07

Aug/23

Salt 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

07

Jan/23

Home 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

07

Nov/22

ZeroTier

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

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

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

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

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

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