Home Assistant waters my plants
2 days ago
- #home-automation
- #home-assistant
- #irrigation
- Author's first foray into home automation with Home Assistant (HA) for plant irrigation.
- Motivation stems from a love for cooking and sharing food, combined with a nerdy interest in technology.
- Requirements for the irrigation system: simple, safe, cheap, extendible, observable, unsupervised, and cloud-independent.
- Chose Beelink EQ14 mini PC for HA, overkill but future-proof for projects like a media server.
- Selected Link-Tap Q1 4-zone unit for water control, compatible with local MQTT server for HA integration.
- Installed Proxmox on Beelink, then HA as a VM for USB passthrough (e.g., Zigbee transceiver).
- Set up MQTT broker in Proxmox, connected Link-Tap for local communication with HA.
- Created HA automations for irrigation based on weather forecasts and push notifications.
- Added Zigbee sensors (climate, soil moisture) with SONOFF ZBDongle-P, facing mesh reliability issues.
- Remote access to HA via Cloudflare tunnels and WARP VPN, with Zero Trust security.
- Proxmox backups set up; troubleshooting NVME deep sleep issues on Beelink.
- Future plans: media server, energy sensors for solar panels, improve Zigbee mesh, expand irrigation.