Home Assistant helpers can greatly improve automations and make more complex ones possible. Normal automations can be very powerful but they miss one feature that is sometimes needed for more complex interactions: variable storage. Fortunately there is another feature – called helpers – that can be used to fix this Read more…
A printer is part of most households. Integrating a printer with Home Assistant is the next step to get some cool automations and nice graphs. I recently had to buy a new printer and will describe here how to add it to Home Assistant and my Graphana dashboard. The printer Read more…
Building a home server includes taking care of user management and (network) file shares. This can be a tedious task and chmod and samba shares’ configurations can be tricky to create. I created an Ansible script, including everything I learned about this, to fully automate these tasks. Here is how Read more…
Some actions in a smarthome still need a manual trigger. This is where cheap wireless buttons like the Aqara mini switch come in very handy. Just put a couple of those in the right spots to start a scene or control a light. This is how you can use them Read more…
ZFS is a super robust file system made for servers with great features like snapshots and build in checks for data security and integrity – with no special hardware needed. In this guide I will describe how to use it for a home server with integrated RAID functionality, snapshots of Read more…
Self-hosting important software and data on your own home server has a lot of advantages but can be a daunting task to get started with. I have been running my own server for a couple of years now and will describe the choices in hardware and software here. This will Read more…
You can use the full power of your smart devices by making them all work together and add automations to get rid of reoccurring tasks. I use open source software (currently Home Assistant) to automate all my devices and built a lot of automations for them overtime. These are my Read more…
Running a lot of Docker containers for your smart home and other software needs generates a lot of logs. A simple tool for log aggregation to view all of them together can help a lot. Professional software like the ELK stack is complicated to set up but there is a Read more…
Living wall, green wall, vertical garden – some plants on your wall are great! What makes it even better is that you can mostly automate the process of caring for these plants. Here is how I mounted my living wall frame, how I added plants and how I added automated Read more…
I had wood left over, I built a waveform lamp. Some projects are meticulously planned, for others it is just intuition and a good idea. I had some wooden pieces left over from my bookshelf built and decided to experiment a bit. The result is a very unique lamp in Read more…