With smart light bulbs pretty much any existing ceiling lamp can become a smart ceiling lamp in minutes. Here is how to make a ceiling lamp smart – standalone or as part of a bigger smart light system with Home Assistant and Hue bulbs. Smart light system A single smart Read more…
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…
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…
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…
Finding a great integrated blind control solution for a DIY smart home is hard. The IKEA Fyrtur and Kadrijl blinds are cheap compared to established producers and work better than most full DIY solutions. I bought one and tested it with my Home Assistant setup. The Fyrtur smart blinds The Read more…
When I moved into my current apartment I wanted to built a custom ceiling lamp for my living room. The ingredients were clear: wood and filament LEDs hanging from the ceiling. With only a couple of hours of work I built this DIY lamp in a unique design. This is Read more…
Home Assistant is an awesome free home automation system. To properly utilize it you need to add smart home devices though. This is how to add Zigbee and (Tasmota) Wifi devices to Home Assistant. I recently started working on my new smart home server and build up the hardware as 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…