Simple home automation that works properly on a RPi 3B

⁨19⁩ ⁨likes⁩

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨federalreverse@feddit.org⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

Hi!

What I* have:

a Raspberry Pi 3B
a solar PV system with Modbus output
a heat pump with Modbus output

What I want:

energy stats of the PV and the heat pump, going back for a few years, without needing cloud access
trigger the heat pump into overdrive when there’s excess power
something that works well on a RPi 3B
usable phone frontend

What I tried: Home Assistant – which works but is very complicated and behaves rather funkily on the hardware.

(* actually none of these are mine, but for the purposes of this post, let’s assume I have control of all this stuff.)

source

Comments

Sort:hotnew top

philpo@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Besides the specialist PV solutions node red might actually also be an alternative for what you want to achieve - but I also cannot understand the issues with HA. Is it possible that your SD card is slow/detectiv?

source
- federalreverse@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Hm, I guess I could try a different SD card. The card is new but I figured it’d be fine and didn’t check speed much.
  
  I will also check what Node Red is. Thanks!
  
  source
  - philpo@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You can also simply copy the current install on a USB stick and boot from there - once you have the SD card running that’s also an option. Tutorial: pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-boot-from-usb/
    
    source
Strider@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Strange. I’ve been running haos for some years on a 3b+ which is different but the soc is the same (although slightly higher as is the amount of ram.

As said, I run haos though, not containers. Not sure how you tried it.

Just slap it on a SD card and go… Mostly intuitive.

source
- federalreverse@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  HAOS installed sucessfully. But it does seems slow, even with basically nothing running on it but HACS, the SSH addon, and the file editor. And yeah, I think it’s a 3B+ here too. From what I’ve seen in terms of recommendations, you should use at least use a RPi 4 or a NUC though.
  
  As to containerization: Afaiu, all versions of Home Assistant are containerized which automatically makes them heavier than they’d need to be. The difference between HAOS and container Home Assistant is that HAOS is a full Linux distro with multiple Docker containers preinstalled on it, whereas with the containerized Home Assistant you set up your own OS and then run those same Docker containers on it (or perhaps it’s just one Docker container, haven’t tried that).
  
  As to the integrations, both devices have Modbus and there are (plugins? integrations?) for them, so I am hopeful there, although I haven’t figured it all out yet.
  
  source
  - Strider@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Never looked in to deeply how haos manages things.
    
    I never used hacs since I’ve heard it complicates setups and maintenance and I don’t want to put in more effort than I absolutely have to (working as it pro and don’t need that privately). Running several integrations, Enphase as stated, airthings, broadlink, esphome, homekit, melcloud, nanoleaf and the main one for me, zigbee.
    
    Speed when booted is perfectly fine, can’t say otherwise.
    
    What specifically is slow?
    
    source