How do you add an existing doorbell to your smart home? I did it by connecting it to a modified Aqara door sensor. Now a ring will flash lights, send a message to my phone or do anything else I want it to – with all the power of Home 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
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
Here is how I integrated my Prusa Mini with Octoprint and Home Assistant. While 3D printers are a really great tool for makers in general they get even better when combining them with a smart home setup. With the free Octoprint software it is easy to make your 3D printer 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
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