04
Dec/23Smart Bulbs With Light Switches
Borrowing this idea from Tom McGuinness. This is the ultimate setup to allow features of a smart bulb like changing colours, Zigbee/Matter repeater and still retain the functional use of your light switch. The concept is to disconnect the bulb … Continue reading
07
Aug/23Salt Level For Water Softener With ESPHome
overview We got a water softener installed near the water mains coming into the house. It’s a “dumb” softener so that it does not rely on using electricity. This means it will continue to work in a power outage but … Continue reading
05
Jun/23Increase Growatt Shine Update Interval
A quick, at your own risk tutorial to change the reporting frequency of your Growatt Shine sensor data. This won’t change the data being reported on the Growatt dashboard / ShinePhone app however it will show up things like grott … Continue reading
07
Jan/23Home Assistant Dashboard On A Raspberry Pi
Overview I wanted to create a display of a web page on a Raspberry Pi with no desktop or browser looking controls. This is called a kiosk mode. The main driver for this is to replace the MagicMirror to show … Continue reading
02
May/22Water Depth Sensor With ESP32
Overview We live in a house with a water tank in the loft which uses gravity to feed water to any of the water sources upstairs in the house like the hot water tank to bathroom taps. Now and again, … Continue reading
06
Dec/21Raspberry Pi Connect To Hidden SSID
Turns out the Raspberry Pi won’t automatically look for hidden WiFi networks. CLI To enable this edit the file /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf and add scan_ssid=1 inside the network declaration: SD With the SD plugged into another computer other than the Raspberry Pi, … Continue reading
04
Oct/21Home Assistant: New Starter Tips
Overview These are the things I wish I knew at the start of Home Assistant to save time and re-doing various setup related changes. It purely focuses on configurable points within Home Assistant as opposed to choices of eco systems, … Continue reading
05
Jul/21Home Assistant: Condition Based Auto Entities Card
Overview I was looking for a way to show / hide information based on states or attributes of an entity. Example use cases: Show any windows / doors which are open. List any low battery devices. Pre-Requisite Optional: Home Assistant … Continue reading