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Home Assistant

Home Assistant — camera feeds, solar monitoring, weather

Home Assistant OS runs as a virtual machine on pve2, providing a unified dashboard for security cameras, solar monitoring, and home automation — all self-hosted with no cloud dependencies.

Architecture

graph LR
    subgraph pve2["pve2 (Proxmox)"]
        HAOS["Home Assistant OS<br/>VM 200"]
    end
    subgraph pve1["pve1 (Proxmox)"]
        Frigate["Frigate NVR<br/>LXC"]
    end
    subgraph Cloud["Cloud APIs"]
        FoxESS["FoxESS Cloud"]
        Tigo["Tigo Solar"]
    end

    Frigate -- "MQTT" --> HAOS
    FoxESS -- "REST API" --> HAOS
    Tigo -- "REST API" --> HAOS
    HAOS -- "Dashboard" --> Browser["Browser"]

VM Deployment

Home Assistant OS is deployed using the community Proxmox helper script, which automates the VM creation with optimal settings.

VM Specifications:

Setting Value
VM ID 200
IP <HOMEASSISTANT-IP> (DHCP reservation)
VLAN Management (10)
RAM 4 GB
CPU 2 cores (host passthrough)
Disk 32 GB (write-back cache)
Machine q35
OS Home Assistant OS 17.0

Installation:

bash -c "$(wget -qLO - https://github.com/community-scripts/ProxmoxVE/raw/main/vm/haos-vm.sh)"

Accept defaults during the wizard. The script creates a q35 VM with EFI boot and optimal settings for HAOS.

VLAN Tagging

If your Proxmox host is already on the target VLAN as an untagged/native VLAN, do not add a VLAN tag to the VM's network interface. Double-tagging will prevent the VM from getting an IP address. Only add a VLAN tag if the Proxmox bridge carries multiple VLANs as tagged traffic.

After boot, create a DHCP static reservation in OPNsense for the VM's MAC address to ensure a consistent IP.

Initial Configuration

  1. Access the web UI at http://<HOMEASSISTANT-IP>:8123
  2. Create your admin account
  3. Set your home location and timezone
  4. Disable analytics (FUTO principle — no telemetry)

MQTT Broker (Mosquitto)

MQTT connects Frigate NVR to Home Assistant, enabling camera entity discovery and event-driven automations.

Installation:

  1. Go to Settings → Apps → search Mosquitto broker → Install → Start
  2. Create a dedicated MQTT user: Settings → People → Users → Add User
    • Set as local only and non-admin
  3. The broker listens on port 1883 (MQTT) and 1884 (WebSocket)

Adding the MQTT integration:

After starting Mosquitto, HA auto-discovers it. Go to Settings → Devices & services → Integrations and configure the auto-discovered MQTT entry.

Frigate Integration

Frigate communicates with Home Assistant over MQTT, automatically registering camera entities.

Frigate side — update config.yml:

mqtt:
  enabled: true
  host: <HOMEASSISTANT-IP>
  port: 1883
  user: mqtt
  password: "<your-mqtt-password>"

YAML and Special Characters

If your MQTT password contains #, you must wrap it in quotes. In YAML, # starts a comment — without quotes, everything after # is silently discarded. This causes authentication failures that produce no error in Frigate's logs, making it extremely difficult to diagnose.

Home Assistant side — install via HACS:

  1. Install HACS (Home Assistant Community Store):
    • Install the Terminal & SSH app from Settings → Apps
    • Run: curl -sfSL https://get.hacs.xyz | bash -
    • Restart HA, then add HACS as an integration and link your GitHub account
  2. In HACS, search and download Frigate Integration
  3. Restart HA
  4. Add the integration: Settings → Devices & services → Add Integration → Frigate
  5. Enter your Frigate URL: http://<FRIGATE-IP>:5000

All cameras are auto-discovered and appear as entities (e.g., camera.doorbell, camera.front_camera).

Verifying the MQTT connection:

Frigate does not log MQTT connections. To verify the link is working, check the Mosquitto broker logs in HA under Settings → Apps → Mosquitto broker → Log tab. You should see a line like:

New client connected from <FRIGATE-IP> as frigate (p2, c1, k60, u'mqtt').

You can also test manually:

mosquitto_pub -h <HOMEASSISTANT-IP> -p 1883 -u mqtt -P "password" -t test -m "hello"

Frigate Lovelace Card

For live camera feeds on the dashboard, install the Frigate Card frontend component.

  1. In HACS → Frontend tab → search Frigate Card → Download
  2. Hard refresh your browser: Ctrl+Shift+R
  3. Create a new dashboard: Settings → Dashboards → Add Dashboard
  4. Edit the dashboard → Start with empty dashboard

Add individual camera cards (one per camera, not a carousel):

type: custom:frigate-card
cameras:
  - camera_entity: camera.doorbell
live:
  preload: true

Repeat for each camera entity. This gives a grid layout where all feeds are visible simultaneously.

