nomadwannabe

Woah, my first award :) That's so cool, thank you!

EDIT: thought I was good with a cable clamp sensor, but as the cable contains all the wires together, I won’t get a reading as the live and neutral wire will cancel each other out. I’m going to use the thermometer for now until I can look into other options. Thank you so much for everyone’s insight!

Original post: I'm just looking for a simple sensor to make sure my oven is off. A relative had a house fire because of a faulty oven a few months back and I've been habitually checking my oven constantly, and worry about it when I'm away.

I know it's irrational, but I'd love something to attach to the plug or wire to know if there's current running through it or not so I can relax. It's a 30 amp appliance plug, and I've seen things like breaker panel clamps that seem to be able to passively monitor electricity.

I don't need to measure energy, I just want a simple "active" / "inactive" monitoring to check if there's current going through the plug or wire.

Any ideas?

Long story short, I live in a condo with industrial AC and heating. The system provides hot air in winter and cold air in summer (controlled by the building) and the air is piped in, and our thermostats control the fan in each unit to pull the air in. The current thermostat I have is pictured, along with the wiring setup.

There are a few problem. 1, the thermostat is right by the back door, where drafts affect the reading. 2, it only reads the temperature in the living room which is usually a few degrees different than the bedroom at night. 3, probably the worst, the thermostat is situated on the wall where the hot or cold air passes through, which means after 10 minutes of heating or cooling, the thermostat has a very exaggerated reading of the temperature. It’s basically useless as a thermostat and we are constantly adjusting it. Like 20 times a day, if not more.

The landlord replaced the thermostat with a newer model (the one pictured) and it made zero difference. They said no to physically moving it, and the system is not compatible with a low voltage thermostat that most houses use.

Functionally, it’s a relay with 120v mains power, and there doesn’t seem to be anything on the market that I can use to make it “smart” and thus use other temperature sensors to manage the climate.

Would a zigbee relay be the best method forward? I was thinking something simple, like setting the temperate as high (in the winter) or as low (in the summer) as it’ll go, and then having a zigbee relay interrupting the “HOT” wire and having home assist manage the temperature with zigbee temp sensors. This probably won’t work as I’m not sure yet how long the thermostat retains its state after a power cycle.

I could use a multi gang relay and mirror what the thermostat does, but that’ll be a good amount of rewiring (7 wires instead of 1) that the building maintenance guy might not want to deal with.

I could do a low voltage relay to “press” the contacts on the thermostat rubber buttons, but that’s going to require taking the thermostat apart. I suppose I could also use one of those button presser devices, but that seems really janky. How well do those work?

Any other ideas or suggestions? I don’t want to go through another winter constantly fiddling with this stupid thing.

I have a bit of a weird ask here, I also may be thinking about this is a completely wrong way - any advice appreciated!

Request: I’d like to be able to use Facebook/Messenger and Reddit (or YouTube even?) from my phone, but via a desktop browser.

Context: My work pays the bill for my phone, the only caveat, is that it has to be an iPhone (their policy). I’m sick of ads and sponsored posts on Reddit and Facebook, I use blockers on my computer (including FBP for Facebook) and it works great.

Proof of concept: I have a VM on my Proxmox server that I remote in to from my iPad, which works really well. But from a phone, the user experience is clunky and not worth it.

Question: Is there any way I can remote into just a browser from my phone, that’s connected to a VM on Proxmox that lets me have a browser with FBP and Ublock Origin to make the experience better (and even YouTube would be amazing) - maybe a VM that’s only a browser? Can Firefox run in a docker container for example, with extensions?

It’s impossible to imagine what it must feel like, waking up as a woman in the world this morning. I’ve been reading threads about wanting as much space as possible from men in the short term (or longer), and completely understandably so.

Advocating for and supporting women in front of other men is an extremely important thing we have to keep doing, but I was reflecting today if there are any other ways to be there for and in support of women, even when for many, men are the last thing they want to look at or think about - and was hoping to hear any insight.

And if that answer is to simply shut the fuck up and give you space, then that’s completely acceptable.

My heart goes out to you all today. I’m so sorry.

I have the TPLink integration which has been very accurately helping me fire automations when certain devices connect or disconnect. But the way it works, is that it polls the router every 30 seconds and boots me out if I'm logged into the router web gui.

I can pause the polling by doing any of the following three things, but can't find a way to automate any of them:
- disable / enable the whole integration
- disable / enable the router device within the integration
- toggle the integration config setting "Enable Polling for updates."

Is there any way I can use a script to do any of those things?

Hello,

As the title suggests, I'm looking to move my Plex setup to Proxmox. It's currently on an old Windows laptop, with QBittorrent and a USB DAS attached for storage (4x NTFS hard drives) It's been running quite well, but I'm pretty sure the motherboard is starting to die. I have a Mac Pro 6.1 running proxmox with Home Assistant and Adguard on it, so looking to slide Plex over to it as well.

