Fix It 'Til It's Broke

A poorly designed WP blog


The joys of homelabbing

https://youtube.com/watch?v=AbSehcT19u0%3Fsi%3DRhg9BF3TpapHHRxw

I have an upcoming project to add some insulation into the attic of our addition. The previous owners added on this portion of the house, and did a lot of things poorly. But very few people have hard numbers to backup their claims. Mostly it’s just, “I spent $1,800 upgrading my attic insulation, and it was totally worth it! This room was cold in the winter, and now it’s noticeably less cold!”

So I want to lay some insulation.

This requires a bit of data, from a new z-wave temperature/humidity monitor that I bout about a week ago.

The monitor has some slick history/graphing capability in Home Assistant (to be fair, this is HA functionality, not specific to this sensor), which wasn’t working (I had a Debian VM, with a handful of modules cobbled together with docker-compose)

I couldn’t get it to work in Home Assitant without some serious re-work in my compose file with modules that I hadn’t really used before. So I decided to migrate it into a new VM using Home Assistant OS (HAOS).

HAOS isn’t strictly setup for Proxmox, so you have to do some magic to import it. I did find one guide, which was outdated.

I finally got it imported and HAOS wouldn’t boot, because it is setup to use UEFI, but somehow doesn’t want secure boot. There was very little documentation for this.

Finally got that running, and the z-wave USB hub in my server is setup with a S0 and S2 key for encrypting traffic to devices. But my measly docker container implementation didn’t have that stored anywhere I could find, at least not human readable, so wouldn’t import.

So I had to factory reset the dongle and generate new keys, but the one I bought doesn’t have a button to factory reset (Zooz ZST10 700, do not buy). So I had to download some software (and make an account with Silicon Labs, who I’m sure have already sent me spam e-mails) to be able to do that.

All is right with the world now. I have HAOS up and running with functional USB passthrough in PVE, all my z-wave devices re-imported, and I’m slowly building up my 48 hours of temp/humidity data.

To do:

  • Continue logging data
  • Mentally prepare for putting fiberglass into an attic in the Southern heat
  • Write a bad amazon review for my cheap chinese z-wave hub
  • Create a tutorial for getting HAOS working in proxmox (is that seriously such a niche that it doesn’t exist yet?!)
  • Go see that man about that horse, which I was supposed to be doing between working from home today and am now late on