Table of Contents

Home Assistant

Home Assistant controls parts of the physical hackerspace, including ceiling lights, Zigbee devices, WLED installations, media/cast devices, and related automations.

Access

Web

Pi

Talk to @kfh or @sjn who have SSH access, and they can add your key. The IP address is bound to a Docker container, so it won't help to just add the key to any OS user.

The Pi takes a long time to boot up after a power cycle, around 5 minutes.

NetBox

Known mismatch to verify physically:

Hardware

Home Assistant runs on a Raspberry Pi in the rack with the audio gear.

Zigbee devices, like the IKEA lights and buttons, run through a Zigbee stick that's plugged directly into the Pi's GPIO headers. deCONZ, with the Phoscon interface, is used as bridge between Zigbee stick and the Home Assistant runtime.

Software

As of 2026-06-21:

Important integrations and add-ons:

Areas

Configured Home Assistant areas:

Operational Checks

Basic checks:

Useful UI pages:

Current State Notes

2026-06-26

KFH: Tried poking at the controller through the UI a bit, this seems to have been the fix for the plugs:

- In Hassio: restart the DeConz plugin - Open up the DeConz dashboard - Disconnect and re-connect the plugs that were missing (the plug itself, not its load) - For the Matelight plug that didn't come back up: trigger pairing in DeConz and then disconnecting and re-connecting it

All four plugs appear to be live now, and everything turns off and on with the button as is supposed to.

As of 2026-06-21, Home Assistant had many unavailable entities. This does not necessarily mean Home Assistant itself is broken, but it is useful context when debugging devices or automations.

Largest unavailable groups:

Pending updates at that time:

No pending Home Assistant Core, Supervisor, or Home Assistant OS update was observed at that time.

Backups

Home Assistant has backup entities configured.

As of 2026-06-21:

Check backup configuration from the Home Assistant UI before relying on it for recovery.

Debug

Powercycle

We've had issues with lights bouncing between modes and turning off randomly. The current theory is that new lights get stuck in a weird split-brain state when added through deCONZ. A reboot of the entire device seems to fix this.

Update: Eirik and Deburd found that the reboot was just after OTA happens. So we tracked it to https://github.com/dresden-elektronik/deconz-ota-plugin/issues/37, where unfortunately this git issue had no solution when we checked. However, we turned off OTAU in the DeCONZ VNC app, and the power cycles stopped. We also turned off OTAU in the phoscon app settings, so that may also have fixed the problem. Anyhow, disabling OTAU in one of the places seems to have fixed the issue.

Lightbulb naming convention

Our six main ceiling lamps each have four bulbs. The lamps are numbered `1` through `6` in clockwise order around the room.

Within each lamp, the bulbs are named `A` through `D`.

Use this naming when matching Home Assistant entities to physical bulbs, for example `1A`, `1B`, `1C`, `1D`, up to `6A`, `6B`, `6C`, `6D`.

Maintenance Notes

Before cleaning up devices or entities:

Likely cleanup areas:

Recovery

If Home Assistant is down:

  1. Check power to the Raspberry Pi in the audio rack.
  2. Wait several minutes after power cycling before assuming boot failed.
  3. Check network reachability to `10.10.3.115`.
  4. Check the switch port documented in NetBox.
  5. Use `hackerpass hassio.local` for login credentials.
  6. If the UI is reachable, check Repairs, Updates, Backups, and Devices & services before making changes.

Files

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