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Getting started with Grocy

Rather than jumping in headfirst and running amok in the cupboards with mobile apps and barcode scanning. I thought it was probably better to get the basics of Grocy sorted out, adding extra functionalities once the groundwork was laid. To start with I chose a single barcoded product that is either entirely unused or used, depending on whether beans on toast are on the menu. The menu options on the left are broken down into four groups; a Stock overview and Shopping list , which are concerned with what is and what should be in the cupboards; Recipes and Meal plan , to organise your food planning; Purchase , Consume , Transfer and Inventory , which are the basic operations used to manage stock levels; and Manage master data , which is a group of data table entry functions that are used to set up Grocy to organise your food stocks. Our first task, then, was to get baked beans added to the list of products that Grocy is managing. To do this I opened Manage master data > Produ...
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Configuring Grocy

Once Grocy was installed there were two pieces of housekeeping to do to it before it could help with the housekeeping. The first was to localise it and the second to drop out unwanted features of the program to create a more streamlined interface. All of the information on how to complete this is on the Documentation tab (red circle) and the alterations are made on the Configuration tab (green circle). The instructions in the Configuration section of the Documentation tab look a little daunting at first. But there is no need to tackle all of them in the first instance and, from my reading, there didn't seem to be any reason why the settings can't be altered at a later date if need be. To localise Grocy only the culture and currency options on the Configuration page need to be altered. The program defaults are for USD and US English ( en ). To get proper money and the King's English it was just a matter of typing in the 3-letter currency code GBP and choosi...

The last leg - Installing Grocy

Hopefully this is the final installation step of my matryoshka virtual bean counter, ie Grocy running on Home Assistant (HA) running on a virtual machine running on my PC. Home Assistant is explicitly designed to be interoperable with and extensible to as wide a range of devices, protocols and programs as possible and uses integrations to link in specific home automation devices and services. However for third-party programs that deliver more extensive functionalities the term Add-on is used and Grocy is an example of such an Add-on.  So our first step is to navigate to the Add-ons screen ( Settings > Add-ons ). If you are using a clean install there will be nothing on this page. From here we follow the link to the Add-on Store (bottom right-hand corner above). Don't try to use the search bar ( Search add-ons ) at this point as it won't work, it only looks at your installed Add-ons. Once you are in the Add-on Store using the Search bar will return the link for ...

Getting Home Assistant running on a virtual machine

Now I have a virtual Raspberry Pi set up this should be a discussion on how to get Home Assistant (HA) installed on it. Correct? Well, no. Once I'd got the virtual Raspberry Pi up and running, and forearmed with my (limited) knowledge of how VirtualBox works, I went looking for a distro of Home Assistant that would run on the Raspberry Pi Desktop OS . Only this time I made sure I read the whole list and r ight at the bottom I found what I was looking for - Install Home Assistant on Other Systems . However, instead of needing a prepared Raspberry Pi this protocol will install everything in a single process. It turned out, as I read another manual, that Home Assistant is actually an OS in and of itself. The Open Home Foundation , the developer of HA, uses another piece of open-source software, Buildroot , to craft a bespoke version of Linux it calls the Home Assistant Operating System (HAOS; previously known as HassOS). Although the process of setting up the HA virtual machine (V...