I have long been looking for a way to add a light in my son’s bedroom to try and teach him to stay in bed until it’s morning. I’ve seen many clocks that give a different colour for sleep and it’s ok to wake up times, but they were too “childish”. Also they’re all “dumb” in that the time is not synced so I’d have to adjust the time every so often (at the very least twice a year as daylight saving changes)

I also wanted a way to be able to set a different time in the weekend.

By this stage I’m actually thinking of building a lamp with some of the LED Strips leftovers I have  from past projects with a WeMos D1 Mini Pro. I ended up doing just that.

The only thing I needed was something to put the LED strip in that would look ok.

I thought the IKEA GRÖNÖ would be a perfect candidate. Plus at £6 it’s rather inexpensive.

The Arduino code is pretty much the one i used for the Conservatory LED Strips though there are only 8 LEDs to control. It’s still not finished as I want to add an ultrasonic sensor to allow anyone to turn it on without needing access to Home-Assistant, but for now, here is how it looks:

Lamp – Off

Lamp – Inside

Lamp – Blue

So I’m still on Ubuntu 16.04, and from version 0.65, Home-Assistant.io now needs Python 3.5.3 or later to run.
Issue is, by default Ubuntu 16.04 only goes up to Python 3.5.1.
I can update to 3.6 but ran into backwards compatibility issues. So I thought this would be a good excuse/opportunity to try Docker.

And my oh my is it awesome. No need to worry about any prerequisites, it takes care of everything that’s needed to run HA. It also means updating and downgrading HA is a breeze.

Only issue I’ve seen so far is that the python scripts that I have running to update some of HA’s devices no longer work as they use libraries that aren’t installed in HA’s docker. I looked at a few options but ended up moving them completely out of HA and having them publish on MQTT instead of interacting with HA directly.

Moving scripts to communicate via MQTT also means that should I lose internet connection, my HA instance will keep updating as I’m not attempting to connect out and back via HTTPS.

I’ve already added InfluxDB and Grafana on Docker and I use Portainer to manage it all, I’m now planning on moving other apps to docker (Plex, WordPress, OpenALPR, etc)

Finally I use docker-compose instead of docker run to launch my containers, it’s easier to manage all options and means I don’t need a separate bash file to launch each container. Here’s the container I use for HA, InfluxFB and Grafana: