I’ve been playing with HA (docker) now for a few months. I have Google assistant set up, i have my MQTT server working, node-red docker etc.
I have some WLED devices, some Tasmota-flashed switches / power monitors, and I’ll be ordering some shelly dimmers if the reviews are good once the usual youtubers receive them.
So there seems to be many ways to achieve the same outcome with HA and with devices etc. and i’m not sure what paths to take.
I’m ready now to start getting serious with HA, which will mean removing all the ‘test’ devices etc that i’ve configured whilst I learnt the basics.
So far, i’ve used tasmota HA auto-detection (SetOption19 1). What’s your view on this? Should I use it for all devices or manually add each device in the *.yaml file? I can see benefit to doing it manually in yaml, but looking for advice. Some devices need *.yaml configurartion as they don’t support auto-detection. I’ve got a bunch or prevously auto-deleted devices that I now need to delete as they are no longer named what they were detected as etc.
Also, in Tasmota, do you usually set your topics to the device name, or the mac address? What’s the best choice?
And the frontend - since the whole UI isn’t drag/drop/click-click done and everything can’t be done without yaml, are you using *.yaml config files to configure the GUI, or are you using the GUI editor as much as possible and then manually editing the “raw config editor” to tidy up?
What is the recommended course to take for this stuff? As there’s 2 ways (GUI and *.YAML) i’m just not sure which path to take, and don’t want to redo everything in a year or two.