hpr_transcripts/hpr4512.txt

Episode: 4512
Title: HPR4512: HomeAssistant - Nmap ("Network Mapper")
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4512/hpr4512.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-11-22 15:16:13

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,512 for Tuesday the 18th of November 2025.
Today's show is entitled Home Assistant End Map Network Mapper.
It is hosted by Rato and is about 37 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is Presence Detection in Home Assistant End More.
Hi, this is your host Rato and this is a show about Home Assistant.
Recorded in June 2025.
I will focus on the application of End Map.
This abbreviation stands for Network Mapper and Network Exploration Tool in Home Assistant.
A bit more context from the main page of End Map.
While End Map is commonly used for security audits,
many systems and network administrators found it useful for routine tasks such as
network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules,
and monitoring host or service uptime.
These are the headings I will talk about today.
Short introduction and why End Map.
My personal automation.
Radiation of Bluetooth, CQP or Wi-Fi.
Enhance my automation.
The co-pilot.
The outro.
So let's get started.
My short introduction and why End Map.
Well, first of all, I would like to bring to you the terminology used within Home Assistant
to you.
When I started 20-23 or so with Home Assistant, I had to watch some videos on the terminology
used and how to weigh on the terminology and what is what for, basically, because for
me it didn't sound sometimes after what I was looking for.
So this time I want to focus on automation and Blueprint.
Notemation is, as the word says, without your interaction, basically, the system should
do something that you expect.
For example, if you walk into a room, the light goes on.
Or if you turn on the TV, the different light goes on or the other light goes off.
Now, there are situations where you may need the same automation for different rooms.
And instead of copying it over from one room to the other, there is a thing called Blueprint
in Home Assistant.
It's the Blueprint you can also share with other users from Home Assistant and other
users from Home Assistant can share it with you.
This is really handy.
Often, you find them in a blog post, in a forum post, and it will lead you mostly to
GitHub Guests page, where you can sometimes, if it is well done, you even have a link
in the forum, and it will do it mostly automatically, and then you get a nice GUI, basically, to
put in all the parameters you need, like which lamp or which light and which sensor and
to combine them and how you would like to have the color of the light, for example.
And this is the thing with automation in Blueprint.
So first, you basically experiment with automations in YAML and such.
You can now a switch between YAML and go back to the visual editor, and we'll go back
to the YAML.
And finally, it is nice to get the Blueprint in case you need it again.
So that's my short introduction for automation in Blueprint.
The next one is why using NMAP, there is the thing about Presence Detection within
Home Assistant.
This can be, well, different Presence Detection, of course, well, one of the Presence Detection
could be somebody at home or not.
I name now the Presence Detection is my PC running or not.
One of the offers to use within Home Assistant is NMAP.
You can use the Ping command, and if it is a mobile phone or a mobile device, you can
use the Home Assistant Companion app, I think that's the name.
So what's mine is about Tower PC, and I wanted to use NMAP because the idea of a Ping
that is pinging my PC to find out if it is still here or such, I don't know, didn't
sound so nice, and maybe I read something else because NMAP can do really a lot.
Anyway, so I went for NMAP.
NMAP is very interesting, the usage within Home Assistant.
At some point I read that there are some Home Assistant integration that you can work
together with your router, and so the Home Assistant can really connect to your router.
You then have to edit somehow in the menu in there, if you have such a router, and NMAP
can do even more, however my router of course doesn't support that function, and so I cannot
use that.
If you want to use or play a little bit around with NMAP, this is quite easy.
If you go to Settings, go into your Home Assistant, you go to Settings, Integration, and usually
at the bottom somewhere there is a plus sign, and there you can look for the NMAP tracker.
The beginning of my personal automation, so in 2023 I built the server, the base of
the server was Open MediaVolt, and on top of that is the Home Assistant.
So in 2023 I was building an overview in Home Assistant that's, I guess, what everybody
does a little bit to get on the screen what you really want.
Part of it was a server state, like free storage, memory, temperature, a weather forecast, and
others.
Then you also get, come along with Hex the Home Assistant, store anything.
Once this was running I started learning about automation.
I tried to learn from others with little success, way to complex for me, and way more than
I needed.
There were blueprints to download, they could do nearly everything, but then not exactly
what I was looking for.
Many of us are looking for small solutions that fit their own purpose, because we also
think that a lot of overhead can make things, can later on get a problem.
One thing and the other thing is you want to optimize it as much as possible, well, not
all of, not all people have that feeling, but I have it.
