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Further adventures in household paper products

As the toilet rolls are up and running I couldn't resist adding the rest of the loft stocks into the mix. The next two items are kitchen roll and facial tissues . Following the same process described for toilet rolls; kitchen roll comes in a multipack, but this time a case has four packs of three rolls and we already have the storage location, shop and quantity units set up. Again, I think we'll have to set up a generic item (Parent product) as well as a specific one for the Kirkland brand rolls (Child product). So I gave it a name, Kitchen roll and a description; default storage location and shop, Loft / Costco ; a min stock amount, 3 rolls ; all the quantity units are Roll . Job done. Now for the specific product, as previously, pulling images and descriptions off the Costco website, setting up case and pack barcodes and quantity conversions between them, buying in Cases and using in Packs . But hang on, do we really want to track in packs of three? We only need a sin...
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Toilet roll road test

Grocy is now operational ; but where to start? At the bottom of course! Staying with single use items, as they are easiest to work with, toilet rolls ;are easy to quantify, very definitely something that needs to be kept above a minimum stock level and I am happy for one taken off the shelf to count as used. Most of the toilet rolls are stored in the loft, as there is plenty of space up there and they don't go off, so it is no problem to bulk buy them from Costco in a big packet (10 packs of 4 rolls). However, this means that checking how many are in stock from downstairs is quite inconvenient. The first step is to set up toilet rolls on Grocy, as we did previously for tins of baked beans. We'll need to set up a storage location, the Loft , the shop that they are purchased from, Costco , the quantity unit that they are measured in, Rolls , and the item itself, Kirkland Triple Satin Bath Tissue . The location first, and then a shop, and finally the quantity unit. Not...

Man Down! - HA-Grocy goes off the rails

Problems, problems. As part of an HA-Grocy update to v0.24.0, released on the 16 th Feb 2025, a point version upgrade of Grocy was included from v4.3.0 to v4.4.1. Unfortunately it was found that the update had dismasted parts of the HA-Grocy app (see 1 / 2 ), preventing users from opening pop-up windows in the Grocy iframe ; for instance, when clicking the " Add " button in tasks no action is taken. The root cause was a bug in the Grocy version released on the 31 st January (v4.4.1). Although to be fair, Grocy is not specifically aimed at supporting Home Assistant (HA) and as a standalone installation the Grocy program continued to function normally. Happily, the bug was patched by Bernd in v4.4.2, released on 28 th Feb. Unhappily, the HA-Grocy Add-on is still missing the patch as of the 20 th June. So if you are installing from the Add-on Store in Home Assistant it simply won't be fully functional (this is tested and confirmed). If you've already install...

The Grocy Android app

The final layer in our stack is the Grocy Android app , which provides a mobile front-end to the Grocy-Home Assistant installation and allows for camera-based barcode scanning. The program was written in Java by a pair of brothers, Patrik and Dominic Zedler, during the start of the Covid lockdown (see the About section of the ReadMe ). The app is currently on its 3 rd full point release after five years of development (currently v3.7.0), although only one of the brothers is still maintaining it. The update schedule is still relatively frequent at present and it is, like Grocy , now fully featured. So it should be useable for some time as is, even if development ceases. Also, as mentioned previously , there is a possibility of falling back to an SSL version of Grocy that will read barcodes natively (untested by me but on my list to check out). Support options are somewhat limited; there is an in-app FAQ, some of which is replicated on the GitHub FAQ page . But other than that ...

Grocy and its Home Assistant Add-on

The next layer of the Virtual Bean Counter software stack is the meat in the sandwich, Grocy (see Grocy system install ). As with the Home Assistant (HA) Operating System that was reviewed previously the aim of this article is to consider the support and backup options for the Grocy system as installed onto our HA virtual machine . But first a little history. Whither Grocy ? It sprang from the desire of a software developer, Bernd Bestel , to progress beyond using Excel (as we know a great spreadsheet and data analysis tool but with a limited UI) to something more fully featured by exploiting his experience with commercial inventory management. The first version of Grocy was released in 2017 and after seven years is now on its fourth full point release . However, unlike HA, it is essentially a one-man band with a single developer responsible for pretty much the entirety of the content all without stable funding (currently). That said the package is quite mature and " does wha...

Home Assistant Server Review

As discussed previously we should investigate each of the software packages involved in providing our virtual bean counter , so that if (when) problems occur we have a working plan for resolving them. As Home Assistant (HA) forms the base layer of the system, it is a reasonable point to begin at. So, where does HA come from? It was started as program to control Philips Hue smart light bulbs written by Paulus Schoutsen and has since grown into a large community-based IoT open source project on GitHub . How long has it been around? Since 2013 , so over 10 years now and the operating system (OS) software is on its 13th full point release . The OS is now provided via the Open Home Foundation and is financially supported by a single partner, Nabu Casa , but all three projects are led by mostly the same people. It is a mature offering supported by thousands of contributors (the most active project on GitHub by number of contributors) and is as fully supported as an open source pr...

Grocy Progress Checkpoint

Now we have validated that Grocy meets the requirements set out in the first post  this a good point to review the progress made so far. Starting with a quick reminder of the criteria that the system had to meet in order to be useful. These were pretty light. Firstly, the system had to be barcode-based and usable from a mobile device ( ie phone) and, secondly, it had to be able to track stock levels and, using re-order limits, automatically generate shopping lists. The availability of both of these features were confirmed by the test installation. However, Grocy is quite a bit more powerful than that; it is able to work forward from a menu plan and, given the associated recipes, examine available stocks to generate a shopping list; it can be used to track prices and nutritional information for individual items or meals; and monitor the expiry dates of the food stocks dependent on how they are stored or consumed. As the required functionality of Grocy has been confirmed. The nex...