Adventures in home automation

 Just add these lines to your configuration.yaml file: sensor:   - platform: systemmonitor     resources:       - type: disk_use_percent         arg: /config       - type: memory_use_percent       - type: swap_use_percent       - type: load_1m       - type: load_5m       - type: load_15m       - type: network_in         arg: eth0       - type: network_out         arg: eth0       - type: processor_temperature       - type: last_boot   Then check and reload your YAML configuration by restarting Home Assistant Core. You can find this on the page Developer Tools on the tab YAML. After that you will have sensors f...

Some time ago I decided to try out Home Assistant for the first time, and I have been very pleased with it. My choice for the server machine was the Rapberry Pi 4 running Home Assistant OS. At first, I tried it out with an SD card, but that setup proved to be very unstable. This seems to be the major gripe with most Raspberry Pi installations. Even with the official power supply and a proper branded SD card the system will eventually die, just because of the high amount of writes the SD card has to endure.  In my opinion, a Raspberry Pi running from an SD card is only stable if you can configure the SD card to be read only. That is not possible with Home Assistant, so another storage medium is needed. After the card corrupted for the third time I decided to get a small 256GB USB SSD drive, and with that the system has been very stable indeed.  The installation method for an SSD drive is exactly the same as with an SD card. After flashing the SSD you just plug that in and conne...