So I built my own automation from scratch.
The idea was as much as needed, but as little as possible, to understand my code in a
years time and comments all around it.
Even if it was clear to me at that moment in a years time, it won't be.
So I tried to carefully put some comments what each section was doing and so, and yeah,
my chest is on GitHub, I will link it there.
I think it is a good place to begin.
And from there you can enlarge it to your needs or whatever.
I called it motion-illuminance light source sun brightness.
To do that, I needed some devices around it, and there were three devices, well, actually
two was enough.
So the one was the Xiaomi Aquara motion sensor, the RTCQ, I put the link in the zone out,
and the Draught Free Bulb E27 from IKEA, this is just a white one.
I also added, because I heard from some guy on the internet, not the one from HPR, the
Xiaomi Miya Thermohugrometer with Bluetooth BLE, it's called LYWSD, also the link in the
show notes.
So with them connected to my home assistant, I had a motion sensor, and within the motion
sensor is also an illuminance sensor, so I can find out how many looks are in the surrounding.
The light source is clear, is the bulb, and the sun is also clear, well, the sun parameter
was actually whether it is daytime or it is nighttime, so sunset, sunrise.
And the brightness I just explained in a moment.
So when you walk in my room, in my office, the light should go on if the illuminance is
below a value of 37, in my case.
And if it is during the day, so if the sun is up, it should be a brighter light than after
sunset, it should be a little bit less bright.
So that's what the brightness is for.
And I got all these things together kind of easily, but then there is one thing.
When you sit on your chair for a while, and you're not moving a lot in your chair while
sitting on the computer, and even if you have this motion sensor, two and a half meter,
I don't know how many foods that are, two and a feet, two and a half meter behind you,
would that be seven feet, even if you have seven feet behind you approximately, it wouldn't
recognize you after a while.
Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.
And so I set the timer to a couple minutes, and then I had to add some counter measurements
that the light would not suddenly go off.
So I had like, if it doesn't have any motion for six minutes, then it would go to like
30% of light for another 40 seconds.
And within this time frame of the 40 seconds, I had enough time to move my hands around
until the light got bright again, so the timer was reset.
This is not that bad, because you move instead of just sitting still all the time, right?
So it is good for your body, basically, nonetheless, after a while, you get fed up with it.
But that's in a later section of that podcast.
Anyway, so my first chist had a lot of counter measurements because of this not moving enough
to trigger motion sensor.
The motion sensor also is interesting if not the motion sensor, sorry, the illuminance
is interesting because if there is a thunderstorm coming, a really dark one, and you sit in your
office during the day and the light goes below a certain threshold, then your bulb will
turn on and bright up your office.
And once the thunderstorm is over and it gets bright outside again, the light switches
itself off, and it's just nice to have, right, when somebody is serving you.
So much about my automation, so motion, illuminance, light source, sun, brightness.
And I had that created around, I don't know, autumn of 2023, somewhere there.
And or even it's no, no, wait, no, this was later, this was in spring 24.
And so I had that for almost a year and this spring now I got a little bit tired of it.
And so I started the enhancement that finally leads to this podcast, but that's in the next
section.
Radiation of Bluetooth, CQP or Wi-Fi.
As I'm talking here about devices that make use of some of the services, I would also
like to make you aware about some things about it.
Well, first of all, if you use these tools or these connection, it is good as long
as you have no interference.
So before you start to really integrate Bluetooth, CQP or Wi-Fi, a lot, make sure that you
learn about the Wi-Fi channels that you learn about, collision and interference that you
can have between CQP and Wi-Fi and how you choose the right channel, like if you are on
channel one and channel two, they are so close to each other that they will have interference.
Usually these numbers about the channel are, you have to learn about it and then place
and choose your channel wisely based on your surrounding and others.
Maybe if you are in a single family home in a house, maybe easier than when you live
in a block in a city.
So Bluetooth uses the lowest power which can be easily understood by its very small
range and it is not a contagious transmission as well, continuous transmission as well.
It is very energy, its energy impact is very minimal unless you have many Bluetooth devices
around your body.
So it is about the radiation and how it is going on, how it is the effect on your body.
The Bluetooth is maybe quite little, then there is CQP, CQP is a mesh network so one bulb
can talk to the next one and the next one and the next one.
But on the other hand CQP doesn't transfer a lot of information but it is good to be
aware that it builds up a mesh network.
Next is Wi-Fi, this is quite stronger than Bluetooth and CQP.
