GreatBlueHeron

joined 1 week ago
 

I built a new house last year and moved in this January. This is my first time living in a house that's air tight enough to have an air exchanger. Through the winter it was fine - I just left it run its own Eco mode and everything seemed good. I'm finding spring really frustrating though - most days are nice and warm and we open windows, most nights are cool and we close the windows. I don't like wasting electricity by running the air exchanger all day when the windows are open.

I've considered window sensors and a smart plug on the air exchanger, but I don't really want to install 13 window sensors.

Are there air quality sensors that are accurate, and reliable, enough for me to turn the air exchanger on whenever the CO2, or whatever it is that make a house feel stuffy, level gets high enough?

My air exchanger is a very basic "builder" model and won't do this itself. It has an air quality sensor and changes the fan level to what it thinks we need, but it won't turn off when we don't need it.

[–] GreatBlueHeron@piefed.ca 2 points 2 days ago

Did you read my post, or just the subject? I'm not asking for help, just sharing an observation - just in case I got a bunch of "me too"s.

I resolved my issue by unplugging and replugging my Zooz USB stick.

[–] GreatBlueHeron@piefed.ca 3 points 2 days ago

It seemed to be a hardware issue - the blue light on the controller was out until I removed and replaced it. It's too much of a coincidence for me though that I just happened to have this hardware issue at the time when the software that uses that hardware was being updated.

I use Vendor/Product ID to access it:

# lsusb
Bus 002 Device 005: ID 10c4:ea60 Silicon Labs CP210x UART Bridge
Bus 002 Device 004: ID 051d:0002 American Power Conversion Uninterruptible Power Supply
Bus 002 Device 006: ID 1a86:55d4 QinHeng Electronics 800 Z-Wave Stick
...


<hostdev mode='subsystem' type='usb' managed='yes'>
      <source>
        <vendor id='0x1a86'/>
        <product id='0x55d4'/>
      </source>
      <address type='usb' bus='0' port='1'/>
    </hostdev>
 

I've been running Home Assistant for about a year now and always installed every update as soon as it's released and never had any issues at all.

Yesterday some time in either the zwave js 15.6.0 or core 2025.6.0 update (I am too complacent and did them both in quick succession without testing anything) I lost my Zooz 800 zwave controller. Reloading HA didn't bring it back. I had unplug and replug the Zooz USB stick and then reload again.

Not a big deal, just sharing FYI.

[–] GreatBlueHeron@piefed.ca 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

I'm not a server admin., just a user. The Lemmy instance I'm on setup a Piefed instance in parallel and is giving users the option to use either, or both. I'm still trying to get my head around the history and the pros/cons of each but for now it seems like I'm switching to Piefed. I imagine that if most users move then the Lemmy instance might get shutdown in the future.

[–] GreatBlueHeron@piefed.ca 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

yeah, I need a TPU - my CPU is 5 generations too old

[–] GreatBlueHeron@piefed.ca 3 points 1 week ago

but not really sure what you are doing?

I want to install one of these in a machine that doesn't have an M.2 slot.

 

This isn't specifically Home Assistant, but so many people seem to be using Frigate with Home Assistant it feels close enough.

I recently got my first camera. I tried ZoneMinder for a while, but have given up - just overwhelmed with false positives for fog, rain, insects etc. and not being able to tune them out. Most people seem to be going Frigate so I'll give that a go.

I don't really want to use a USB TPU (no real reason) and my current server has no Mini PCIe or M.2 slots. I recall seeing people say they had bad experiences with PCIe M.2 adapters.

Does anyone here have any experience to share about any specific adapter?

[–] GreatBlueHeron@piefed.ca 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yes - I should have noted that I'm using "Compact UI" = "Yes - thumbnails only".

I should also add that the current layout has advantages. When scrolling other platforms in "mindless meme mode" it's frustrating to click on a thumbnail expecting to expand the image and instead following a link to an article.

Ideally Image posts and other posts should appear subtly different in the feed - different enough that you know what you're clicking on, but not so different that they interfere with the visual flow of the feed page. I have no design skills and can't suggest how that might be implemented, but I'll know it when I see it :-)

 

Just started using piefed yesterday and something I immediately miss from lemmy is the ability to toggle between All posts or just Unread/Unhidden posts. There's a really convenient spot for the buttons right between the view selection buttons and the topic selection buttons.

 

I've had a bit of a play and configured custom CSS to move the image preview, for Image posts, to the right, rather than centre. What I'd really like is for the preview to be smaller and up, inline with the header text, like the preview image from a Link post. In the attached example, I'd like the 4chan image text to appear similar to the whitehouse logo in the post below it. This would remove a lot of whitespace and condense the whole feed.

This is beyond my CSS ability. Is it even possible with custom CSS on the settings, or would it need a change to the backend?