This is funny because my last 3 drives have all been used. $/TB has definitely gone up since COVID for new drives.

IMDB would probably be a good start.

Why’d you do this to me?

I’ll second what they said about ZWave and their recommended switches.

I have that same Zooz scene controller in the kitchen and it works great to control the kitchen lights and the RGBW cabinet lighting I installed. For ‘normal’ smart switches, I’m using the dimmer and on/off Zooz switches (Zen32 and 34 I think? Zen72 & 76) which are about half the price of that Innovelli.

I used the HUSBZB in the past and it did work, but it’s also pretty dated and hard to update so I went with the Sonoff 3.0 USB dongle (zigbee) and Zooz ZST10 dongle (zwave) and have had a trouble free experience.

You can bind switches to bulbs in Z2M. That way they still work whether HA is running or not

So then throw them in the trash and buy something else?

I don’t see what can be accomplished by complaining about them while also refusing any workarounds unless you have chronically low blood pressure that’s cured by your constant anger toward these bulbs and their dumb design.

Instead of replacing the switch with a button, you can replace it with a smart switch that doesn’t actually cut power when you press “off”. My Zooz ZWave switches allow you to configure them to either use the internal relay to turn lights on and off (which cuts power) or disable the relay and use the ZWave side to turn the lights on and off (maintaining power).

It’s an annoying issue but this is what happens when you DIY things using parts from various manufacturers with differing design ideas.

Any chance you guys have your zigbee radios plugged directly into your host device? I had a bunch of issues with mine until I plugged it and my ZWave dongle into USB extension cables. I think with the Pi specifically, you can wind up with interference. Another point of interference is your wifi AP as wifi and zigbee frequencies overlap one another.

I’ve personally used Aqara window sensors, temp sensors, and switches for a few years now on my current Sonoff and previous HUSBZB radios without issue after eliminating any possible interference as noted above.

Getting some repeaters couldn’t hurt either. I have a couple Ikea Tradfri shades and they both came with repeaters.

If you go this route, you’ll absolutely need mmWave sensors as regular PIR sensors only sense movement not presence and you’ll experience lights shutting off when you’re sitting too still in a room. I’ve considered setting this up a few times but want mmWave and PIR sensors with a lux sensor all-in-one and the market for this is extremely small. I think only some sketchy Tuya and the Everything Smart Home youtube channel have sensors like this but they’re expensive and I just haven’t pulled the trigger.

Not sure if you got this idea from Technology Connections but he recently didn a video using this exact premise.

I checked HA and found that A) my furnace fan is likely dying as the furnace overheats and power cycles frequently and B) despite the overheating, or furnace has only run at most 25% of the day during the coldest temps we’ve gotten this winter (which has been mild and only down into the low 30s). I think if/when we replace the furnace we can safely cut the BTU rating down while still maintaining our desired temperature.

I think it depends on what you’re storing. If it’s video then you’ll want bigger drives because you’ll fill your array of small drives up quickly and trying to manage 10 or 15 1TB HDDs will get out of hand quickly. Backing up isn’t super critical with large “Linux ISOs” since you can just torrent most everything again to replace missing files.

For fast throughput of small files, I think smaller drives in an array win out and if these are important files, it probably wouldn’t be too expensive to buy a couple of large HDDs to backup the entire array.

It’s interesting how old console tech comes back around to be useful for other stuff. I’ve used a couple Xbox Kinects to do 3D scanning and with an augmented reality sand box.

My tree lights (Twinkly) are also controlled by HA along with some Govee stick lights in the front window. No ‘smart’ ornaments yet but there’s still time!

This is a weird setting that must be in some brand new release because I’ve been using WLED for years and it’s always just been a current limiter for the entire strip. Perhaps it has something to do with OP using COB lights as I’ve only ever used it for standard strip lights like 5050 WS2812B or 5050 WS2815.

Yes that’s correct. Same goes for the normal WS2811 strip lights which are addressable every 3 LEDs.

USB PD is not specced for USB-A which is limited to 5V 2.4A. They had Quick Charge back in the day that got a little bit higher power using 9V but all the modern higher voltage high current PD stuff uses USB-C. The USB-A cables aren’t specced to be running 5A or more that PD uses.

https://www.usb.org/usb-charger-pd

USB-C can deliver more power which is why they’ve been appearing more and more on charging bricks.

Someone took Monster’s “$100 gold plated HDMI” cable and one-upped it.

Damn bro, this is like seeing an 8-slot VCR or 50 disc CD changer.

Ditch the SD card all together and get a cheap SSD to use as the boot drive instead.