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Adding Energy Monitoring to Home Assistant
Now that I have Home Assistant running pretty well, I've started seeing what else I can add to it. There are several components for monitoring energy usage, but sadly none for my Rain Forest Automation Eagle Energy device. After a quick search, I found a Node-RED flow that looked promising. It would query the local API of the device (or the Cloud one) and give me an answer. The next step was seeing how to get that into Home Assistant. I found the HTTP Sensor which would let me dynamically create sensors. (There is so much to explore in Home Assistant, it will keep me entertained for awhile.)
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All In with Home Assistant
I've spent parts of the last 9 months playing with Home Assistant and have written about some of my adventures. A few weeks ago, I finally decided to go all in with Home Assistant and ditch my Vera. I bought an Aeotec Z-Stick Gen5 Z-Wave dongle and starting moving all my devices over to it. Within a few days, I had all my devices moved over and unplugged my Vera. Everything was running great on my Raspberry Pi B, but I noticed that the History and Logbook features were slow. I like looking at the history to look at temperature fluctuations in the house.
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Dipping my toe in the world of Docker
A former co-worker of mine has talked about Docker for years and I've taken a look at it a few times, but have generally been uninterested in it. Recently with my interest in Home Assistant, I've decided to take another look as many of the installs of Home Assistant as well as Hass.io are based on Docker.
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Setting up a Leviton VRCZ4-M0Z for use with Home Assistant
I've been so pleased with Home Assistant that I decided to see if I could migrate completely away from Vera and run all my Z-Wave devices on Home Assistant. Currently Home Assistant uses OpenZwave as the base and has basic support for a lot of Z-Wave devices. While OpenZwave isn't as mature as Vera in its implementation, I found that with the exception of 4 Leviton VRCZ4-M0Z zone controllers, everything worked well. I've read that some people have had problems with Z-Wave on Home Assistant, but so far things have been going quite well for me using an Aeotec Z-Stick Gen5 as the controller. I suspect that my success is due to the type of devices I have (only outlets, switches, 1 light bulb, 2 portable MiniMote controllers and these VRCZ4s); I don't have any sensors and only 2 of my devices are battery powered.