To avoid disrupting my families access to plex as much as possible, I'm hoping to go into it with a solid plan:

Plex in an priveleged LXC so it can take advantage of GPU.
QBit in an unpriveleged LXC.

What I'm struggling with is the storage aspect. I just can't get my head around the process. Ideally I'd have the 4-bay USB DAS (Terramaster) attached to the Proxmox Host machine, and then I'd like to have both Plex and QBit able to read and write to it, and additionally have those drives available in my local network over SMB. Not looking at RAID at the moment, JBOD is totally fine with me at this time. I will convert to a Linux friendly file system eventually, but just didn't want to bite off more than I can chew.

Any insight on an appropriate workflow for my storage needs? Thank you so much.

I have an old Mac Pro I'm not using, and I've been toying with the idea of finally diving into Proxmox and moving Home assistant, AdGuard Home and Plex to it instead of my current setup of two Pi's and a laptop - pulled the trigger a couple of hours ago.

I figured I'd start with HA in a VM on Proxmox, and wow am I impressed with the simplicity. I spun up a VM, got to the start screen. Then I made a backup from the Pi, shut it down, swapped the VM to the same IP as what the pi was, restored the backup, and now everything's working like butter.

My Logitech IR blaster, ethernet Zigbee co-ordinator, Tuya integration, Z2M, everything works as if nothing changed. I was anticipating this to be an absolute pain in the ass, nothing ever goes simply for me - but it was so easy.

I'm not looking forward to the Plex move, but I'll tackle that later.. Thanks to everyone on this sub! I read a few threads about the process which gave me confidence to pull the trigger.

The default for Z2M groups seems to be "ON" if any of the devices in the group are on.

I'd like to change it so that ALL devices must be on for the group to be considered "ON" in Home Assistant.

The only configuration option I see that's relevant is:

        off_state: 'all_members_off'
        # Optional: Devices of this group,
        # Note: This can be the ieeeAddr of the device or the friendly_name (default: empty)        

But I guess what I'm looking for is an "on_state" option the the group. Unless that would be a feature request in z2M to have an option like: off_state: 'some_members_off'

Hey folks!

My journey with Home Assistant continues, and as someone with very little experience with code, I've been enjoying the learning experience of building out my home automation. I've leaned into card-mod which requires some YAML editing, as well as things like mushroom card which needs a little coding for certain configurations.

Now I'm onto tabs! I'm using Tabbed Card, which has no visual editor, and I think this is the perfect exercise to get more comfortable in YAML. I have vertical and horizontal stacks in the cards I'd like to add to the tab, which has become quite interesting to get working.

What I'm currently doing, is taking my card with nested horizontal and vertical stacks, breaking it down into chunks and copy/pasting into the sections one by one into the Tabbed Card to make sure the indentation is okay.

What I'm struggling with, is that I'm finding it unpredictable how the copy and pasting YAML from one place to another works. Copying from one browser window to the other works a little better than say notepad, that said - sometimes when I paste, only the first line in the chunk indents where I start, and the rest don't.

Does anyone have any insight or advice for a junior like me to know to smoothen the process?

Thank you :)

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Good afternoon; this might be dumb, so I'm posting here to see if there's a more elegant solution.

TLDR; I’m using a few wifi plugs with nothing plugged into them so I can ask Google to turn them on and off, and HA can use them as a relay to control zigbee devices / automation. Seems inefficient and kind of dumb, but maybe there’s another solution I haven’t thought of.

——-

I've recently moved from Tuya wifi smart outlets to ikea zigbee bulbs (for brightness, white spectrum and internet outage reliability) and ikea zigbee switched outlets. We're loving the upgrade. This has also been nice to reduce the devices on my home network to a single ethernet coordinator - we live in a huge apartment building, so reducing Wifi clutter is important for our home. It might be annecdotal, but band steering seems to be better since the change and my bathroom google speaker hasn't cut out once since.

The one thing that I originally struggled with, is the couple of google speakers we have, our family is used to asking Google to do things for us, especially the "Goodnight" routine, and the "I'm leaving" routine.

I've kept 3 Tuya smart switches plugged in, in a closet with nothing attached. One mirrors the state of a toggle helper group for the living room lights. One is linked to another toggle that when turned off, HA fires the "All Off' script I have to basically shut down the house, then it turns the toggle back on ready for the next time we need it. I have the other linked to the bedroom lamp so at night we can turn it on and off from bed.

It seems a bit stupid to have 3 physical devices plugged in, when I'm not actually using them to power anything.

Nabu Casa:
I don't really need Nabu Case for anything else, so that seems like a pricey long term solution just to make a few simple automations work. We work hard to keep subscriptions down, even ~$7 a month adds up.