A Wi-Fi router sits in your house and is constantly emitting beacon signals and uses the maximum
bandwidth of the ISM, 2.4 and 5 GHz.
Energy impact on your body is maximum since there can be a lot of Wi-Fi access points
around and you may constantly using Wi-Fi to connect devices at home.
Now the next in the level this is 4G, so mobile phones versus Wi-Fi.
In terms of potential harm there is no clear evidence that one technology is significantly
more harmful than the other, especially learn about the baseband.
What I mean, how does your mobile phone know about the strength of the connection to
do your mobile tower or Wi-Fi hotspot?
Because the station does constantly send a baseband signal, why?
Because it gets power from the wall in opposite to your mobile phone or CQ.
So I wasn't aware of that until 2008 when on the next house an antenna was mounted and
I started when I got interested in how this thing with the radiation works and then
first they come and tell you yeah no problem with the mobile phone because it will just
emit data and such if a mobile phone is connected.
They didn't mention the baseband which is constantly sending a signal and your Wi-Fi hotspot
may as well.
So some people believe their government and health industry with shareholders and put all
this stuff in their body.
I don't, I'm a scrutinizer, what suits me and what not.
Why should I stop when it is my body?
So my approach is I reduced the emitting power to 60% of my Wi-Fi router.
I use Wi-Fi when I need it.
I turn it off afterwards.
In any case I turn it off while I am sleeping.
Yes, it would make my life easier to let it run all the time.
But what are the side effects in the long run?
I leave you a couple of links here if you want to look a bit deeper and now back to the
main topic.
So let's talk about how I wanted to enhance my automation.
There are the things in place that I needed and map was in place.
I was playing a little bit around with this device tracker.
This is either not home or not null.
I had a sensor with its illuminance.
I had a sunrise sunset that I could take over as well as the illuminance before.
So I had my blueprint, my YAML from my previous settings and thought it was the easiest way
to adjust this YAML to my new configuration.
I have the modem with the DHCP server on it.
I have a nook Intel nook computer where everything is running and I have a switch in between
the modem and the tower PC.
Always connected via Ethernet cable, so at least no struggling with Wi-Fi.
Well I had to find out it was not so easy for me to simply go ahead and adjust the code.
I had, I stumbled and stumbled and so I decided to delete as much out of it that I just
have the base functionality.
And then from then, write it again, build it up again and see step by step how that works.
And to support you in this process, if you go to home assistant on your web interface,
you have on the left hand, you have the developer tools and if you go inside there, you have
on top a couple of topics and one is called states and there you can change this design.
So I had to find out since the last time I opened it, please it feels like.
Then you can go there and set a current entity state of a sensor or whatever.
So this can be helpful.
And I was doing that and then I opened the second tab with home assistant as well and there
I opened the history of the sensor, the light and the device tracker.
And so I could on one on one tab play with the state and on the other tabs, see what
the history of the thing was doing of the sensor and so on and how the light was reacting
to it.
Well, okay, I would see the light.
But anyway, you have then all this thing very nicely lined up.
And then it was an evening, I was somewhere, can't remember the month, maybe July or so.
And there was a fun storm coming in and then it got very dark or so, it was around six
o'clock or whatever.
And my value of the illuminant sensor went below 37, that meant I wouldn't have to take
care of it because it would tell to my light to switch on because it is below 37.
Now while I was testing, this fun storm went over.
And as I said, it was around July, so the sun was quite high and it got bright again.
And if it is more than 37 illuminants, my trigger wouldn't trigger.
I found it out after a while, but of course, it took a bit, just to make you aware if you
are working in the developer tools, playing with the states of the entities and switch
them manually and they come back sometimes automatically after a certain amount of time
or such.
So make sure you refresh your web interface from time to time so you're not missing
that.
Any state in the device tracker is equal to null as I found out.
And while I was working with the whole thing, you have the graphical things with what you
can play in the YAML or you can play in the graphical user interface on the website.
And I did a little bit of both to see how it changes when I add this or that.
And I was at the point where I wanted to have an end function.
But the trigger is always an OR.
It does trigger this or that.
So I needed an end and the end is called a condition in the YAML.
On the web interface, it is called end if.
So when my desktop changes its states from null to home, so it is running.
And if the motion sensor and the illuminance is triggered, then turn on the light based
on the sun.
And you are just as I'm telling you now that it is on the one interface, it is a condition
at least on my screen job.
And on the other, it is an end if.
So it's an if statement or it's a condition statement, YAML versus graphical interface.
So yeah.
Now you know, I had to learn it.
