Home Assistant dashboard are great, but Grafana is even more powerful. So why not combine them and embed your Grafana graphs directly into your Home Assistant dashboard? It is actually pretty simple. If you are looking for an even better shortcut in your smart home journey check out my new Read more…
Network wide DNS ad blocker like Adguard Home and PiHoleAds can be a great solution to a big problem. Ads can be really annoying and even a huge security risk, but many modern devices like smart TVs are out of your direct control. Network wide ad blocker can get around 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…
Home Assistant is awesome but it lacks advanced support for showing data, especially over time. There is a much better software for this: Grafana. And it can easily be integrated with Home Assistant. I set up InfluxDB and Grafana with my Home Assistant installation and will show you how to Read more…
Docker is great – keeping all your containers up to date not so much. Fortunately there is an easy fix to that: Watchtower. Docker and docker-compose allow you to easily run a bunch of services on a computer as cheap as the Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately with a lot of power Read more…
You are looking for a LastPass alternative? Recently LastPass changed their free tier – which was a less than popular decision which makes it pretty much unusable for many users. Fortunately I use a very different solution to store my passwords and here I am sharing how to do this: Read more…
Home Assistant has a neat UI but many often needed pages are only accessible via a nested menu. Fortunately the Home Assistant sidebar is customizable with some tricks. I found a solution that allows adding new items for much used pages like integrations and automations. How to re-arrange existing entries Read more…
There are two awesome tools for local control over Zigbee devices: ZHA vs Zigbee2Mqtt. Which one should you use? I recently switched from Zigbee2MQTT to ZHA. Here I will show you how to set up ZHA with Home Assistant and compare ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT. My setup I recently started a Read more…
Zigbee2MQTTAssistant makes a great software even better. Zigbee2MQTT is a very nice piece of software you can use to control all kind of MQTT devices with one gateway. But while it is awesome it can be a little hard to get started with. This is where Zigbee2MQTT-Assistant shines: it gives Read more…
Tired of running a dozen different hub and Apps for your smart home devices? Here is how to build your own custom smart home server that is a universal hub and so much more. With a Raspberry Pi, Docker and open source smart home software and without spending much money. Read more…