WLED is a really powerful free software solution to control your LEDs in a smart way. It used to be complicated to set up bit that has changed. Here is how to get your LED setup ready in just five minutes. What is WLED? If you are looking to build Read more…
I am currently building a smart mirror and want to use a small Raspberry Pi Zero W for that. Unfortunately MagicMirror² does not support it out of the box. Here is how I got it to run anyways. The magic mirror For those who do not know what a magic Read more…
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…
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…
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…
I love my Grafana dashboard to see everything important in my smart home on glance. Using rows and the modern time series panel makes it even better. Let me show you how I updated my dashboard. Grafana dashboards Grafana is this awesome open tool to create dashboards. I have set Read more…
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…
If you run the supervisor version of Home Assistant (or Home Assistant OS) a backup solution is built-in. If you prefer the more flexible installation via Docker there is no such solution. Here is how to keep regular backups of your Home Assistant configuration when running it in Docker. Running Read more…
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…
ZFS is a great filesystem for your server. Until something goes wrong. I wrote a small ZFS alert script that sends me a popup notification if my ZFS pool ever goes offline. The ZFS filesystem ZFS is a very robust and versatile filesytem that includes many features like snapshots, RAID Read more…