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:
- Specifically made for ESPHome devices - no other devices required;
- Single daemon or something PHP/Python/Node that you can setup manually with a few systemd units;
- Connects to the ESPHome devices, logs the data and shows a dashboard with it;
- 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.
Node Red.
I run nodered within Homeassistant in a vm on one of my nucs, I do all of my actual automation in there and homeassistant is just an IO layer for zigbee and bluetooth stuff.
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.
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.
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.