Category: computer stuff

I have been running home assistant on a generic Linux virtual machine using Oracle’s Virtualbox system for several years. It has worked pretty well for me, but I recently decided to purchase a mini pc and move home assistant to it.

In part what prompted this was finding a low cost mini PC that looked pretty good. $139.00 for an OUVISLITE Ιntel Celeron J4125 (Up to 2.7GHz), with 8GB DDR4 128GB M.2 SSD Mini Computer, 4K HDMI, Triple Display, Dual WiFi, BT4.2, and HTPC. For that price I figured “what the hell, let’s give it a try”.

Normally you restore home assistant to a previous backup using the backups stored locally that are listed under Settings -> System -> Backups. Just click on the backup you want to restore and a window pops up. Simple.

But if you want to restore to a version saved to Google drive you first have to copy the backup file from Google Drive to your local PC and then upload it to Home Assistant. Then the feature to upload a backup file is hidden under the “three dot” menu at the upper right of the backup page.

Open the menu, select “Upload backup”, and find the backup file you copied from Google Drive.

I was looking for a tilt sensor to tell me if my garage door was open or closed. The sensor had to work with Home Assistant and the only one I could find that looked simple and cheap was the Aqara Vibration sensor that had a tilt/orientation feature.

Unfortunately the feature was not one of the attributes that Home Assistant showed with the device which sent me down the rabbit hole of googling. Eventually I got it figured out and this article is to share my experiences.

Goal:

Use Home Assistant to use Amazon Echo to play Amazon Music playlists

Resources used:

Home Assistant Community Store – Alexa Media Player

I have been playing around with Home Assistant for just a little while now, and while I am impressed with what it does, I find the documentation and the examples to be less than helpful. One thing I wanted to do was simply add a “card” of web links to the UI. Since the Home Assistant interface (Lovelace) is web based you would think that this would be easy.