If anything goes wrong in your smart home (or with your server) it would generally be great to get notified as soon as possible. Sending notifications with the versatile Pushover service is a simple way to do this. Here is how you can also make your smart home text you. Read more…
I read quite a lot and needed a new place for my books. The old shelf was not quite doing it anymore so I decided to build a new DIY bookshelf that fits the rest of the room out of oak wood and black pipes. This is how I did Read more…
Home Assistant is awesome but it lacks advanced support for showing data, especially over time. There is a much better software for this: Grafana. And it can easily be integrated with Home Assistant. I set up InfluxDB and Grafana with my Home Assistant installation and will show you how to Read more…
I recently bought a pull-up bar to stay fit during the Corona times. It is a pretty simple black device that looks relatively good – until you see all the silber screw heads. So I went ahead and fixed that with my 3D printer. The pull-up bar A pull-up bar Read more…
I built my ultimate automatic smart light system and this is how you can do the same. You want lights that turn on and off automatically and always dimm to the right level? Lights that even change color (adaptive lighting/true tone/flux…) all on their own? It is possible with some Read more…
The Roborock S50 is a great cleaning robot with a great price. I have been using it for quite some time. Unfortunately it is always trying to climb on small ledges (like chair bases) just to get stuck there. Why did Roborock not make the front bumber height adjustable? Anyways Read more…
The old Echo Dots still work pretty well but they do take up some space and don’t sound very good. Instead I mounted mine to the wall with a 3D printed wall mount and connected it to some better speakers. External speakers I still have a couple of old (2nd Read more…
A modern smart home often relies on a lot of battery powered devices. That means you need a low battery warning to keep track of all of them and change batteries in time to avoid devices dropping from your network. Fortunately I found a nice and simple solution for this Read more…
Finding a great integrated blind control solution for a DIY smart home is hard. The IKEA Fyrtur and Kadrijl blinds are cheap compared to established producers and work better than most full DIY solutions. I bought one and tested it with my Home Assistant setup. The Fyrtur smart blinds The Read more…
Blueprints are an awesome new feature in Home Assistant that allow you to build & share generic automations for similar situations. You build a smart home to be able to automate common tasks but sometimes you do not have the time or knowledge to create them. That is where you Read more…