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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Summer is here! A fan can help you fight the temperatures, a smart fan can do it even better. Here is how you can integrate Home Assistant with the affordable Xiaomi Mi smart standing fan 1C. The Xiaomi smart fan I bought this fan last year and already described how Read more…
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 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…
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…
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…