0Home Assistant Tweaks

I’ve made a num­ber of improve­ments to my home assist­ant instance of late and wanted to doc­u­ment what they were

Add ZigBee to sidebar menu

I have a Con­Bee Zig­Bee USB stick but to view the net­work I’ve always had to go in via con­fig­ur­a­tion -> integ­ra­tions. I wanted instead to have a dir­ect link on the main left-hand menu. An art­icle on DigiBlur had most of the info I needed. I adjus­ted the 1 line needed, restar­ted HA and got the desired menu straight away. Just add the fol­low­ing code to you configuration.yaml

panel_custom:
  - name: ha_zha_con
    sidebar_title: ZigBee
    sidebar_icon: mdi:cog-transfer
    js_url: /api/hassio/app/entrypoint.js
    url_path: 'config/zha/visualization'
    embed_iframe: true
    require_admin: true
    config:
      ingress: core_configurator

Switch database to mariadb

This only switches the his­tory data­base and has no risk of break­ing your HA setup. You may well lose your his­tory though — I wanted to get rid of my 4Gig data­base so I choose to delete it before restart­ing so I could start from clean. I fol­lowed a nice guide by lkeays on the HA for­ums. I also wanted to make sure the data­base did­n’t expand out of con­trol again in future so I also tweaked what is kept in the data­base by fol­low­ing a guide by denilsonsa also on the HA for­ums. I ended up adding the fol­low­ing to configuration.yaml (note you do also need to add a couple of addons via the super­visor add-on store so do read the guides linked as you need more than just the code below.

recorder:
  purge_keep_days: 42
  db_url: !secret URL_MariaDB_Thing
  exclude:
    domains:
      - device_tracker
      - media_player
      - uptime
      - time_date
      - worldclock
    entity_globs:
      - sensor.clock*
      - sensor.date*
      - sensor.glances*
      - sensor.load_*m
      - sensor.time*
      - sensor.uptime*
      - sensor.wiser*
    entities:
      - sensor.home_assistant_v2_db
      - sensor.memory_free
      - sensor.memory_use
      - sensor.memory_use_percent
      - sensor.processor_use
      - weather.openweathermap