What were the others?

@@kyledewaal9332 Cloudflare tunnelling and your networking 101 series.

How'd you make your water meter smart?

VM is my preferred long term option.

Yea I got HA green a couple months ago. Advertised as plug and play but definitely not user friendly lol

Thin clients and Proxmox containers are the way to go IMO. More robust storage, battery backed clock, and power cables that aren’t waiting to come out. Raspis aren’t really suited unless you need the IO pins.

@@MIsterB716 exactly, even when you need gpio you can use a microcontroller at the location you need it.

You can also boot your pi off a usb hard drive instead an not worry about the sd card....better performance as well

It depends on the device. Some devices are cloud only, so you have to setup the device in their app and HA communicates with the cloud. Other devices are local. My light bulbs for example use Zigbee and I just have to activate the linking mode by quickly turning them on/off a few times and they'll pop up in HA.

Exactly. I used the docker method and I'm ready to throw HA into the bin as it is unusable without any Add-ons at all - or at least so crippled that I don't care to use it. What a shame

Take notes

Home Assistan/Nabu Casat has called this the year of "Voice" and you may have noticed the new assist icon which on a phone you can still use a mic although that does use the built in voice controls. Personally I run Rhasspy which is all stored on my NUC locally, no cloud involved. Just a USB speakerphone hooked up to my HA server. You can also run satellites in other places wirelessly. Nabu Casa also hired the guy who wrote Rhasspy so I'm waiting to hear their solution for an echo like device that is 100 percent local, no cloud needed. I had to stop using Amazon Alexa/Echoes after I found out about Amazon Streets which build mesh networks via BT and 800mhz radios which is what Lora uses and Lora can reach up to half a mile. They also have no reason being in some devices outside of being used for Amazon Streets. Lora is a long range, low power, low data (like text) data transmitting protocol which is actually really neat when used properly and typically runs on ESP32's for low power. Essentially Amazon is building city wide mesh networks without building any infrastructure with devices you buy, all encrypted so nobody knows what they are really doing. using products you buy (that they own) including ring doorbells. It also uses a small portion of your internet without your knowledge although it's limited to 88kbos and 500MB/s of data a month. Say you have a WiFi light far away from your router and you use Alexa to turn it on/off, if your neighbor owns an echo or ring it will actually turn the light on/off using their wifi., Not yours without either of you knowing. All the data uses 3 layers of encryption and Amazon says it's for security and that they can't even see the data. Yet, they also say they will give data to law enforcement with a proper warrant. How can they give law enforcement data if they can't see it? I just don't trust billion dollar companies that collect data like this personally. It was more about the free software for all your data evolving to "we are going to use hardware you buy, from us to build mesh networks without your knowledge to make money" that was just over the line for me. It can be disabled in the Alexa app but they have been doing this since (in beta) 2019 and it went live last year so if you haven't disabled it in the Alexa or Ring app your part of Amazon Streets.

The HA team (Nabu Casa) has reached a stage where there is an update monthly. They have a livestream each month to talk about the updates. I've been using HA since 2017 and I can tell you that the system stability is now unmatched. There is a large community that is growing everyday (glad Chris is jumping in) so finding a solution to almost any problem is a couple of clicks away.

Most often with a USB connected dongle.

@@CrosstalkSolutions So for the VM solution, you connect the dongles directly to the NAS?

ukposts.info/have/v-deo/cYmmaW2tobBooo0.html

havent heard about this yet, will have to do some research on it. any recommended channels to look at for the setup?

I'm also interested

I have been doing this for years to turn off kids internet at bed time on school nights and then turn it back on after school started to keep from distractions in the morning. I can over ride with a switch on a dashboard too!

Is there a way to automate led strips over poe?