07

Jan/23

Home Assistant Dashboard On A Raspberry Pi

Filed Under Home Automation, IOT at 7th January 2023 12:30 by

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 →

09

Dec/22

Zigbee Firmware List

Filed Under Home Automation at 9th December 2022 17:17 by

A useful list of Zigbee published firmwares are available from: OTA Image Types Firmware versions

07

Nov/22

“Real Time” Solar / Energy Dashboard

Filed Under Blog, Home Automation at 7th November 2022 0:01 by

Summary Home Assistant introduced an energy dashboard in 2021.8. Whilst useful and offers a quick setup, it lags an hour behind due to the way it presents data. So I set out to create my own “real time” dashboard. I … Continue reading →

03

Oct/22

Home Assistant With Version Control

Filed Under Home Automation, Infrastructure at 3rd October 2022 0:01 by

Overview Home Assistant works half in system (e.g. UI integrations) and half in YAML Ain’t Markup Language (YAML). YAML files are usually stored as .yml or .yaml (Home Assistant works best with the latter). More and more features are available … Continue reading →

04

Jul/22

Home Assistant Continuous Integration Workflow

Filed Under Home Automation, Houseware, Infrastructure, Software at 4th July 2022 0:01 by

Overview Development pipelines such as version control to deploying changes automatically. In Home Assistant’s case, you can make changes in YAML text files anywhere and Home Assistant can pick up the changes and automatically load them. Tools I use GitHub … Continue reading →

02

May/22

Water Depth Sensor With ESP32

Filed Under Home Automation, IOT at 2nd May 2022 0:01 by

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 →

04

Apr/22

Time Tracking With NFC Tags On Android

Filed Under Home Automation, Mobile Phone, Workflow at 4th April 2022 0:01 by

Overview NFC tags are relatively cheap solution to start timers (or any other tasks in Tasker) where GPS has an accuracy up to 50 metres. An NFC tag is down to the centimetres. NFC is less of a power draw … Continue reading →

07

Feb/22

Home Assistant Backup

Filed Under Home Automation, Infrastructure at 7th February 2022 0:01 by

Overview Backups are very important especially the amount of effort spent in automating everything. If the automations are done right, any loss would have a impact whether it’s inconvenience to dependencies making the time to recover even more important. I … Continue reading →