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
When I moved into my current apartment I wanted to built a custom ceiling lamp for my living room. The ingredients were clear: wood and filament LEDs hanging from the ceiling. With only a couple of hours of work I built this DIY lamp in a unique design. This is Read more
Docker is great – keeping all your containers up to date not so much. Fortunately there is an easy fix to that: Watchtower. Docker and docker-compose allow you to easily run a bunch of services on a computer as cheap as the Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately with a lot of power Read more
You are looking for a LastPass alternative? Recently LastPass changed their free tier – which was a less than popular decision which makes it pretty much unusable for many users. Fortunately I use a very different solution to store my passwords and here I am sharing how to do this: Read more
Moving Docker data to an external SSD fixes a major flaw with my smart home system. Many people out there, including me, are running a small home server on a Raspberry Pi – usually running on a SD card with very limited space and a potentially very limited lifetime. Fortunately Read more
Home Assistant has a neat UI but many often needed pages are only accessible via a nested menu. Fortunately the Home Assistant sidebar is customizable with some tricks. I found a solution that allows adding new items for much used pages like integrations and automations. How to re-arrange existing entries Read more
Home Assistant is an awesome free home automation system. To properly utilize it you need to add smart home devices though. This is how to add Zigbee and (Tasmota) Wifi devices to Home Assistant. I recently started working on my new smart home server and build up the hardware as Read more
There are two awesome tools for local control over Zigbee devices: ZHA vs Zigbee2Mqtt. Which one should you use? I recently switched from Zigbee2MQTT to ZHA. Here I will show you how to set up ZHA with Home Assistant and compare ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT. My setup I recently started a Read more
It is time! I am building a new smart home server for 2021. Home Assistant, Docker, Pi-hole & more, everything on one Raspberry Pi. Lets get ready by assembling the hardware and setting everything up. I have been running Openhabian on a Raspberry Pi 3 for years and it has Read more