So I’ve been away for a while now, tidying stuff up, testing new things, making sure everything is working as it should be, building new things a lot.
So I’m going to write a lot of smallish posts to streamline the writing process a bit in my head, and make each article just something to focus on. They might be a bit hasty, since that’s what I am.
Smart Home: Rethink can be a bad thing
So I have this thing, where I tend to overthink a lot of things, and keep going back and forth, did I do the right thing? Most of the time, these might be bad ideas (Zigbee2MQTT -> ZHA) since they fight against my whole hosting ideology (separation of concerns)
I’m fairly bad at deciding things, so I end up going around in circles on what is the best approach on current problems. Or if I see a problem, I’ll circle around and think of ludicrous solutions that wont actually fix it, but will give me something to tinker with. (ehm. Zigbee2MQTT -> ZHA). Luckily this time, I didn’t do anything too hasty.
Zigbee2MQTT
So the thing is, Zigbee2MQTT is really really good at what it does, and while I did have some issues with our Homeassistant, it was only because of the UI itself, not Z2M itself. So I’m really happy, it works flawlessly, and is lightning fast.
Zigbee Dongle
But what I did do, was extend my Zigbee dongle outside of the metal casing where it was, hoping it would at least give me my zigbee network a little boost. No, I haven’t’ seen a single shred of evidence that this actually did something, but I feel better about it.
Home Assistant & UI
This is probably where the most of my time regarding our Home Automation has gone, making sure our UI is slick, fast and responsive. Because think about it, if your UI is not fast, responsive, the whole experience will suck.
The single biggest issue was, that our light control code was made with Hue Like Lights (https://github.com/Gh61/lovelace-hue-like-light-card) and the maintainer removed some caching, which means, everything is actually updated as fast as the zigbee network announces it.
This is probably the biggest piece of happiness in my life, we love the ability to easily trigger scenes, we love how we can group lights, and we love how we can manipulate them straight from the page itself. It’s just a really nice piece of code that works for us.
SSD
And last but not least, SSD upgrade has been well worth the money. It’s made everything so snappy, at least in the terminal side. Actual noticeable speed increase in app responsiveness? None!
But as I live in the console, making everything fast, snappy, and more reliable (at least in thought) is money well spent.