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Automation

Home Assistant helpers & state machines – take your automations to the next level

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…

By Oliver, 4 years09.10.2021 ago
Automation

Push the button – cheap wireless Aqara mini switch

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…

By Oliver, 4 years19.09.2021 ago
Automation

My 5 favorite useful smart home automations for Home Assistant

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…

By Oliver, 4 years30.08.2021 ago
smart light

The ultimate automatic smart light system with Home Assistant

I built my ultimate automatic smart light system and this is how you can do the same. You want lights that turn on and off automatically and always dimm to the right level? Lights that even change color (adaptive lighting/true tone/flux…) all on their own? It is possible with some Read more…

By Oliver, 4 years19.04.2021 ago
Automation

The best and cheapest motion sensors for your smart home?

Automatic lights are magical. You walk into a room and the lights just turn on… to add this magic to your smart home you need motion sensors. Many motion sensors. Here is everything you need to know about them and my experience on how to find and install cheap and Read more…

By Oliver, 5 years21.09.2020 ago
smart light

Brighten up your day! How to automate your DIY smart lighting system – part 3

You built your own smart lighting system? But it really is not smart yet. Lets add some smartness to the system. You don’t want to be pressing buttons all the time anymore, right? Here are some ways to make you light setup smart(er). Rules in Openhab I am controlling my Read more…

By Oliver, 5 years30.08.2020 ago
Basics

Beautiful smart home dashboards with Grafana

You want to see everything going on in your smart home at one glance? Then you need a smart home dashboard!Smart home control systems like OpenHab and Home Assistant usually offer nice ways to display important data about your smart home. What they do less well is display data over Read more…

By Oliver, 5 years20.07.2020 ago
smart light

Affordable DIY smart wardrobe lights for less than 40€

A simple way to add some awesomeness to your wardrobe is to add lighting. Smart wardrobe lights look great and help find things more quickly. I build a cheap do-it-yourself solution which has some great effects not found in off the shelf solutions. All of this is done for around Read more…

By Oliver, 5 years07.07.2020 ago
smart light

How you can add affordable smart switches anywhere in your smart home

One of the main problems with smart homes is how to improve usability by allowing control via “legacy” switches instead of relying on Apps and voice assistants. One great way of doing this is by adding smart relays to your existing wall switches and keep using them. For any case Read more…

By Oliver, 5 years21.06.2020 ago
Openhab

Infinite energy – How to add a battery level warning to all your sensors

Battery powered smart home devices are great. Usually small and unobtrusive and usable everywhere without the need for wires. Unfortunately batteries run out of power at one point and quietly loosing an important sensor is not so great. Here is how to build a battery level warning system to avoid Read more…

By Oliver, 5 years10.06.2020 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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