Home Assistant

I’ve had a Polycom VVX 500 “business media phone” on my desk since 2016 and have only used it for making phone calls since then. However this series of Polycom VVX phones also has a built in limited-capability web browser. The phone can display a non interactive web page on it’s idle screen and an interactive page that’s accessible through the phone’s “Applications” menu.

On a side note, I think I’ve been running a VOIP PBX for personal or business use, more or less continuously since 2006. Starting with open source systems based on Asterisk, then FreeSWITCH and then in 2019 I migrated to a proprietary 3CX Phone System. The best part for me about 3CX has been that it’s painless to configure and keep up to date.

Sometime early last year I replaced my SmartThings home automation hub with a Home Assistant VM running on an Intel NUC.

Not long after that I converted my Envirosense boards (see previous post) to run the ESPHome firmware and started scraping Prometheus metrics from Home Assistant.

There was one thing I wasn’t happy about with my original design. The PIR sensor was frequently showing false positive motion events.
This seems to have gotten worse with the switch to the ESPHome firmware. It appears to be a known issue that these HC-SR501 modules are easily triggered by Wifi interference.