Home Automation

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Discussion about general home automation ideas and projects, home automation protocols like Z-wave, Zigbee, Matter, etc, and home automation software and hubs like HomeSeer, Home Assistant, OpenHAB, Homey.

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Repurposing an Animus Heart (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Way back at the beginning of my figuring out home automation, I bought a Animus Heart.

It's ok but it's extremely limited and the UI is terribly sluggish and unwieldy, so I'd like to replace the OS with Home Assistant instead.

I have reason (my router recognising it as a such when it crashed) to believe that on the inside it's just a Raspberry Pi with some added bells and whistles.

Has anyone tried this? Is this feasible?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Assuming you've done a cursory Google search on modding these things and came up dry, I might start by physically opening up the case and seeing if there's anything recognizable inside. With luck, there may just be a straight up Pi board in there, although it could also be a custom board with a compute module or something else entirely

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Correct assumption yeah, the product is unfortunately not very widespread, so there isn't much about it, let alone about jailbreaking it.

Physically opening and checking it sounds indeed like the next step, I was hoping to get a more definite answer from someone who was there before, but i guess that will have to be me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For future users stumbling upon this:

I have investigated further, and it is indeed a raspberry pi-like board.

It comes with its OS on a microSD, so it's very easy to tinker without risking much.

I have been able to boot raspbian for Pi Zero 2 W on it, and i'm now testing with a home assistant install.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Update 2: Home assistant from the normal raspberry pi SD flasher worked like a charm out of the box.

It's basically just a custom raspberry pi board with some integrated antennas and apparently a temperature and humidity sensor included.

That's it, everything else went fine too, overall a strong purchase.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

This seems very interesting. But I have never worked with raspberry, can you plesse help me a bit more wirh some steps how to get started to transform my Heart to a HA raspberryPi please🙏