IOT and related gizmos - Honey I bricked the house!

[eizbaer]

Guide to the new Matter standard:

SPEAKING OF MATTER

I installed a nuki smart lock on our door back in march - purely because of laziness so it would lock automatically at night. current gen also supports matter without bridge, so yay. pairing into home assistant back in the day via the apple tv as a thread border router worked nicely, even if it was slow af (as usual for homekit / matter devices, somehow that's just normal). everything worked nicely since then, even the firmware update to matter 1.2 on the lock (to allow both "unlock" and "open" states separate from each other) and 1.3 on home assistant and everything. for three months.

then last night the lock just disappeared from my matter fabric. home assistant just knows it's "unavailable". no further info, nothing in the logs. it's just gone. other people have similar issues, but have had them on older versions of HA and matter as well and can't re-add their locks either, for some reason. what's weird is that this wasn't directly caused by an update or something... the lock worked perfectly fine since the latest updates to HA and matter... and then just last night decided to get lost somewhere. ugh.

subscirbed to the issue on github to see when / how / if that gets fixed... until then I'll just leave it as it is. can't be bothered to spend hours fiddling with it only for it not to work after all. the lock does what it's supposed to: lock the door at 9 pm lol. whether I have the button in HA or not isn't all that important, tbh.

edit: lock can't be re-added to either HA or apple home either. it just fails without any meaningful error message. good shit.

 

[eizbaer]

built an automation that will automatically close the roller blinds in our bedroom 75% if there's a lot of sun in order to help with the temperatures. sounds easy enough... however:
the homematic integration for the roller blinds controls don't report the current status properly to HA (so I can't set a target). even if I could, they're not properly calibrated, so the % they report is currently meaningless. plus: I'd have to go and test out the right value anyway, because "all the way down but not closed off" is probably at like 69% (nice) or something.
workaround 1: just hit "close", wait 12 seconds, then "stop". bit rough, but it does what I want.
my trigger: total PV production > 7 kW for more than 5 minutes between 7-13h (later is not worth it anymore, really). may need to fiddle with the actual number and the time threshold. no idea what's sensible here... but any sunny day will be above 7 kW and any overcast/cloudy day will not, so that should be ok, I guess.
further: wait until 16h, then open the roller blinds again. at that point, the sun has moved around the house far enough to no longer hit the bedroom anyway (that may also work out with 14 or 15h, because of a large roof overhang).
also: if pv power falls below 5 kW (again, rather arbitrarily chosen) for more than 15 minutes (yada yada), also open the blinds (and stop waiting for 16h) because I'll assume that some clouds have shown up.

as a result, I now fully expect my bedroom blinds to go completely ham the moment I next leave the house and spend the entire day going up down up down up down, because surely I've stuffed something up in the automation.

 

[leviathan]

Heh. Blinds automation is a neat thing, I have it too Mine works using the sun azimuth / angle to know that the windows in question are in direct sunlight, + temperature from the weather forecast to know it's warm enough outside so closing the blinds makes any sense. Looks something like this:

Template binary sensor "direct sunlight in bedroom":

{{ (160 < state_attr("sun.sun", "azimuth") < 340) and (state_attr("sun.sun", "elevation") > 10) }}

Template binary sensor "direct sunlight and hot":

{{ (states('binary_sensor.direct_sunlight_in_bedroom') == 'on') and (state_attr('weather.at_home', 'temperature') > 18) }}

The automations trigger on the second sensor's state changes and close or open the blinds respectively. The blinds I use are "Gurtaufroller" integrated via Fritz! Smart Home (RolloTron DECT 1213), and thankfully they expose full state and controls to HA, so I can command them to fully close / fully open / go to any percentage position and it works reliably.

 

[eizbaer]

And I just walked into a completely blacked out bedroom - it seems HA treats a status of 87% as "open"... I just put the bloody status into a technically unnecessary binary helper now. ugh. it annoys me a little, so maybe I'll actually use the status % tomorrow instead (basically say only lower if = 100%, i.e. fully up).
Actually using the sun position is too advanced for my tastes - and would require more thinking on my part I could do that to determine whether the sun actually hits the room of course, in addition to the pure "power" thing from the PV system. But the approximation that it'll be shining into the room between sunrise and 14/15/16h or so is honestly enough for me. That way a potential rising of the blinds is also nice and predictable and will always happen at a certain time of day (which may help with WAF (wife acceptance factor)).

my 3d printer automation already failed on me also... it triggers off the 3d print finishing (which works fine) and is then supposed to wait for nozzle temp to drop below 45°C before shutting down power. somehow the automation determined that this check was false (since 205>45) and then decided to shut the damn thing down anyway (see yellow outline on the step below, same timestamp). so somehow my understanding of HA automations must be completely off...
I've now changed it to simply wait for 30 min after print finishes, then checking whether the status is idle, then killing power... which will probably kill power in the middle of printing next time I do two prints back to back.

edit: that thing above goes directly against HA documentation:

If the result of a condition is false, the action will stop there so any service calls after that condition will not be executed.

 

[eizbaer]

SPEAKING OF MATTER

edit: lock can't be re-added to either HA or apple home either. it just fails without any meaningful error message. good shit.

decided to revisit this. didn't do anything except put a HomePod mini right next to the lock. same firmware on the lock. newer versions of HA & matter, but they don't address this at all in any way... but it added back onto the network just fine. what the shit? oh well... better not ask any questions.

thinking about making myself a little DIY weather station using one of my ESPs with whatever Bosch temperature, humidity, pressure sensor thing I have lying around and putting this tip bucket aliexpress special thing on it for rain (basically it closes a contact every time the bucket tips, i.e. it's collected a few ml of water). I don't know why I'd need it, but that's pretty much true for most home automation stuff, right?

 

[eizbaer]

I skipped the solar stats for now, because that somehow felt boring,

ok then, boring stats pages added, because why not? may add daily kWh from the roof to the solar page as well... so far so good. the animated icons up front will change according to the status (i.e. turn into a night sky when power falls below 250W (rather randomly chosen) and the grid arrow will change direction and turn red on import):