this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
12 points (71.4% liked)

Selfhosted

38789 readers
366 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Hello,

My IoT/Home Automation needs are centered around custom built ESPHome devices and I currently have them all connected to a HA instance and things work fine.

Now, I like HA's interface and all the sugar candy, however I don't like the massive amounts of resources it requires and the fact that the storage usage keeps growing and it is essentially a huge, albeit successful, docker clusterfuck.

Is there any alternative dashboard that just does this:

  1. Specifically made for ESPHome devices - no other devices required;
  2. Single daemon or something PHP/Python/Node that you can setup manually with a few systemd units;
  3. Connects to the ESPHome devices, logs the data and shows a dashboard with it;
  4. Runs offline, doesn't go into 24234 GitHub repositories all the time and whatnot.

Obviously that I'm expecting more manual configuration, I'm okay with having to edit a config file somewhere to add a device, change the dashboard layout etc. I also don't need the ESPHome part that builds and deploys configurations to devices as I can do that locally on my computer.

Thank you.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I started out that way, but I've moved to doing most of it in HA directly since they massively improves the UI. I still use NR for complicated stuff though. I've recently started using Pyscript for modbus integrations too.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

The UI is definitely better than it used to be, but nodered can do some more powerful stuff like pulling the html of a devices web ui and parsing data straight from the page when there's no API to use for example. I used to do that for a solar inverter at my last house.

Now I use it to control my AV switcher that distributes video through the house, it has no native homeassistant integration and only supports things like control4 and RTI so I implemented my own control using their REST API and hooked it all up to buttons and selectors in homeassistant. works great.

Also my home theatre receiver has a homeassistant integration but its terrible, so again, I've manually implemented the tcp controls in nodered.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

pulling the html of a devices web ui

I've done something similiar in NR to scrape the CUPS webpage on my desktop and turn on a tasmota plug for the printer when it sees a job waiting in the queue. I wouldn't even try to do that in HA directly. But I wouldn't be surprised if there's an integration somewhere that would do it.