Your smartphone keeps hiding in from you? Every time you want to leave it is missing? Fear not, my Home Assistant smarthome helped me solve that problem and here is how I did it. Losing your smartphone Today (nearly) everyone carries a smartphone most of the time, me and my Read more…
I recently 3D-printed some hands to hold hats, scarfs and other things in my hallway. This goes quite well with the printed noses holding my sunglasses. What my hallway is missing A couple of months ago I noticed a problem in my hallway: it is quite a small room and Read more…
The Govee H6076 are a great addition to my light setup offering amazing accent light. Unfortunately the integration with Home Assistant turned out to be complicated than expected. Here is what I like (and dislike) about these lights and how to control them from Home Assistant. On accent lights Each Read more…
Recently one of my old Sonoff power plugs started acting up so I was looking for a replacement and found a seemingly great one: small, cheap, power measurement and Zigbee 3.0 plus support in ZHA. Is this the best Zigbee power plug for Home Assistant? What makes a great smart Read more…
Older Raspberry Pis are not powerful enough for you? Here is how I switched to a new Pi with 8GB of RAM and to the 64bit Pi OS to be able fully utilize it. Why would you want to switch to a 64 bit OS? I have been running my Read more…
Do you want to know what artist you like most? At what time of the day you usually listen to music? With the (unofficial) self hosted “your spotify” software you can get this data and display it in a great looking interface. The data you don’t own I am, like Read more…
In a quest to make my desk as smart and useful as possible I recently made a couple upgrades. Here are a couple of neat additions to any smart desk for a smart home, DIY and programmer enthusiast out there. Smart home control, cable management and paperless workflows… Controlling your Read more…
I have used older Aqara switches before with Home Assistant and ZHA. Using the newer H1 I was surprised some things were not working out of the box. Here is how to fix possible issues. The Aqara H1 remote switch Aqara is selling a wide range of quite popular smart Read more…
If you run a lot of Docker containers you need some mechanism to let you know about updates. Watchtower is a popular solution I also used but the auto-update feature can be dangerous. Diun is a very lightweight alternative that takes the safer approach of only notifying you. Docker image Read more…
A MagicMirror is the perfect display to show your smart home condition. Here is how to display data from Home Assistant using the MagicMirror system for smart mirrors. What is a MagicMirror? A so called magic mirror is a very futuristic and cool looking piece of furniture. It is basically Read more…