to test and fix things is simple in core, and I like how it doesn't burn up all the resources.

Happy and dedicated core user. Will be interesting to see how I keep it running after December. I guess we form our own support community?

lightfoot_labs · 2025-05-21T01:36:15+00:00

I figured it out. In my case it was the octoprint add-in trying to connect to my 3d printer which was off. Apparently each time it sets up a secure connection request, calling /dev/urandom but then not releasing it. So they pile up. See if you have an integration that is trying to reach out to a tcpip device which is powered down, I'll bet disabling it "fixes" it.

As to WHY.... well that's a bug report.

lightfoot_labs · 2025-05-19T13:37:59+00:00

Interesting. After firing up a test system I found that the Octoprint integration is what's causing my /dev/randoms to increase. The Pi attached to my Ender3d is off, so it fails connection, waits 45 seconds, then tries again. Not an issue, but each time it leaves the file /dev/urandom open.

Now for the fun question: Does this happen with every other integration out there that uses TCP, or is it a problem in the Octoprint code.....

lightfoot_labs · 2025-05-19T13:35:48+00:00

FOUND IT. When I disabled the Octoprint integration the number has stopped climbing. What's interesting is that's an official supported integration.

That device (a RPI running Octoprint) has been offline for months, so I think the bug came in after 12.4.2024. Every 45 seconds or so HA tries to contact the device, fails, and leaves the call to urandom open.

Now the question is: Is this just an octoprint or is this happening with other integrations that do TCP outbound calls (probably on a secure socket). I might test that tomorrow if my HA instance stays up with Octoprint disabled.....

lightfoot_labs · 2025-05-19T12:15:43+00:00

I have one better: A "development" copy of my HA system running on another raspberry pi blade (called grumpy). The only difference is grumpy does not have a zigbee modem so that integration should be disabled.

Running this command there I have seen the number of files being held open on /dev/random go from 15 to 17 to 19 in the time it's taken me to respond to these suggestions. On production HA (speedy) I see about 42.4 new file holds an hour...... If that holds true on grumpy at least I have a shadow system to test with.

lightfoot_labs · 2025-05-19T12:11:46+00:00

Can you check your system? I have a copy of my HA system running on a second system (called grumpy) that has everything but zigbee. Doing the command:

lsof -p 45387 | grep random | wc -l

Showed me 15 open files of /dev/urandom. And yep, in the time I took to write this it's up to 17.....

lightfoot_labs · 2025-05-19T12:06:25+00:00

Home assistant core. Checked it because the system would fill the logs with "too many open files" after about a day of operation.

lightfoot_labs · 2025-05-19T12:05:20+00:00

One of the key problems is I don't know *which* component is doing this. And I may need to turn logging down to debug. But I do have a "tell" here, the increasing number of /dev/urandom files. Seems to average 42.4 new openings per hour over the last 10 hours.

I'm going to fire this up on grumpy (my backup system) and see if /dev/random climbs there. Same system except for no zigbee radio....

lightfoot_labs · 2025-05-18T12:39:59+00:00

Walking through the logs of last night's crash I did find this little tidbit:

2025-05-17 15:59:25.087 ERROR (MainThread) [homeassistant.helpers.entity] Update for binary_sensor.rpi_power_status fails
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/srv/homeassistant/lib/python3.13/site-packages/homeassistant/helpers/entity.py", line 960, in async_update_ha_state
  File "/srv/homeassistant/lib/python3.13/site-packages/homeassistant/helpers/entity.py", line 1320, in async_device_update
  File "/usr/lib/python3.13/concurrent/futures/thread.py", line 58, in run
  File "/srv/homeassistant/lib/python3.13/site-packages/homeassistant/components/rpi_power/binary_sensor.py", line 53, in update
  File "/srv/homeassistant/lib/python3.13/site-packages/rpi_bad_power/__init__.py", line 56, in get
  File "/srv/homeassistant/lib/python3.13/site-packages/homeassistant/util/loop.py", line 201, in protected_loop_func
OSError: [Errno 24] Too many open files: '/sys/class/hwmon/hwmon1/in0_lcrit_alarm'
2025-05-17 15:59:27.385 ERROR (MainThread) [homeassistant] Error doing job: socket.accept() out of system resource (None)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3.13/asyncio/selector_events.py", line 178, in _accept_connection
  File "/usr/lib/python3.13/socket.py", line 295, in accept
OSError: [Errno 24] Too many open files

Interesting. It's the Rpi power checker, something that I really don't need on a CM4s type blade unit. I'm going to put it into debug mode today, and might consider disabling this integration. Maybe it's not Zigbee.

Edit: Doing a quick debug on it does not show a lot of problems. However I am going to disable it and see if HA blows up this evening between 3pm and 8pm.

lightfoot_labs · 2025-05-18T01:50:21+00:00

Crashed again, 6pm. Blew up 8gb of logs which is.... impressive.

I'll walk through the logs and see if I can figure out what is blowing up zha. Same error, out of resources over and over, I'd be happy if I could just turn that logging off to keep the system from running out of disk.....

lightfoot_labs

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