Maybe you all know then what else did I find out?
Yeah, this was basically it.
So the developer tools the states, the second tab for the history in the web browser,
in Firefox preferably.
And that the condition in the YAML is an end.
So you can have the trigger.
So the trigger could be a motion sensor.
And then you have the condition plus it is not this the illuminance is below certain value.
Now while I was troubleshooting the whole thing, there were, well, it sounds now pretty easy
on the microphone, but I can tell you it took me a couple of days to get that sorted.
Well, and well, there was a year in between from one development to the next one.
And yeah, most of it was last and some new stuff came in.
So I started to write in the home assistant forum.
I put the link in the show notes.
So if you like, you can go and see, see there.
And I put in a description what I was trying to do and that I had no success.
And I was waiting a couple days, unfortunately, nobody came in and told me what I would have to do.
So I started to write down what my problem is.
So I started to reply to myself.
So I kind of documented in this forum post my next changes the code I put in.
And then after a while, somebody started to answer me.
And so it was already felt a little bit better than just being by yourself.
And yeah, you can follow up finally, I found a solution.
And it worked.
I tested it for a couple of days to make sure that it works.
And then it was actually time to build the blueprint from this one, as I mentioned before.
The co-pilot while I spent way, way, way more time to get this automation up and running the way I had it in my mind.
I heard someone in a podcast mentioning co-pilot.
I was going to solve my problem with co-pilot because that's a no-no.
Of course, many people do that.
But for me it was, I wanted to understand what I do and I wanted to do it in the most efficient way.
But as it was running now, I thought I have some comments in my YAML.
I have an introduction text to my YAML.
Why not open, where did I go to do that?
Yeah, I simply went on Bing.com, as far as I remember, with my Firefox.
And I was looking there for co-pilot, put in my complete YAML,
copied my YAML stuff and paste it on the comment prompt.
This one in and then co-pilot asked me, do you want a quick answer or a long answer?
And I'm waiting for the long, not do you want a quick think about it or a longer thinking about it, more like that.
I go for the longer one and I was hoping to get the better result.
And so it came back after, I don't know how long,
30 seconds or a minute, I don't remember.
And I was looking at the code and on the first side, it looked quite good.
So I copied the code given from co-pilot and I have to admit that
the text it generated to explain what it is actually doing was quite well.
So for example, well, okay, I guess I already adjusted this one a little bit, but he says like
triggers and conditions. The blueprint uses both a state change from not home to home
for your PC tracker and the motion sensor activation.
A numeric state condition ensures that the automation only runs when the ambient lighting
from your illuminant sensor is below the defined threshold, default 37 locks.
This minimizes unnecessary operations when the area is already well lit.
So the wording itself and so on came over quite nicely.
And so then it was time to test the code.
So I copied the code as it is and put it in the home assistant and it wouldn't work.
So I was a little bit disappointed as I thought everything was done.
I mean, with such a nice text in the intro.
So the co-pilot didn't add a device class.
So I had to, when I used this KDIF, I'm using KDE, I used this KDIF to compare the
the code I had with the blueprint and then I saw some differences.
Well, several differences, some are relevant and some are because it is a blueprint and not a
pure yellow. And also missing was a minimum and maximum value per input.
And therefore, the list showed useless items in the graphical user interface.
Instead, the one with necessary capabilities.
The device class does define whether it should show up with a bulb with a light
or whether it should show up with motion sensor or such.
So I added, for example, device class motion or the device class illuminance.
And so when I added that, I tried it again and it worked.
And I was almost happy, but just almost.
Because co-pilot changed my terminology of some of the entities or the input devices.
And I wanted to have the same entities or text as I used in my previous
blueprint. Because, well, you do that once and the next time you look at it and you compare it,
you're much faster up to speed and understand what is going on.
So anyway, with KDE, with the text editor in KDE, it was kind of easy to search for this pattern.
And replace it with that one. And so he did, this was quite quick and without any error.
And finally, I had my blueprint.
I hope this was a lot of motivation for you to go ahead and try to do another
automation on your home assistant. By the way, with Enmap, you can, of course,
detect several things. For example, if you have your TV on a cable or on your Wi-Fi or if you have
your TV box connected to it, you can base on that presence. Think about you want to change the
light, you want to change anything in based on this TV on or off or the box, whatever.
So if you like, leave a comment, send me a message or record your thoughts on that topic,
what I've done wrong, what I should have done better. Oh, and before I forget it,
where is the squirrel? I haven't heard it for a long time. Have a nice one.
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