07

Aug/23

Salt Level For Water Softener With ESPHome

Filed Under Home Automation, IOT at 7th August 2023 0:01 by

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 →

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 →

07

Nov/22

ZeroTier

Filed Under Infrastructure at 7th November 2022 0:01 by

Overview I have been looking at moving towards a zero trust network but I have never been able to get other how home devices especially Internet of Things (IOT) generally use discovery protocols to ease setup which is contradictory to … Continue reading →

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 →

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 →