alt Hacker NewsHome Assistant waters my plants
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After years of doing this, I determined that dumb controllers are superior for my uses. A once a week irrigation with a simple rain sensor results in the same quality lawn/beds and better can run with pretty much zero maintenance burden on the sw/hw side. The vegetable garden is even dumber, just drip lines, a hose bib, and a dumb timer that flips daily in the morning powered by AS batteries. In my apartment days I just used an elevated water container and the same dumb timer to gravity feed my garden.
I find home lab stuff has far more return on investment for like automatic blinds, lights, etc. It’s not like you can just stay inside anyways and get amazing vegetables, you still need to be on top of thing like checking for pests and disease. The automatic garden is a myth.
> I think I need more Zigbee repeaters to get a reliable mesh network, but to date I haven’t found any consumer-grade devices certified for use in NZ.
Since many devices are also Zigbee router (it's a mesh network after all), maybe some additional lightbulb for exterior would suffice ?
"Find a problem for Home Assistant" is a dangerous starting point. Next thing you know you've built a small distributed system to water parsley.
A glorious feature when you need an equivalent of sixteen cray-3 supercomputers to water plants is here.
I love HomeAssistant, and my second time on a new home, i'm slowly getting what i want in terms of interface and devices; doing it slowly helps you plan better and execute it perfectly. I've also been watering my garden (sprinklers) and i even built my custom ESPHome device: https://github.com/mgarces/open-esp-sprinklers
I wanted home assistant compatible plant watering solution that works on a solar panel and does not require being connected to the water line and is Zigbee compatible. Unfortunately, I could not find any. So I did a DIY solution: a big barrel which I manually fill with water, a 12V pump (usually sold for camper vans), some rechargeable batteries, 10W solar panel, a solar charging controller, and Tuya ZG-2002-RF switch.
I have been using HA to water my garden for 4 summers. I setup a Tempest weather station this fall, and will have some fun experimenting with using rain and temperature data collected in my back yard to make watering decisions.
I love HA, after setting it up I used an old tablet as the dashboard to control and monitor the house, plus the app. It’s very easy to setup and work with, maybe a bit convoluted in the initial setup but once done, you barely do anything until you add new sensor. You can setup a whole SCADA-like system with it, controlling your garden, power grid/solar and monitoring it, integrating CCTV and all, and it’s free. A similar industrial project I did before, SCADA and RTUs that monitored and controlled many actuators and solenoid valves and sensors, cost wise was ~$9M, and all the functionalities were implemented can be done with HA on principle.
Seems like a really cool thing to have hooked up to openclaw
Don’t try that indoors
Nice! For the hardware, why didn't you considered using a Raspberry Pi?
Fun project. Though it’s kind of unreal how complicated it is to set up HA and I literally do this for a living, both embedded sw and backend web dev.
Docker compose with a zwave management server, reverse proxies for TLS, vlan isolation for the server, macvlan for HA container so it does see the host network, etc, etc. All to turn on and off a lightbulb with the sun. All the while AI is telling me to configure things insecurely.
I think when I get some more spare time, I’d like to write a statically linked program that handles a zwave controller and basic automation scripting. No IP networking needed for my lightbulbs. Then it wouldn’t feel risky to just make a system user and udev rule to give it permissions to the controller, and run with systemd.