To host services on your own server you need a simple way of running them. A great combination here is Docker and docker-compose for running your services. After some initial setup this combination is very simple to use, easy to extend and really powerful. This is how I run my 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
Running a lot of Docker containers for your smart home and other software needs generates a lot of logs. A simple tool for log aggregation to view all of them together can help a lot. Professional software like the ELK stack is complicated to set up but there is a Read more
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
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
Having an unreliable Internet connection is annoying. Constantly getting asked for speedtest measurements over a couple of days by your Internet provider instead of actual help is even worse. Bad enough to implement a system that regularly measures your Internet connection. This is how it can be done with OpenHab. Read more
Even the best smart home system does not do you much good if the controller becomes unresponsive. Mine runs on a Raspberry Pi and recently died due to a software issue. To avoid something like happening again I updated my monitoring of the Pi itself. Here is a simple way Read more