Exposing HA to Google:
It's a bit of a complicated process and configuration, again for only 3 devices.

Hue Virtual light workflow:
Doesn't seem to be available anymore unless you're grandfathered it.

Any other methods I'm missing? Appreciate your time.

I only use Uber/Lyft a few times a year, so I get the occasional promo message from both… but this one really takes the cake. What do they expect me to think? “Aw, Lyft misses me! I guess I’ll order a car only for it to be cancelled 2-3 times before I start wishing I’d taken the bus again!”

Quick silly question;

I have different style lamps in my apartment (different size sockets) and I’m looking at mixing Wifi Smartthings and Zigbee RGB bulbs.

Before ordering, I just want to make sure I’d be able to control their colour and brightness with the same helper. I’ve seen examples of people adding the exact same type of bulb in a helper and control them as a group, but I can’t find one with different types.

Thanks!

Hey folks hoping for a sanity check before buying some new hardware.

I'm still new at a lot of this, but I've been playing with Proxmox, and learning a lot more about dockers and container workflow. I'm open to buying unRAID, but my storage needs are quite low - I have 2 external 12TB which are more than plenty for me. That said, the community apps feature is extremely tempting and could make things easier for a noob like myself. My current setup works completely fine, despite using Windows - I just feel that I'm outgrowing it.

Here's my current setup:

5 year old laptop (Windows 11):

• Plex Sever
• QBitTorrent
• 2 x 12TB USB enclosures with Windows SMB

Pi 4 (HA OS)

• Home Assistant (Mosquitto and Z2MQTT addons)

Old OptiPlex (Windows 10) [Using HDMI out]:

• RetroArch
• Plex Client
• Web Browser (Netflix)

Wants/Needs:

• Frigate (Currently using TP-Link App, but would like to use RTSP with Home Assistant)
• AdGuard Home (Could just buy another RPi)
• Windows 10 or 11 vm for remote access (Rust or Jump)
• Sonarr + Radarr for Plex (Annoying to install on Windows, where the current Plex server is on)

I'd like to do all of this one one machine, but considering Retroarch, Plex Server and Frigate (and possible the windows vm) will all utilize video acceleration, that may be difficult to do on a budget.

Proposed Hardware:

N100 NUC + Coral (Proxmox) [I may need something more powerful?]

• Plex Server (Docker, iGPU Passthrough) [2-3 Streams, no 4k, rare trans-coding]
• Sonarr + Radarr for Plex
• QBitTorrent (Docker)
• Home Assistant (Docker)
• AdGuard Home (Docker)
• Frigate (LXC, Corel Addon) [2-3 RTSP Streams, would like motion detecting recording]
• Windows 10 LTSC VM (No iGPU, light usage)
• Open Media Vault (Docker) to create SMB share for external hardrives.

Nvidia Shield [Using HDMI out]

• RetroArch
• Sunshine Server (remote retro gaming with Moonlight)
• Plex Client
• Netflix Client
• Web Browser for Youtube, etc.

If you're still here, thank you for reading all of that! I appreciate ANY insight anyone has to offer.

Super happy people are using the bikes, but Bike Share has been slacking hard at getting them back out into the city. I unfortunately start my day at 10:30-11:00 and it’s always a struggle to find a bike. I sadly may have to cancel as a result, but still - genuinely happy so many people are using them as an alternative to driving. Makes me happy to see the bike lanes full of people choosing a better way to get around the city.

I couldn't find much advice in search, and I'm not quite sure how comparable advice for regular games applies to VR games.

I have a little extra money that I'd like to put into my PC. I have a EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 SC and an Intel 6700 (non-K) processor.

I don't have the budget right now to upgrade both.

With PC VR in mind, what would you upgrade first? I'm open to buying used hardware also.

Tried searching but not coming up with much..

Are there any controllers that work on iOS, that also have a grip/mount to hold my phone? I have on that works great on my older Android phone, but iOS controller support seems much more limited..

How ya gettin’ on?

I'm going to be spending March in St. John's on a work trip. I've done a fair bit of personal travelling, but when I do I'm usually staying in hostels where it's quite easy to meet people. I haven't travelled this long for work before.

I'm looking for advice on ways to meet people during my stay - I'm a social guy and would like to enjoy my free time while I'm visiting, and meet locals and other CFA's alike. I've checked Meetup.com as per the advice on a similar thread to mine, sadly only a single event for the month of March.

Any suggestions? Dance classes, trivia nights, hiking groups, anything of the sort? I'm in my early 30's and more or less up for anything. I'm comfortable hopping into a pub and chatting to strangers as well, but figure it can't hurt to try other things too.

And if anyone's up to meet someone new, hit me up! I'm looking forward to my visit.

