I’m gonna assume you’re not using Home Assistant yet.

There is an app for Home Assistant but from your comment I’m assuming you’re talking about something like Smart Life.

Home Assistant takes all these different companies and creates a central hub for them all. So we have Hue bulbs and Nest cameras all talking to each other via Home Assistant.

If you’re already using Home Assistant then disregard and have look into PIR and Mm Wave sensor.

I’ve moved up a level and recently made a bed sensor.

I’ve had the opposite experience with the cube, but I use Zigbee2MQTT so I’m maybe that made the difference.

It’s a fantastic concept and I think everyone should buy one just because it’s so cool and so fucking useless at the same time.

So you have turn like a knob function, then changing sides, a knock knock, a slide and a drop sensor.

I programmed the drop sensor to toggle my room lights then showed a bunch of 40+ year old kids, who had great fun for a full 5 minutes playing epileptic catch.

The problem is that it has all these functions, but you only know what they are because you spent the time programming them. So it’s fucking useless to anyone else, and by the time you’ve set the thing down you’ve forgotten what you set it to do yourself.

I’ve had the turn like a knob set to brighten and dim my lights, then decided it should control the volume on the speaker when it’s playing music too, which lead to a little project in node red. But nobody else in the house even knows that’s what it does.

I should stop this wall of text, get one, it’s useless!

I did it all in Node Red so unfortunately I can’t share the automation, but I can point you at this HACS integration https://github.com/meichthys/uptime_kuma

Set that up and all your nodes will be visible in HA then it’s just a case of “if node X is off for X minutes” - “notify”

I think I’m a step behind you. I use Uptime Kuma for monitoring and it worked really well. Just have it running on a pi separate from my main machine.

I worked out how to get it sending me emails when things are down and up, and now my email inbox is a fucking hot mess of notifications.

So I’ve just this weekend integrated it into Home Assistant and set it to notify me when things are down for 5 minutes or more.

My next step was going to be finding some way of integrating Portainer into Home Assistant so I can restart stopped containers, and maybe Proxmox so I can reboot VMs from HA. Not sure it’s possible yet though.

Ultimately I want to have HA send me a notification with actionable buttons with “reboot container” and “reboot VM” which, when pressed, will sort the issue out.

However this will not help when one of my drives goes down. They’re HDDs plugged in by USB3 which isn’t great and my server is behind the coat rack so sometimes the kids just throw their coats on and it falls onto my server, which then heats up and goes silly.

I tested both out years ago when I was first starting with ZigBee and preferred Z2MQTT, it was just way better. I’ve been using it ever since.

Nice! I’ve just set up a couple of daily tasks, and worked out how to get nagged to complete tasks in node red, which basically requires removing the tasks from the to-do. If it’s been ticked then the node errors out, but if it has not then it gets removed, the node completes and I can send a notification saying “You didn’t do X!”

Timers to add tasks sounds like a good next step, I’ll have to look into it

Yeah problem is that your body clock gets synched and you end up waking up early. It’s 7.30 on Xmas eve and I’m up again, although I hear footsteps so it looks like I have company this morning.

Yeah I used to be a Google Keep user. I still am but I used to be too.

Like I say I’ve synchronised Keep with HA now, just my shopping list using a HACs plugin. The only downside was that it required me to use a Docker container to get the Token which was doable but required me to learn how to get Docker running in Interactive Mode in Portainer which I’ve never done before.

If you’re interested there’s a dude on YouTube called FutreProofHomes that’s integrated ChatGPT with ToDo and is doing some cool things with it

Now then, that’s an impressive Lovelace view.

Haha no not anymore but I certainly used to. Now they’re entering teenage years and I have to drag them out of their beds.

It gets better

ESP32 and a pressure strip. Basically this https://github.com/eoncire/HA_bed_presence

I got a cheap Nest E thermostat on eBay from a charity shop seller. It cost me like £15.

Replaced my dumb one with it, then hooked it into HA and made a sensor from all my motion sensors and door sensors which all have temperature gauges in them.

Conglomerated those sensors into one that tracks the average (making sure to only have so many per floor so as not to skew the data to one part of the house) then made a sensor called “Is it cold enough to have the Heating on?” which acts as a simple switch with a lower and upper limit.

Now my heating only comes on when I need it to based off the temperature of the whole house instead of that one place the dumb thermostat was based.

The display unit for it died after less than a year, replaced that for another £20 on eBay and synced the new unit to the Thermostat on the wall.

So for less than £50 and some smarts I’ve upgraded my heating, and saved money on the bills (since it only comes on when we need it to rather than based on the temperature of one location).

I’m not particularly recommending Nest since I have no experience with other manufacturers, but I managed to do it all on the cheap and I’m quite pleased with the results

2 things, one of which has already been said

Get an SSD and a usb cable for it. Boot off that. Be aware that not all cables are the same (have a Google for usb 3 SSD cables for home assistant before you buy one). There’s a little song and dance you have to do to boot off ext SSD but it’s not hard and doesn’t take long (Google).

That combo will eliminate the SD card issues in the future. But you also need to look into the Google Drive backup add-on. Get that for when shit goes down.

With those two things you should be all set and eliminate this ever happening again. If it does you have a backup.

I’ll be honest and say that most of my self hosted music collection was pirated or ripped from CD like 20 years ago. I put it all on an iPod back then.

I found the iPod gathering dust in a drawer when I finally got a car with a usb jack a couple years ago (yeah I’m not exactly laden with bags of cash over here) and recently pulled all that music back onto my newly set up media server.

I have a Spotify family account I’m trying to phase out with resistance from the children.

To support artists I go and see them when they tour and buy a ludicrously expensive t-shirt

Yeah I know, I use Gluetun now, I was just answering OPs question.

I ran a Linux VM and just had Mullvad app installed and always on, and that was all I needed

Yes

I think you should have a thin sheet of steel kept in your car or somewhere safe, so you can just use that like a locksmith.

Plex was easy enough to set up. I use plexamp on my phone but can access the Plex server via a browser, which includes my music

Yeah I mean I get it because I was also thinking about self hosting for a long time and had a bunch of questions myself.

The problem is that a lot of the questions were not needed, and a bunch of the other questions I answered myself by just tooling around with the stuff.

Great comment btw, it’s a good idea to have a list of the services you’d like to run, in order of importance z then work through it.

I did that then found ways to combine a bunch of services, to the point where I had multiple stand alone VMs that are now just one for Home Assistant and second for Plex and Docker