My Roborock S50 robot vacuum has maybe been my best smart home purchase so far but recently an error 2 message stopped it from working properly. Here is how to fix the error 2 and how to clean the underside of the robot. Error 2 – bumper stuck The S50 Read more
If you have not heard about the Log4j2 issues then it is time to act! Secure your selfhosted service right now or risk loosing all your data. Here is what you can do. The issue with Log4j2 Log4j2 is a logging library that is widely popular in the Java world Read more
I needed a way to store some towels in my bathroom in a out-of-the-way location. I built a nice premium looking towel rack – a shelf out of bamboo and Plexiglas. Here is how to do it. The idea & the materials for the towel rack The whole project started Read more
The digital, paperless future is coming closer and closer. When I was looking to go digital I ran into one major problem: automatic upload to Nextcloud. The automatic upload from your scanner makes digital copies of your documents available everywhere – but only to you! It turns out that his Read more
Unifi hardware is great for an enthusiast network but can get quite expensive. Fortunately there is a pretty cheap way of extending a Unifi network. The small flex mini switch gives you most of the advantages of the Unifi platform for a small price tag. It also comes in a Read more
With smart light bulbs pretty much any existing ceiling lamp can become a smart ceiling lamp in minutes. Here is how to make a ceiling lamp smart – standalone or as part of a bigger smart light system with Home Assistant and Hue bulbs. Smart light system A single smart Read more
A smart home server is the heart of your setup. It needs to be running well to power everything else. Monitoring Raspberry Pis, my favorite low power server, is easy to set up and helps you to detect errors early on. This is how you can easily set up monitoring Read more
Hosting your own services is pretty simple with Docker. Making services available everywhere via the web can be tricky. A reverse proxy is a flexible and safe solution for this problem – and Traefik is a reverse proxy build to be used with Docker and docker-compose. Here is how I Read more
Grafana is an awesome tool to visualize your smart home data. It gets even better if you create a dynamic dashboard though. Change the datasource for a set of diagrams with one click – easy, show all values of a certain type in one diagram? – possible! All of this Read more
To host services on your own server you need a simple way of running them. A great combination here is Docker and docker-compose for running your services. After some initial setup this combination is very simple to use, easy to extend and really powerful. This is how I run my Read more