My garage temp sensor, running home-assistant-temperature-monitor stopped working several months ago. I didn’t have time to figure it out and then summer hit, when it’s not important since I don’t heat up the garage before I workout. This weekend I finally got around to troubleshooting the problem.

Turned out I needed to install Adafruit_Python_GPIO. I must have updated my code at some point without fully testing, otherwise I’m not sure how any of it worked before. I didn’t investigate that though; I was more concerned with fixing it and doing some improvements. I updated the OS and everything on the Raspberry Pi since it hadn’t been turned on in quite some time.

Earlier this year, another Pi on my network, the one running Home Assistant and Pi-hole, ran out of disk space without warning. I’ve wanted to put in a notification system so it never happens again, so I updated home-assistant-pi to report the disk use % to HA. I added an automation to notify me whenever it’s above 90% for one of my Pis. I also reworked all of the automations in home-assistant-pi to make it easier to configure each time I get a new Pi.

That all took much longer than I expected. Most of the trouble was trying to understand the Jinja template system used in HA and where it can be applied to configurations. I think I’m finally getting the hang of it.

While writing this post, I found an old draft with some other updates to home-assistant-pi I never published. Maybe I never finished and that’s why everything stopped working! Here’s a list of some previous updates:

• Fixed errors causing program to crash.
• It wasn’t reconnecting very well, especially if Home Assistant went away (ex. for a restart after an upgrade). Rewrote how the MQTT connection works.
• Switch from PushBullet to iOS notifications.
• Changed show/hide Home Assistant group automations.

Now that this stuff is running again and I have a better understanding of the Home Assistant automation capabilities, I need to continue the series of posts I planned on home automation. It’s been five and a half months since I published Part 1!