Hmmm…
@pat you have me thinking now.
I had considered trying to make a Farm Assistant variant of Home Assistant in the past, but was put off for 2 or possibly 3 reasons:
- It would probably be a lot of work for little benefit, mostly re-skinning with an agri theme.
- Home Assistants Development has too many frequent breaking changes making keeping a forked version in line a little more difficult. Also potentially less appealing to perspective users as an IOT solution in a live business use case.
- Lack of necessary skills (But I’ve been working on that one)
I also found someone else actually beat me to it and took this path, but that project seems to have stalled, Farm Assistant needs help - Third party integrations - Home Assistant Community, AgSense Consulting.
But maybe a Node Red module with both flow programming and the dashboard accessible within farmOS would be the simplest way to go and cut out Home Assistant altogether.
In my current setup I now have 2 instances of Node-Red running.
- Node-Red addon in Home Assistant, which is used for everything HA and sensor related including forwarding sensor data to farmOS if necessary.
- On a separate Raspberry Pi I run farmOS, so I also installed Node-Red here and use it for automation within farmOS, connecting farmOS with other API’s, CSV uploading and a notification/calendar synchronization server. I separated it out as there were too many farmOS flows running on my HA instance and its easier to guarantee it is running while farmOS is.
I’m also working on a module to send log update events from farmOS to Node-Red or other services. External notifications, webhooks, MQTT etc - #17 by Farmer-Ed
Edit 1:
A poor MS Paint mockup
Edit 2:
Perhaps with some further development of Node-Red nodes for farmOS this could also make a flow based alternative to creating quick forms and CSV importers more accessible?