I have used a couple of Wifi based hardware controllers for LED of any kind in the past. Now I am looking for a Zigbee LED controller that just works with my ZHA Home Assistant setup – and I found a great solution. The different types of LEDs and LED 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
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
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
Setting up your own smarthome server with HomeAssistant and more is easy with Docker(-compose). Upgrading Home Assistant to keep everything up to date afterwards can be a challenge though. Here I will show a couple of ways to quickly update your containers. A smarthome server based on Docker My personal Read more
I recently connected my smart Xiaomi fan to my Home Assistant installation but found the default card in the user interface lacking in design and functionality. So I used this as an excuse to finally create my first own card. Here is how it works and how you can use Read more