I have all the usual Home Assistant stuff, including a Goodnight Routine.

I also have 3 cats, one of which has only known the house with automation.

Now these cats seem to have a hierarchy, and the Top Cat sleeps in the bedroom with us. This is now the Cat that only knows automation.

So when I say "Hey Google, Goodnight" she meows, she's genuinely excited.

Now a lot of the time my Wife falls asleep on the sofa while I watch TV or game, and I have to wake her up to go to bed. It's "Goodnight" then wake up the wife.

Last night I had a brainwave. What if I can get the cat to do it? She wakes my wife up at 4am by cleaning her face already, maybe I can get her to wake her up on the sofa too.

So last night I did the usual "Hey Google, Goodnight" then started saying "Goodnight" to the cat, then softly calling my wife, "Wifey, goodnight, goodnight" until she woke up.

When she woke up the cat put her front paws on the sofa and sniffed my wife's face and meowed.

So I plan on waking the Wifey up this way in the future in the hope that the cat will cotton on, and instead of just meowing in excitement, actively participate in the going to bed process.

Thereby giving me a Biomech automation.

She's an intelligent kitty so I have confidence it'll work. Today she (indoor cat) managed to get out while I gave a delivery guy directions and she sat outside in the garden meowing to be let back in, and another of my cats was inside the door meowing too.

It's been written by a self_admitted noob at integrations, but it effortlessly pulls in all data from my Sleep As Android alarm clock and even introduced me to features of the app I didn't know existed, and I've been using it for years.

By following his instructions (I skipped the watch bit) Home Assistant now know when I'm sleeping and awake.

I've been considering some kind of bed load esp board for a while but now I don't have to. I know when I fell asleep last night and even when I was snoring.

More importantly, Home Assistant knows these things and I can now have a more reliable Good Night automation that knows when I'm sleeping, even when I get kicked out of bed and have to sofa sleep.

I've been using SB for years but it's just a bit shit sometimes.

What I love about it is that it has Chromecast Bridgez meaning I can play music to my Google Home Minis.

But nowadays I have all my music in Plex and I'm using Symphonium to stream to my phone. Symphonium connects up nicely.to my Google minis, I just need something to replace my squeeze lite end points so I can send music to them from my phone.

Currently these are both running on Pis so if anyone can recommend an easy UPNP endpoint software for a pi, that would be great.

I woke up this morning at 6 am with IBS cramps. I tried to go back to bed but I'd woken fully up so by half 7 I was sat at my PC with a brew for some uninterrupted tinkering.

My espresence has been a bit finicky since ai set it up. I've been moving the nodes around to find better positions with slight improvements but nothing making it properly stable.

Well this morning was even worse than usual. I'm sat in my front room with my sensor flitting between the floor above and below me but never on the floor I'm on.

I moved the sensors again. I played with dwell time. I changed "wait until" up. I even dived into the rabbit hole of tuning the base stations by increasing rssi and absorbsion, which actually seemed to do the best at improving it.

So at this point my phone has been sitting on the desk for a few hours while I fine tune all this, when my wife comes down the stairs. Her beacon is firmly set to "frontroom" when she sits down but mine is bouncing around the house. Odd.

Then I finally figured it out!

The damn phone is sat on a wireless charging stand on my desk. This must be interfering with my Bluetooth!

I take my phone off the stand and voila, it's in a stable place in espresence.

So that's how I wasted 2 hours this morning.

I say wasted, I did manage to get it more stable on the charging stand before I realised, and this seems to have helped it's stability when it's off the stand. In fact, all my messing about this morning has made espresence correctly report my location ever since.

Since my air fryer notification I've bought 2 more Esp32 Dev boards from The Greal Mall of China- AliExpress. A couple days later I'd read about MMwave sensors and purchased a couple of those too.

A week later and they land a day after each other. I got home today and found 2 MMwave sensors on the kitchen table.

I had half an hour before I had to pick the kids up so I tried to wire and flash it.

The first problem was the writing. I'm 40 now but always had awesome vision, so shit like this just shows me how much it's actually deteriorated. I had to get my phone out and zoom in to work out where to plug in my wires.

I managed to plug shit in and flash the basic firmware on the board, and managed to add some basic code I'd found for my board when I searched using it's full AliExpress name.

I left with a sensor running in HA happy it was that easy. But...

I did some digging, because all I was getting in HA was an occupancy On status, no variance or info.