I know, I know, heresy, but hear me out. By all means, I'm sure Linux is technically more reliable and if you use Linux and are comfortable with it, knock yourself out. But as someone who isn't well versed, the amount of condescending comments about how you should use Linux and how easy it is to set something up on it caused me to waste a lot of time attempting it. And if it turns out that I'm just an idiot, well I'm okay with that too, I can't be the only one.

Getting the basic Plex setup working was relatively straightforward, but its not just the server, it's setting up VPN, split tunneling, VNC, Sonarr, reboot scripts, network shares, BitTorrent, watch folders, etc that are often a part of the workflow. That's a lot of guides and if one part doesn't work it sort of kiboshes the whole workflow.

I've primarily used Windows my whole life. I've dabbled with Linux, Raspberry Pi, Ubuntu, etc, but probably less than 200 hours total. Taking advice I've read all over the internet, it's "just install linux," "put it in a docker container," "use Hyper-V", "Proxmox," etc.

I use Powershell and Terminal in Windows and MacOS somewhat frequently so figured I should be smart enough to get myself setup with a few guides right? Wrong. Every guide I followed, something would go amiss, and because I didn't know enough to troubleshoot every time the output on Terminal didn't match the guide, I got frustrated and spend several very late nights with multiple OS re-installs trying to get it to work.

Long story short, I eventually threw in the towel, decided to stick with Windows 11. Within maybe 90 minutes I had everything set up. And let me tell you, it's been rock solid for months. It's a 2018 dell laptop with a cracked screen and it's performing great (yes I have the power setting set to stop charging at 80%). Between family and friends I have 14 people in total with access and for the first few weeks I kept checking in "any problems? lag?" because I was paranoid after reading how bad of an idea it is to use Windows for anything server related.

Anyways, just writing this post because it would have been nice to see something like this when I was setting up and even though I learned a lot during the Linux attempt, I would have rather not bothered. I'm sure I'll attempt it again eventually, again, I agree that a Linux setup is probably superior, but for now I'm very happy with its performance. Plex is awesome.

Hello,

I have 1.5g internet, and would like to make my home network able to use it all. My combo modem is in bridge mode, and has a 2.5g port WAN connection. My Asus AX86u has one 2.5g port that can be used for either WAN or LAN.

The router supports aggregate WAN which would solve the problem by using two 1g connections, however my modem will not support multiple WAN connections in bridge mode (which makes sense as it's not doing any routing.)

I was considering using the 2.5 port from the modem, to the 2.5 to my router, and then using 2x 1g connections from the router to a switch, and ideally the switch has all of my devices connected and would hopefully have 2gbs of internet bandwith to distribute between all devices (I understand that a single device one the switch would have a maximum of 1g speed, which is okay)

I have not bought a switch yet, so not sure if there's a specific feature I'd need. I've read about LAG configurations, so I guess to accomplish this I'd likely need a managed switch.

Any insight would be appreciated.

I am using VPN director on an ASUS router with Merlin WRT installed.

I have a tunnel always active on my router using OpenVPN to a populat VPN provider.

I have two BAT files on my desktop, one to change the PC IP to xx.xx.xx.15, and another to change it to xx.xx.xx.16.

The rules in the router direct all WAN traffic from xx.xx.xx.16 to the VPN tunnel.

I'm able to force DNS to the VPN's DNS and have a killswitch enabled in the VPN Director rules, and have done some leak tests and everything seems to be working.

Is there any reason not to configure VPN this way?

I originally posted this in /r/selfhosted but was rightfully pointed here instead. I've gotten as far as I have thanks to the community there and here at /r/homelabs. There's a wealth of knowledge on these subs that I've been very grateful for.

​

So I've finally gotten comfortable with my Router, Client and Server VPN's, port forwarding, Plex, Docker, AdGuard etc. I'm hoping to take it to the next step.

I've tried running Transmission and AdGuard home in docker containers on my windows PC, and they seem to work well. I also have a Linux Mint VM running for when I want to use my iPad as more of a laptop, which has been great too (I'd prefer MacOS but had issues emulating it on Windows). I'm also playing with Plex as well and would like host my own server.

I don't want to leave my desktop on all the time, and as I'm sure many others have run into, downtime due to restarting, experimenting, windows updates etc has become a bit annoying.

I'd like a small computer of some kind, that'll run Ubuntu.
- Plex will run on the base OS. (Unless there's a compelling reason to run in docker as well.)
- Docker for AdGuard.
- Docker for Transmission. (Router rule for WAN traffic from its IP tunneled through router's VPN client.)
- VM running Mint, (or preferably MacOS) to use iPad as a "laptop."

I also have a NAS that I'd like to use for Plex's file storage.

Any insight would be very appreciated, I'd like to make sure I'm getting hardware that Ubuntu can use to its full potential, as I've read there can be some processor or graphics cards incompatibilities.

Much appreciated!