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Software

HomeAssistant

I created a beautiful custom Home Assistant card to control a Xiaomi fan

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…

By Oliver, 4 years06.07.2021 ago
network

Hardware for a professional smart home network – Next level network with Unifi equipment

To make your smart home network more reliable and secure you can build a network based on prosumer components like the Ubiquiti Unifi line. Everything in your smart home relies on a robust network, so I decided to built a new & better network including several Wifi networks, VLANs, a Read more…

By Oliver, 4 years14.06.2021 ago
HomeAssistant

How to seamlessly add Grafana graphs to Home Assistant

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…

By Oliver, 4 years30.05.2021 ago
Software

Adguard Home or PiHole – How to block obnoxious ads for your whole network

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…

By Oliver, 4 years24.05.2021 ago
Software

Staying safe – Sending notifications and alarms to your smartphone with Pushover

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…

By Oliver, 4 years17.05.2021 ago
HomeAssistant

Beautiful dashboards for your smart home with InfluxDB, Grafana and Home Assistant

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…

By Oliver, 4 years02.05.2021 ago
Software

Watchtower – Simple solution for automatic updates to all your Docker containers

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…

By Oliver, 4 years01.03.2021 ago
Software

Great LastPass alternative – securely self host your own password manager with Bitwarden(_rs)

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…

By Oliver, 4 years18.02.2021 ago
HomeAssistant

Customizing the Home Assistant sidebar by adding 3 convenient shortcuts

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…

By Oliver, 4 years06.02.2021 ago
Software

ZHA vs Zigbee2MQTT – choosing the best system?

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…

By Oliver, 4 years25.01.2021 ago

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About this blog

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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