Home Assistant + NFC + Windmill.dev

Goal

I wanted to see how easy it would be to be able to scan a NFC chip and persist this to a DB for knowing when we put my son to bed or when you drive your car.

I didn’t take it to the extent of writing to the DB, but what I did find is using Windmill.dev cloud hosted along with HomeAssistant’s (HASS) NFC reading was very easy.

TLDR §

Don’t mount dbus when running on a Ubuntu host.

What Didn’t Work §

I was getting bluetooth errors and HASS wouldn’t start up successfully??

• https://community.home-assistant.io/t/2022-9-causing-issues-with-my-bluetooth-and-devices/458398/30
• https://community.home-assistant.io/t/help-with-bluetooth-initialisation-after-most-recent-update/541278

I’m assuming this was caused by mounting dbus, see below

Steps I took §

The docker compose in their docs didn’t work for me:

version: '3'
services:
  homeassistant:
    container_name: homeassistant
    image: "ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable"
    volumes:
      - /PATH_TO_YOUR_CONFIG:/config
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      - /run/dbus:/run/dbus:ro
    restart: unless-stopped
    privileged: true
    network_mode: host

So I after searching around and to make my life easier I went with this to get hosting working:

volumes:  
  homeassistant:  
  
services:   
  homeassistant:  
    image: ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable  
    environment:  
      - TZ=US/Eastern  
    ports:  
      - 8123:8123  
    volumes:  
      - homeassistant:/config 
    restart: unless-stopped  

A few things

1. A volume isn’t needed to my knowledge, I just used it in my shotgun approach trying to fix things and kept it
2. I thought it was a version issue for a while and pinned to a particular version, but that wasn’t it, stable is fine
3. Hardcode TZ in my shotgun approach, probably not required, list of TZs
4. The privilege, networking, and port exposing just didn’t work. I don’t if or why these are required. I didn’t look it up. My example is working fine for
5. Do not mount dbus, that was the root issue
6. The initial create account UI didn’t work, the create button was disabled. You can fix by editing the button html via dev tools
7. Had issues with the webhook format, firstly need to edit the configuration.yaml file: 1. Get into the container docker exec -it <YOUR_CONTAINER_NAME> bash 2. vi configuration.yaml (they put you in the config directory automatically, this is nice) 3. Example config below 4. Look at your container logs for errors, I noticed I was getting 415 errors and that helped me know I needed to set a header and format the body correctly

Tangent

I thought about HASS cloud (nabu casa). When I go off wi-fi I’ll need a solution to talk to my instance. I think the 2 easiest options are HASS cloud and Cloudflare tunnels (2023-09-06 Cloudflare Zero Trust Tunnel Setup). Since I was just exploring I didn’t take it this far and test. It will be easy to test, I think, by sitting at my desk, scanning a NFC, and taking my phone off wi-fi to test over cellular

Example webhook to Windmill:

default_config:
frontend:                                                                  
  themes: !include_dir_merge_named themes                                  
automation: !include automations.yaml                                      
script: !include scripts.yaml                                              
scene: !include scenes.yaml                                                
rest_command:                                                              
  windmill_troy_sleep:                                                     
    url: "https://app.windmill.dev/api/w/lkat/jobs/run_wait_result/p/u/lanekatris/troy_put_to_sleep?token=<YOUR_SECRET_TOKEN>&payload=e30%3D"       
    method: post                                                           
    headers:                                                               
      content-type: 'application/json'                                     
    payload: '{}' 

Warning

I don’t see a good way to see existing webhooks? I don’t know how to delete existing as well, I can’t find the token I created either…