Well, it’s been 3 months without any posts. I bought an August Pro smart lock and started a post about integrating it with home assistant. It started off alright and then went off the rails and I lost all momentum. So now, 3 months and 6 HA updates later I suspect if I update HA there will be breaking changes. I’m hedging my bets a bit and setting up my spare Pi3 with a fresh install of Hasbian. I’ll transfer over my configurations and see what breaks there. That way I can fix the errors on the spare Pi and once I figure out all of the changes I need to make, I should be able to update the “production” pi and make the changes with minimal downtime. That’s the plan anyway, let see how it plays out:

Fresh install of Hasbian – HA version 0.65.6

Once the Pi finished booting up and installing HA, I was greeted with a fresh installation of HA 0.65.6 which auto-discovered my 2 chromecasts, 2 google home minis, and the Ikea Tradfri configurator. After filling out the configurator for the Tradfri, it now showed my lamps and closet light.

I copied over all of the .yaml files from the other Pi and was greeted with a bunch of errors. Turns out most of them were related to my SSL cert. After commenting out those sections under http: in the configuration file, I got a “Configuration valid!” from the configurator. So it looks like nothing really broke in the last 3 months, so let’s try to update on the production server.

Upgrade the Production Pi

Well, it showed as a clean upgrade on the terminal, but now the GUI won’t load… Not really sure why. Tried disabling the SSL like above, that didn’t seem to do anything. Restarted HA a few times, no change. Rebooted the Pi, nothing. I checked the home-assistant.log file. It updates with every restart/reboot, but only gives the error “Setup of recorder is taking over 10 seconds.”. I think I’ll give it a half hour and come back, maybe it’s still trying to doing something in the background and I keep interrupting it.

Yeah, that did it. After giving it another 15 minutes without rebooting or restarting, the GUI was back. Lesson learned… be patient when doing updates.

Cool,  so now that I’m updated to the latest and greatest (from 0.60.0), I’ll give the August Pro smart lock another go. Luckily for me, HA has officially started supporting August locks so maybe this time the integration will go better! 🙂

 

1 Comment

  1. Lawr

    Reply

    I just went through the process of adding the August Pro to my HA (hassio) via Z Wave. Like may other steps in the HA process I’ve made every mistake in the book and learned way more than I wanted to about a lot of related and technologies. I find this experience with HA a lot like troubleshooting USB issues with old Windows PC’s. One part knowledge, one part magic, a lot of removing and re-adding and just when you give up you happen to look over your shoulder and OMG!! it’s working. The thing that has hurt me the most with various components is my inexperience. Some of the missteps I made early on didn’t trip me up until I added the August lock. For example I added my Zwave door chime (my first inclusion) via the Aotec USB Stick and it worked (mostly) properly in HA so I first added my August Pro using the Aotec and August inclusion instructions. Hence my reference back to the Win/USB issues where you can mostly see a device but it doesn’t work properly and you add this uninstall that, remove the MB Ports, redetect etc. Yesterday I basically factory reset my Aotec Stick, factory reset my Chime, Factory reset my August Pro, then add the August pro using only the HA Z wave GUI (add secure node) and the August Android app. Worked properly. Then I added back my August connect (for the August App) and added back the chime (inclusion) using the HA gui and the Chimes inclusion instructions. Works perfectly. Looks like there are two install paths for a lot of options in HA: Know what to do and when to ignore competing instructions, or long painful tinkering (see Sonos threads that I’ve had the pleasure of reading and finally resolving). Reach out if I can help.

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