I found that when I just searched for the sensor without HLK at the beginning or whatever was at the end, there was loads of info. I found a GitHub full of code for my sensor and happily added it to my esp32.

First I had an issue OTA flashing with some password issue, so I flashed it over USB and it worked, I had new sensors in HA! The problem was that they were unresponsive.

I'd positioned it at this point and figured the Dupont wires I used had probably come loose. When I unplugged and replugged it all, success

This thing is awesome. It could see me at my computer and I must have been only just visible to it, I was sat kinda beside it, must have amazing peripheral vision.

Since I've got it going it's detected occupancy throughout. I was watching it pick up my wife just watching TV, unlike my aqara ZigBee one.

My worry is that it'll take a while fine tuning it to filter out the cats. I'm hoping to use it with my espresence setup to make sofa-sleeping more chill. I don't want lights popping on and off when I'm snoring and my wife gets up, but I do want the lights off when we're both in bed.

I need to fine tune the espresence though, or rely on it less. It seems like it's more like Room Assistant than I thought and I flit around the house in Bluetooth Land. I've managed to improve it by moving the sensors and turning my HA beacon to High from Medium and up to Low Latency.

I can set up another MMwave sensor but I'm gonna move my front room aqara to the bedroom and see if I need any.

I might try a pressure sensor for the bed next, or maybe see if I can run a Squeezebox node from it.

"Hur Hur that's what a timer on your phone is for dude"

Yeah but this was a smart plug that was going dusty in a drawer!

Anyway it's not the notification that makes my brain tickle in that special way, but the fact that my HA takes note of who was in the kitchen when the air fryer was started and only notifies the floor with that person on when it's done.

Now I've worked that logic out with a silly Air Fryer notification I can reuse it in all my other automations.

This week I've been playing with Espresence, which for anyone that doesn't know, is a program that runs on an ESP32 and tracks Bluetooth. It then has a guess where you are based upon the strength of the signal.

So a little backstory, I recently wiped out my HA server and didn't have a backup so I've started from scratch. Since I've started from scratch I've been avoiding Node Red and just using the HA automations, but I am a NR boy at heart.

Previously my bathroom light automation in NR was a massive flow of door, motion, leak sensors.

When I added espresence I decided to reinstall NR to add these new sensors into my automations, and found the Binary Sensor node, so I had a play and managed to make a Front Room Presence binary sensor.

"This is pretty good" I thought and made another for my bathroom, taking in all the sensors I used previously. But this time they triggered a binary sensor instead of the lights.

Now I have the binary sensor triggering the light automation, with extras here and there (like guest mode being on, trigger the lights from the hallway sensor instead of the bathroom sensor. The light automation looks much cleaner and presence is all done on one page.

So I'm using the binary sensor in 2 ways here, as an addition to the motion sensor in my front room, and as a replacement for a full blown automation.

Functionally it's not really any different to using an input boolean helper, but I can make this binary in NR itself.

Edit: Gotchas

So I should probably tell you about the big Gotcha in creating a Binary in Node Red.

You need to set the msg. from string to Boolean. So for each binary you need a Boolean true and a Boolean false nose to set it off and on. Everything else was pretty simple

I've been in the HA world since the time the government placed the world under house arrest. Since then I've seen all sorts of amazing things people can do with an esp32 device.

So I'm late to the game. I always thought it may become a dangerous rabbit hole so I've just avoided it. But apparently I have 4 coming today so it's about time to ask you guys what you do.

My first project was gonna be getting some Bluetooth tracking going on around the house to get some room prescence going on.

I also read I can make some seat/bed sensors with a little wire, aluminium foil, paper and a folder-insert, that sounds like it could be fun.

I have a breadboard and a bunch of components I bought when I first got a Pi. I don't know how compatible these components are with esp32s or what the hell I can do.

I don't have a soldering iron (yet).

So basically: noob post, gimme some easy projects that don't require a lot, or wow me with your esp projects.

I saw an appreciation post for Gluetun on here in the last couple of weeks. I'd set it up before my server died and I had to reinstall everything, but then gone for the easy method when I was reinstalling.

So my easy method install had a VM as a server running Plex and Docker and a second VM with Mullvad installed running anything that needed a VPN in Docker.

Yesterday I opened up a program behind the VPN and it wasn't working again. I had to restart the VM to get it going and it annoyed me. So before work I set up Gluetun.

I had previously used this walkthrough https://youtu.be/9dJPOd0XbN8 so I went back to it, looked in the notes and found his GitHub, then his docker compose under Torrent-VPN.

