Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Any more info or steps for successfully integrating this in Home Assistant? #1

Open
EagleAye opened this issue Dec 29, 2022 · 12 comments

Comments

@EagleAye
Copy link

I am desperately trying to integrate into HA, and it is quite the uphill battle for someone with little familiarity. Could you go a bit basic and help me out with implementation? Once I have the basics running, I can reverse engineer for my needs, but getting initial setup done is a challenge on this end. ANY help or contact would be greatly appreciated!

@k-harker
Copy link
Owner

I'm be unreachable starting tomorrow and I'll be back after Jan 1 so I'll give you the best I can right now. If you can't get it working I can help you more once I'm back.

I think you might be the first person that's is using this other than me, so I would expect a few things might not work as expected. I'm happy to help fix them if we can determine what's going on. I've been using this integration since my first commit here without any issues. I would recommend that you make sure your pump and lights have labels in the Autelis webpage before you add the device in home assistant. This integration pulls the names for the devices from the Autelis.

In order to install it, what I did is follow the instructions for developing a custom integration. It says that home assistant looks for integrations in ‘/custom_components/‘. I put the files in ‘config/custom_components/autelis_pool‘.

If you're very new to home assistant, the easiest way to do this is the following.

  1. Download the files in this repo
  2. Install the File Editor plugin for home assistant.
  3. Create the directory ‘config/custom_components/autelis_pool‘
  4. Upload the files from this repo into that folder.
  5. Restart home assistant (not sure if this is still necessary)
  6. Go into home assistant settings > devices and integrations.
  7. Click add integration.
  8. Select "Autelis Pool Control"
  9. Enter the hostname/ip of your Autelis.
  10. Enter the password for your Autelis.
  11. Click on submit and it will create the device and hopefully all your pumps and lights will be added correctly as well.
  12. Go to any dashboards and add the devices and try it.

@k-harker
Copy link
Owner

For step 4 you need to make sure the folder structure is the same. You should need to modify any files unless you want to customize the names of the devices.

It looks like I have a separate branch that has changes to pull the names from the Autelis instead of using hard coded names that match my pool setup. You're free to try either the default branch or the branch called get-names-from-controller. You would need to change step one to grab the files from the desired branch in this repo. I believe both are in working order. I'll take a look at merging the branch back to default when I get back.

My setup is this:

  • Switches (allows you to turn these items on and off)
    • for the Pumps
      • Pool
      • Spa
      • Solar Heat
    • for the Aux (e.g. lights) This is where it grabs the names from the Autelis.
  • Sensors for
    • Air Temp
    • Solar Temp
    • Spa Temp
    • Pool Temp
  • Climate for
    • Pool Heat
    • Spa Heat

@EagleAye
Copy link
Author

Thanks SOOO much. I will bang on this today, and keep you posted. Have a great vacation and keep dry.

@EagleAye
Copy link
Author

EagleAye commented Jan 2, 2023 via email

@k-harker
Copy link
Owner

k-harker commented Jan 3, 2023

Ok, try the get-names-from-controller branch again following my instructions from above to copy the files to the custom_components directory. I was able to start up a new instance of Home Assistant in docker and it was able to connect to the Autelis and I was able to control it from there. I'm going to work on getting this merged to master since this seems to work well with pulling the names from the Autelis configuration. I'm not using this branch for my setup yet, but I plan to soon.

I haven't gotten familiar with everything needed to add a custom integration to HACS yet. I will work on that to make it easier for people to install and upgrade, but I'm not expecting to have many updates after this (it looks like Autelis is no longer around).

@k-harker
Copy link
Owner

k-harker commented Jan 3, 2023

I didn't make it clear in my last comment that there were some code changes needed for the latest version of Home Assistant. I had made those changes to my installation but I hadn't committed them here. You should be good if you try going through the steps again with the latest code.

@EagleAye
Copy link
Author

EagleAye commented Jan 3, 2023 via email

@k-harker
Copy link
Owner

k-harker commented Jan 3, 2023

I know it's not the most elegant solution, but you could just add the port on to the end of the host entry. So for example if your port is 8080 and your autelis is at IP 192.168.1.20 you could put this in the host field.

192.168.1.20:8080

I was looking last night at getting this added to HACS. I think that would be the easiest way to have others install it. If you want to post it on ISY, I would be happy to have others use this and help maintain it. I don't have color changing lights or a variable speed pump so those are features in Autelis that I can't really test for example.

@EagleAye
Copy link
Author

EagleAye commented Jan 3, 2023

After re-configuring my Autelis and other items, the integration went in right away, no errors, and is showing 12 entities. I could NOT force it to work on a different port, integration errors out. I will chase logs and perhaps get more info.

I have a VF pump to play with and it integrates with Autelis fairly easy. All you really get from Autelis is pump info, but it is nice to know. Watts, RPM, GPM, Filter %. I can definitely test.

In the Autelis, I found a bug on pump details selection for VS and VF pumps. In setup, if VF pump, you can select VSF pump and all info populates. Since I don't have a VS, I don't know if selecting VS in pump type works. VF (my pump) selection would not work.

I will hit this later and play with it a bit.

This will be an excellent solution for quite a number of people desperately searching for ways to use their now defunct Autelis controller (which works well) and not depend on ISY/Vera receiving the info.

I will keep you posted.

@k-harker
Copy link
Owner

k-harker commented Jan 3, 2023

I just changed my Autelis to 8080 and it worked for me when setting the host like I mentioned above. You might need to delete your Autelis integration (which should delete all your Autelis devices and sensors) and try again. If it shows more than 4 entities for the device it is probably setup correctly.

I'm planning to upgrade my Pentair controller and pump to a variable speed later this year. It doesn't look too hard to add support for that in this integration but I haven't had a need for it yet.

@EagleAye
Copy link
Author

EagleAye commented Jan 5, 2023 via email

@k-harker
Copy link
Owner

k-harker commented Jun 26, 2023

@EagleAye Were you able to make the changes you wanted? If not, maybe you could create a separate issue describing what you want for your VS Pumps and include some status.xml or chem.xml or pumps.xml examples with different settings. If I had that, I could probably make the changes.

I'm going to make a few changes for supporting the battery, and I realized solar heat is not allowing me to differentiate between enabled and heating. It currently shows as Off in home assistant when it starts heating using solar, so I'm going to be making changes to this integration.

I use VS Code to edit the python files, and I use the home assistant docker image to help me test my code changes. I can add some basic instructions for how to develop and test. I use docker only for developing, and I have a separate home assistant install on a raspberry pi that I keep as my working system. On my "production" HA install I have the "file editor" plugin installed that lets me tweak files and configuration, but I don't do the majority of development that way.

HA does take a little bit of getting used to, but once you get the basics of creating dashboards and adding integrations, it gets much easier. I don't have much experience with python (but I am a developer professionally) and I have not liked the python I've used so far. Fortunately, this is the only integration I've needed that wasn't already built.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

2 participants