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Basics

Basics

Home Assistant basics – what the heck are devices, entities, integrations and services?

Home Assistant is maybe the best open smart home controller out there but if you are new to it some of the terms can be a bit confusing. As a first step towards Home Assistant basics, here is what devices, entities, integrations, services and helpers are. Home Assistant basics – Read more…

By Oliver, 3 days29.01.2023 ago
Basics

How to SSH into your smart home server the secure way

A server like the small Raspberry Pi usually sits in a remote location and has screen or input devices connected to it. To be able to control it remotely SSH is the de-facto standard on Linux. Here is how to set it up to control your smart home server from Read more…

By Oliver, 2 months26.11.2022 ago
HomeAssistant

Switching Zigbee coordinators with ZHA & Home Assistant without re-pairing & testing the TubesZB coordinator

The stability of your Zigbee network is largely determined by the performance of your coordinator (or router). Switching Zigbee coordinators to a new and better one used to require you to repair all your devices though. With Home Assistant 2022.9 that is a thing of the past. In this post Read more…

By Oliver, 3 months30.10.2022 ago
Software

Fixing Docker stats and Cadvisor CPU usage (on a Raspberry Pi)

Prometheus works great for collecting server stats on a Raspberry Pi but was missing some information on a Raspberry Pi in docker stats and the cadvisor used more CPU than the containers it was monitoring. Here is how fixed those issues. Cleaning up & fixing the downloaded dashboards When I Read more…

By Oliver, 6 months01.08.2022 ago
Software

Monitoring your smart home server with prometheus on a Raspberry Pi – use the power of professional tools

To analyze errors or just to watch what is happening: your smart home gets so much better with some proper monitoring. Prometheus + Grafana is one of THE solutions for monitoring pretty much anything. Getting it to run on a Raspberry Pi does not need much time but still can Read more…

By Oliver, 6 months25.07.2022 ago
HomeAssistant

How to use Zigbee2MQTT with Home Assistant – A quick start guide

Open source software like Zigbee2MQTT and Home Assistant are a great alternative to (more or less) closed systems like Philips Hue. It can be tricky to get started though. Here is a quick start guide allowing you to use all the advantages like full offline control and the possibility to Read more…

By Oliver, 7 months19.07.2022 ago
Basics

Stopping the annoying flood of errors from InfluxDB

InfluxDB (1.8) is a great database but it logs every web access as an error by default. This creates a lot of error entries in a log aggregation tool like Loki. There is a simple fix though. Loki & log aggregation Loki is a great tool to aggregate logs from Read more…

By Oliver, 7 months27.06.2022 ago
Basics

Taming Loki’s hunger – reclaiming disk space used by limiting the Loki log size (for the docker plugin)

The Grafana Loki logging aggregator is a great tool to collect logs from lots of places (Docker containers) in one place. Loki log size can unfortunately grow quite big though with the default settings. When my Raspberry Pis SD card was nearly full I looked for some ways to combat Read more…

By Oliver, 8 months15.06.2022 ago
HomeAssistant

Migrating ZHA to the Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle plus without annoying data loss

Migrating ZHA to a new coordinator can be easy once you figure out how. I have been running my smart home Zigbee network with Home Assistant, ZHA and a Sonoff Zigbee wifi bridge flashed with Tasmota for a couple of years now. With the release of the new cheap and Read more…

By Oliver, 9 months25.04.2022 ago
Software

My 10 favorite & most useful smart home tools – for your DIY smart home

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…

By Oliver, 11 months08.03.2022 ago

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This is my personal slice of the Internet, a place to show my projects and share ideas about all things smarthome, IoT and design

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