I’m reaching out to get community feedback on a potential solution for Harvest Right freeze dryer monitoring that doesn’t require annual subscriptions.
Current situation:
We’re running 3x Harvest Right Pharmaceutical Medium units in a controlled lab environment. We need real-time data logging (temp, pressure, phase, alerts) for compliance, but the annual fees for services like HashyLink don’t fit our operational model.
Potential solution I found:
I just discovered Home Assistant Green ($286 CAD one-time) combined with an open-source integration developed by Drew Miller:
1. Has anyone here already tested Home Assistant + Drew’s tool for Harvest Right monitoring? What was your experience?
2. Any challenges with setup, stability, or data accuracy?
3. Are there other free/low-cost alternatives for freeze dryer data access (without annual subscriptions)?
4. For multi-unit setups: Can a single Home Assistant Green handle 3+ Harvest Right units simultaneously?
We’re serious about implementing this solution and willing to contribute feedback/testing if needed.
Personally - I would go for what you actually own with your own hands, but that’s just my two cents on everything I spend actual cash money on, but once again that’s just me.
If i’m gathering anything by the github it looks like it was potentially vibe-coded (not that theres anything wrong with doing that as a proof of concept) so you could POTENTIALLY add your own features without much issue. I saw while looking up this person’s information that you had also posted in the home assistant forums regarding this which I think is your best course of action - I do not know anyone in my own little world using this but I personally think it’s a better option than the rest.
They also would send me mailing list-sent emails that were written like it was meant to be a personal email. It drove me insane and I subsequently blocked literally any emails from them ever again. Anything that stops things like that from happening to me I think is worth the time and effort. The cloud is just someone else’s computer.
Based on your post I would ask the author if it is a NECESSITY to use the latest and greatest firmwares because I have heard about nothing but headaches upgrading to HR’s newer ones
And you nailed why I refuse to subscribe to anything and then lean on it for business reasons. The last bizcon I went to there were SO MANY really cool businesses that had fucking tons of things that I would consider useful throughout cultivation and into extraction but ALL OF THEM WANTED A SUBSCRIPTION! Or a subscription/monthly bill for their hardware! And then when you’re allowing your machines to communicate with their servers the question of security arises since you can most certainly lock down your end properly but there’s no assurances about the other end.
Reality isn’t my strong suit but being a huge dork is! Keep me posted and let me know if there’s any guinea-pigging I can do over here
I agree with @SubstituteCreature . If you have the means just do this yourself. I think its ridiculous people are charging $500-$2500 a year thinking they are selling enterprise software when in reality they spent $5 on parts and a few hours putting up a website. Especially in this day and age where you can put anything together without a full dev team. Where is the value?
