The Skull Cinema

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...

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 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 ...

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...

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...