Solar Monitoring — FoxESS Cloud

The FoxESS integration pulls data from the FoxCloud API, providing real-time solar generation, battery state of charge, grid import/export, and home consumption data.

Installation:

  1. In HACS, search and download Foxess Ha (by macxq)
  2. Restart HA

This integration cannot be added from the UI — it requires manual YAML configuration.

Get your credentials from FoxCloud:

  1. Log into foxesscloud.com
  2. Go to your profile → API Management → generate an API key
  3. Navigate to your inverter details page — the deviceID is the UUID in the URL (between %22 characters)
  4. The deviceSN is the serial number shown on the inverter details page

Add to configuration.yaml:

sensor:
  - platform: foxess
    apiKey: <your-foxess-api-key>
    deviceID: <your-device-uuid>
    deviceSN: <your-inverter-serial>

Install the File editor app (Settings → Apps) for easy YAML editing. After saving, restart HA.

Key sensors created:

Sensor Description
sensor.foxess_solar_power Current solar generation (kW)
sensor.foxess_bat_soc Battery state of charge (%)
sensor.foxess_load_power Home consumption (kW)
sensor.foxess_grid_consumption_power Grid import (kW)
sensor.foxess_feedin_power Grid export (kW)
sensor.foxess_energy_generated Today's generation (kWh)
sensor.foxess_energy_generated_month Monthly generation (kWh)
sensor.foxess_energy_generated_cumulative Lifetime generation (kWh)

Note

Sensors will show "unknown" at night when the inverter is in standby. Data populates during daylight hours when the panels are producing.

Solar Monitoring — Tigo

Tigo provides panel-level monitoring through its optimizer hardware, giving per-panel performance data.

Requirements: Tigo EI Premium subscription (required for API access).

Installation:

  1. In HACS → three dots (⋮) → Custom repositories
  2. Add: https://github.com/Bobsilvio/tigosolar-online → Category: Integration
  3. Search for Tigo in HACS → Download
  4. Restart HA
  5. Settings → Devices & services → Add Integration → Tigo
  6. Enter your Tigo account credentials

Key sensors created:

Sensor Description
sensor.tigo_current_power Current DC power (W)
sensor.tigo_daily_energy Today's generation (kWh)
sensor.tigo_ytd_energy Year-to-date generation (kWh)
sensor.tigo_lifetime_energy Lifetime generation (kWh)

Unified Dashboard

The GoozLab dashboard provides a single-pane-of-glass view combining security cameras, solar monitoring, weather, and system metrics.

Dashboard layout:

Row Cards
Top 4x Frigate camera feeds (individual cards, not carousel)
Middle Solar gauge + Battery gauge
Bottom Energy overview + Generation stats + Tigo panel data + Weather

Example cards:

Solar generation gauge:

type: gauge
entity: sensor.foxess_solar_power
name: Solar Generation
unit: kW
min: 0
max: 4
severity:
  green: 2
  yellow: 1
  red: 0

Battery state of charge:

type: gauge
entity: sensor.foxess_bat_soc
name: Battery
unit: "%"
min: 0
max: 100
severity:
  green: 50
  yellow: 20
  red: 0

Energy overview (entities card):

type: entities
name: Energy Overview
entities:
  - entity: sensor.foxess_solar_power
    name: Solar Power
  - entity: sensor.foxess_load_power
    name: Home Load
  - entity: sensor.foxess_grid_consumption_power
    name: Grid Import
  - entity: sensor.foxess_feedin_power
    name: Grid Export
  - entity: sensor.foxess_bat_charge_power
    name: Battery Charging
  - entity: sensor.foxess_bat_discharge_power
    name: Battery Discharging
  - entity: sensor.foxess_bat_soc
    name: Battery SoC

Lessons Learned

YAML comment trap: The # character in YAML starts a comment. If passwords or values contain #, they must be quoted. This caused a silent MQTT authentication failure that took significant debugging — Frigate showed no errors, but the password was being truncated at the #.

HAOS is minimal: The Home Assistant OS VM does not include common tools like wget. Use curl instead for any command-line downloads.

Double-tagging breaks networking: If your Proxmox host bridge already carries the target VLAN as untagged traffic, adding a VLAN tag to the VM's network interface causes double-tagging. The VM will show "No address" until the tag is removed.

HA 2026.x renames: Add-ons are now called "Apps" in the 2026.x release. The auto-generated Overview dashboard doesn't support custom cards — create a dedicated dashboard instead.

Frigate MQTT is silent: Frigate does not log successful MQTT connections. Always verify from the broker side (Mosquitto logs) rather than expecting Frigate to confirm the connection.