Home Assistant#

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Where it runs#

Home Assistant runs as a Home Assistant OS (HAOS) VM on ereshkigal (libvirt/qemu), reachable at 192.168.0.55 — the VM took over the IP of the old HA Green appliance, which has been retired after a hardware failure. The Zigbee/Thread coordinator (a Nabu Casa Connect ZBT-1) is passed through to the VM via VFIO, and the VM is dual-homed on both the internal LAN (192.168.0.55) and the IoT VLAN (192.168.2.55).

See the Home Assistant VM runbook for the architecture, the VFIO/USB passthrough, the IoT-VLAN leg, and recovery steps.

Using Home Assistant#

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{{< details “iOS app” >}} Install the Home Assistant Companion app, then point it at the local instance while on the home network. {{< /details >}}

I’d suggest learning about it using the official documentation

The basic controls on the main dashboard should be self explanatory. However, currently, if you want a specific scene, you’ll need to go the scenes set up page, or yell at Siri.

Home Assistant should be considered the source of truth for automations. While Homekit is installed for Siri, anything made in the home app will be overridden by Home Assistant.

ESPHome#

ESP device firmware is built and managed by ESPHome running on ereshkigal, not inside Home Assistant itself. It is embedded in the HA sidebar via panel_iframe — see ESPHome for setup details, VLAN routing requirements, and the device config workflow.

Barcode Scanner#

A HID barcode scanner is bridged into Home Assistant by the flake’s tsunaminoai.barcodeScanner module. A small evdev reader grabs the scanner’s input exclusively and publishes each scanned code to MQTT (broker 192.168.0.55:1883, the Mosquitto add-on in the HA VM) with an auto-discovery config, so HA creates a “Last Barcode” sensor automatically. The module is currently enabled on razer.

Automations#

These are the current automations that are set up:

  • When the sun comes up, turn on the light for the succulents.
  • When the sun comes up, set a timer for 10 hours to turn off the light for the succulents.
  • Notify Ben when Nyssa leaves work (super slow to update)
  • Notify Ben when any device is low on battery
  • Turn on the side door light for Nyssa if its dark when she gets home
  • Turn off all lights when an NFC tag is scanned
  • Adaptively lower the color temprature and brightness of the lights in the office
  • This is based on the location of the house and the sun’s position.

Configuration#

Every device in the house has to be connected to home assistant. To add a device go to the configuration page and click on integrations. If the integration you want to add is not listed, you can add it by clicking on the plus icon in the bottom right corner.

Integration passwords are generally not to be stored. They should be entered manually when adding the integration and not recorded.