From Domoticz to Home Assistant

Lately I’ve been having more and more problems with my Domoticz installation. Attempts to set up a new server failed because I couldn’t transfer the backup of my current server. In the end I set up Monit to at least make sure that Domoticz continues to run, but of course it’s not ideal for a home-automation server.

On the other hand, I heard the increasingly positive voices about Home Assisant (HA). Apparently the frontend has become a lot better and you have to program less and less in YAML to get things done. I decided to install HA on an old laptop I had laying around so I have a console and UPS right away. After some trouble preparing the laptop itself, installing HA was a breeze. The onboarding is indeed a lot better than the last time I tried the software.

Now that I had a working HA installation running, I decided to set up a number of things right away. For example, HA does not write the data it collects to disk, but directly to a MariaDB running on my Synolgy NAS. That way I’m less likely to lose data if something happens to HA. An automatic backup of the files to my NAS should also ensure that I have everything running again quickly if something happens to the laptop.

HA also immediately forwards the data to an InfluxDB that I already had running, so that I can more easily create dashboards in Grafana. And because I already had Philips Hue lighting and Sonos speakers it was easy to integrate those too.

Now it’s time to make a plan to transfer the different parts of Domoticz to HA:

In the near future I will be moving from Domoticz to Home Assistant for each part. Ideally I also want to extract the sensor data from Domoticz and at least store it in InfluxDB as historical data.