I stole his initial Gluetun config and the qBittorrent part, but then went into Portainer and took all my running containers and added them to the file. I took the ports out of each compose file and added the "network mode" and "depends on Gluetun" bits from the qBittorrent part of his config and added them to each compose file I added to the file.

Then the ports I had removed I added to the Gluetun part of his compose file.

Downloaded a config file for Mullvad and added the IP and private Key to the Gluetun compose.

Then launch the stack and it worked.

Now for the Gotchas. I had to go into Portainer to get the IP address that the whole stack used. This IP address was required to get containers talking to each other. If you need Sonarr to connect to Prowlarr it needs this IP address.

Also the downloader (he uses qBittorrent and I used RDT client) needed to be mapped using "localhost" for each container and the port

But other than those Gotchas it was quite easy and I managed to get everything set up an hour after finishing work. This was because I just used backups of my already running containers and restored them in the new ones, then edited the bits that had changed (IP addresses in my Gotchas)

The upside is that I'm now only using the one VM, meaning I've saved 4gb of RAM.

I can use that ram for something else now. Nextcloud? Immich?

Hope this helps someone else.

So last week I had a Proxmox fuckup and lost everything. I learnt the hard way what living without backups is like and I don't recommend it.

Silver lining is that I don't have to tidy up all those old automations and entities anymore.

Anyway it made me realise what I'd miss if I didn't have them, because I didn't have them.

I've been really really tired this week. I get up at 5am and start work at 6, and while I don't like it, I usually cope with it better than most and have comments about how "It's too early for you." But not this week.

I've put it down to losing my connection between my alarm clock and HA. I use SleepAsAndroid and have done for a long time. Back when I started it was because it connected to Tasker, but over the years I've moved to HA and still use it.

SleepAsAndroid with Tasker was done with web hooks but I use the MQTT integration with HA. This means it's connected when I'm home but not in network when I'm away, so it can't fire the messages, which is what you want.

Previously I used Node Red to set up this automation but I haven't reinstalled it yet, I'm seeing if I can do it all on HA, then it's one less thing and I can automate in the app.

I spent a while this morning trying to figure out how to reintegrate it with HA and struggled, but eventually I found an integration in HACS which meant I just had to change my device identifier in the alarm app by adding /MyName to the end of the SleepAsAndroid topic so it reads SleepAsAndroid/MyName, add the HACS integration and then add it again in the Integrations pane, with MyName plumbed in.

Then I added a blueprint from the add ons page and left the house to go on a day trip.

In and amongst the day trip I've been making my automation on the HA app via the blueprint, and have come home, loaded a bowl and set my alarm for 1 minute time, then smoke the bowl and wait...

Success!

Hopefully I'll have more energy this week when I wake up to my lights turning on, instead of complete darkness and a strange noise.

Now what would you miss that isn't obvious (like motion activated lights)?

I've got 3 HDDs connected to my Proxmox machine via usb3. They worked fine until this week. I have them mounted and passed through to OMV.

One failed on Sunday. It was fine one minute, I rebooted and Proxmox wouldn't boot...

Couldn't work out why it wouldn't boot and reflashed Proxmox, losing all my machines (I have since learned the importance of backups since I had none).

I've spent 4 days rewriting it all. Rebooted last night and it happened again, but this time I noticed that it was struggling to find one of my drives and edited them out of Fstab and got it booting again.

I've since added 2/3 drives back in by adding "nofail" to my Fstab entries but my main storage drive is now showing as 100gb instead of 1tb and won't pass through to OMV.

I've come to the conclusion that they were mounted by label and "forgot" their label, hence wouldn't boot, they're now mounted by UUID.

So has anyone got any tips on the best way to mount these things without killing my whole setup?

Also if anyone knows why my storage is showing as 100gb in Proxmox and won't pass through to OMV now I would be eternally grateful. Kinda want to get the files off that drive...

I thought I had a backup. I use the Gdrive add-on and it should have had a backup.

I didn't have a backup.

Turns out when I moved from a Pi to Proxmox I didn't set Gdrive add-on up properly, so it wasn't making backups every 3 days like it always has.

Then I killed Proxmox. No idea what I did to kill it, I just tried to make my NAS VM have 4gb ram all the time instead of Ballooning from 1gb, and it never booted again.

So I had to start fresh. But while I've only been playing with VMs for a couple months my HA instance has been a work of love since Lockdowns and COVID times.

And now I'm starting again.

Now go and check your backup solution.