Reluctantly migrating to Home Assistant, but the transition will be very gradual.
8 May, 2023 - 19:49
Hi everyone who still visits the forum, I have decided to take the plunge and gradually migrate my Home Automation Hub over to Home Assistant, so far I have found some integrations very easy and some what I would consider very simple but quite difficult to set up on HASS. Over the years I have got quite proficient at using “vi” to edit my schedules, HomeAssistant for me feels like a step back when trying to perform simple “cron” changes. Having all the schedules on one page was brilliant even though you had to be very careful with the syntax.
I have just got my rfrx.com device connected to HASS and it has detected nearly all of my 433 mhz devices which is very easy to set up and find Home Easy or other devices.
For my transition to be gradual I would like to try and use my existing JeeNodes amd migrating them over to Home Assistant unfortunately I am really struggling with this, I have read numerous threads but cannot find any real information that explains exactly what to do. Even reading Home Automation Wiki I cannot find what data is sent serially to the 868mhz transmitter and trigger my jeenode rx devices. I will eventually start using ESP8266 devices but would love to get my jeenodes working in the interim as they have been very reliable.
So far I have purchased a number of ESP 8266 devices to experiment with which include a 4 ch relay device with 240v power supply for around £8.00 inc delivery from china, unbelievable!!
Looking forward to hearing anyone’s comments.
Kema…
Hey good to hear from you. I'm still around!
The 866Mhz stuff is xAP packets over RF instead of using serial/ethernet.
[ HAH/xap-serial ] --xAP--> [HAHCentral] --- RF(866Mhz) ---> RoomNode
To control them with HomeAssistant you would have to have the xap-serial program and the HAHCentral node on the network somewhere. Remember xAP is a broadcast protocol. You could switch out the HAH for a PI for example.
In this mode you could run the HAH software on the PI itself -> http://dbzoo.com/livebox/portable
[ Raspberry PI/xap-serial ] --> [HAHCentral] --- RF(866Mhz) ---> RoomNode
^
| xAP
|
[HomeAssistant]
This was the nice thing about xAP as a protocol. Anything on the network could participate in it.
There is a library for using xAP on the ESP8266 if you want to experiment. I've been playing with the ESP32 these are also fun.
https://github.com/dbzoo/esp8266-xap
Let me know where to decide to go and I'll give you some pointers.
Brett