The makerspace doesn’t have many smart home / commercial IoT devices at the moment, but I want to potentially have a POE tablet in each room to control audio, have a button for emergency calls, maybe the ability to report broken equipment. Later we can add some temp controls, monitoring, and lights as well. I’m wondering if it’s worth experimenting with a Home Assistant server on a modern Pi. Anyone have any recent experience with Home Assistant? Does this sound interesting to anyone to help get set up?
I literally just set it up for my apartment. I did it via using a container, not the OS version. Even so it was still fairly straightforward to set up. If you don’t have a pi I have one that I could part with.
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Thanks @paul ! What are you controlling in your apartment? How hard is it to build interfaces for people to control things?
My setup is fairly simple. I only have 2 Smart switchs and a smart light bulb. I’m thinking of adding a third switch for my 3D Printer.
Home Assistant does have a dashboard screen available from the app or included webserver. For simple stuff it’s very easy to set up dashboards. Just look at the demo on there site Dashboards - Home Assistant . More or less drag and drop but you can make it as complicated as you want. (The joys of open source).
I believe you can have multiple accounts for access control, but I have not played around with them. Also, since I only have two zones the dashboard is very bland. The makerspace would have a lot more zones and could have a lot more items.
I only use my phone to control it via a quick settings tile and I’m still working on getting automations to work. Those seem to be a bit more complex. But they could definitely support help/attention needed buttons/toggles and notifications.
Nice! I just got a Wiim amp for the space today, so that maybe we get some more in the future to tie across the space. I’m wondering how well we can integrate that in to a server to control automatically reconnecting zones to a stream if the bluetooth is disconnected, etc.
Let’s see if we can get a few other people that want to jam on this, and maybe next month we try and get something running.
If you get a chance, can you do a little digging to find small tablets or 1 gang screens we could maybe buy/install in the studios to control things?