This is the configuration attempt that finally yielded good results. With the assistance of various videos, I have built a few dashboards including a tablet dashboard for my bedroom. It is primitive but it has several light switches and some indoor and outdoor temperatures. I think this was the effort that got me over the learning curve hump.

Integrations, devices and entities relate to manufacturing providers, their devices, and the attributes of those devices. Dashboards can have multiple views witch are simply a group of dashboards. Dashboard (views) contain cards that are a group entities that show values or states with the option to change the state. For instance a temperature entity simply shows the temperature. A lamp entity can indicate whether it is on or off and has the ablity to change the state such as with a toggle switch.

Next Up

It’s time for a todo list. I have a bunch of ideas running around in my head and I’m afraid they’ll take off and not come back.

Backup

I have a big enough investment so far that I need to save what I’ve done. This is an excellent how-to for backing up VMs. I backed up all my VMs in short order. I’ll delete and restore a test VM to validate the procedure.

I’m mostly concerned about a hard drive failure. I think the procedure will be to install ProxMox from scratch then restore all the VMs from the backup drive. I suppose this means defining the backup device prior to restoring the VMs.

Dashboards

I’m anxious to customize dashboards for each tablet kiosk in the house as well as my smart phone and the kitchen monitor which was Magic Mirror. I also need to get Fully Browser Plus on each tablet. I want to get to know and use HACS Frontends Mini-graph-card, Mushroom, Stack In Card, Swipe Card, Button-card and Card-mod.

There are a handful of YouTubers that publish really good tutorials for Home Assistant. Mark Watt is one of them. I have been using his tutorials to build a dashboard for a mobile phone. I started with this one and moved on to part 2. His video on integrating Alexa devices with Alexa Media Player is a good one. I’m hoping this will help, too.

This video on custom button cards is worth a look.

I have a Fire HD 8 tablet acting up and I’m going to start from scratch using Aaron’s Make It Work video. It uses the Fire Toolbox from XDA Developers and some custom Home Assistant scripts from xstrex. The first step is to do a factory reset on the Fire HD. Avoid registering it with Amazon by selecting a network, cancelling before entering passwork, then skipping registration.

Home Assistant Templates

As I struggle to build dashboards, I learned that templates were a valuable Home Assistant tool. Jeff at SlackerLabs has a great tutorial.

Offline Smart Home

I read an article that discussed issues that concern me and that I want to address. A lot of the devices I use are manufactured in China and they call home frequently. In particular, I would like to implement my Tuya devices using the Local Tuya HACS Integration. I need to investigate how to make my other devices work independent of an internet connection.

Wyze Cameras and RTSP

Wyzecam video is not available to Home Assistant although other attributes are. This amounts to waiting and hoping that a full integration will eventually be available or…

Blink cameras are also not well integrated with Home Assistant. My Reolink video doorbell, maybe. It look like Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) is really friendly with HA. My WyzeCam V2s and WyzeCam Pan can be flashed with RTSP firmware and here are instructions. Here are Ed’s (Smart Home Junkie) instructions for adding RTSP cameras using WebRTC. Mark Watt might also have some helpful ideas.

Proxmox

Implement proxmoxbackup plan and resolve error:
read-only proxmox system.

Routine for when I leave the house and arrive home.

Meross Integration

Meross devices are added to Home Assistant through a HACS integration. I have four plugs (MSS10), an outdoor duplex plug (MSS620) and a garage door opener (MSG100) from Meross. In order for HA to discover all my Meross devices, I removed them using the Meross mobile app and re-added them. One report suggested removing them using an iPhone, which I did, but I don’t think that mattered.

Once the devices were re-added, HA discovered them but required configuration. Device key was required and articles suggested getting them from the Meross Cloud. It wasn’t obvious, but I had to submit the updated configuration missing the device key. Then, I was prompted to retrieve the device key from the cloud. This was successful although I had to restart HA a couple of times to clear other errors.

Node-RED

These instructions from XDA should get me started.