If you run the supervisor version of Home Assistant (or Home Assistant OS) a backup solution is built-in. If you prefer the more flexible installation via Docker there is no such solution. Here is how to keep regular backups of your Home Assistant configuration when running it in Docker. Running Read more
Brandon Sanderson is one of the greatest fantasy authors. His limited edition books are awesome. I built a special shelf to give them an appropriate home. The mistborn books The mistborn series is an epic fantasy trilogy – the first one from Brandon Sanderson. While maybe not objectively his best Read more
In the past I have built a wall mounted garden – a living wall. Now I have built a small version of that and I also have some clues to share on how to keep your plants alive. How is my living wall doing? In the first built here and Read more
Building a DIY smart home needs a good set of software tools to write code, monitor your devices and update data. Here are my favorite smart home tools. Over the years I have used quite a lot and those turned out to be the best for the job so far. Read more
OctoPrint and your 3D printer can be controlled and monitored by Home Assistant either via an integration or via MQTT. This article will describe the more generic MQTT solution. Connecting OctoPrint to MQTT In another article I have already described how to connect Home Assistant to Octoprint via an integration. Read more
Blueprints are a powerful feature of Home Assistant that makes sharing and using automations simpler. Unfortunately using the target selector in a condition is not supported by default. I needed this for an automation of mine and found a way. Blueprints and the target selector Blueprints are one of the Read more
I have used a couple of Wifi based hardware controllers for LED of any kind in the past. Now I am looking for a Zigbee LED controller that just works with my ZHA Home Assistant setup – and I found a great solution. The different types of LEDs and LED Read more
ZFS is a great filesystem for your server. Until something goes wrong. I wrote a small ZFS alert script that sends me a popup notification if my ZFS pool ever goes offline. The ZFS filesystem ZFS is a very robust and versatile filesytem that includes many features like snapshots, RAID Read more
Let’s encrypt, the biggest free provider of TLS certificates recently issued a warning to renew all TLS based certificates. Here is how to force a certificate renewal if you are using Traefik as a reverse proxy. Traefik and let’s encrypt I already wrote about my home server setup using Traefik Read more
Waiting times, prices or dates – any information that is freely available on the web can be collected by you with a process called scraping. With Home Assistant and Grafana I built a simple system to find out at what times of the week my gym has the fewest visitors Read more