Making Home Automation accessible to normal people
I have one of these fancy Ikea desks that lets you raise it up so you can use your computer whilst you’re standing. When I first got it I used to stand up most afternoons, and I found that it helped reduce my headaches and the knots in my shoulders - it was really beneficial. But then I got lazy, and for the better part of the last 3 years I don’t think it went into the standing position once. I…
All the steps you need to take to display Home Assistant dashboards on a Sonoff NS Panel Pro wall display.
All the steps you need to take to display Home Assistant dashboards on a Shelly Wall display.
Room-based location detection lets your smart home know exactly who is in what room, which you can use to trigger bespoke automations. For example, depending on who is in a room and their preferences, you could automatically show different photographs on a smart display, play different music on the smart speakers, or set the thermostat to a person's preferred temperature.
When people ask me for advice to improve their Zigbee network reliability I always suggest that they place their Zigbee coordinator in the middle of their house. That way the Zigbee network mesh spreads out across the floorplan of their property from the center outwards. Zigbee mesh network with coordinator in the middle of the house Of course, when I built my own Zigbee network I completely…
Zigbee is great, and it’s my favourite Smart Home Protocol… until one of my devices stops working. Here is how I deal with it in my smart home.
I recently created some “bed sensors” for my smart home that detect if one of us, or both of us, is in bed. I use a couple of pressure mats that detect when weight is applied to them, and stuck then under our mattress at around hip level and these tell my Home Assistant home automation platform if someone is lying on top of that part of the bed. I originally thought that these would be more of a…
Frigate is an open source network video recorder (NVR) that uses AI to detect objects inside your video camera streams. I’ve been using it for years to reliably detect people… and foxes, in my home security camera footage. I used to run my smart home on Docker, but more recently have switched to Proxmox, a virtualisation environment/hypervisor. According to the documentation, running Frigate on…
Tuya have made a fantastic 4” touch screen that runs Android called the T6E. There is also a S6E, which is a similar device but has an inbuilt switch that can be used to turn on and off lights. The T6E is designed for the European market, where as the S6E is designed for Asia. An incredibly talented individual called Blakadder has figured out how you can root these devices to remove the Tuya…
A few of my people have asked me if it was possible to use both smart switches and smart bulbs in the same place. At first I couldn’t think of any reason why you would want to do that. If you use a smart light switch, or any light switch in that matter, to cut the power to your smart lights then they will lose connection to your home automation system and be utterly useless. What’s the point?…
I love our smart blinds. They’re probably the second most used smart devices in our house, after our smart lights. Every morning when the first one of us walks out of the bedroom into a hallway, the blinds in the common areas of the house automatically open up. Then, after breakfast, when we walk into our home offices the blinds in there open up as well. Later in the day, 20 minutes before sunset,…
In a recent video I compared a bunch of different smart light switches to see which ones would be the best for my smart home. Here are the details of each switch and how I scored them. Brand Model Protocol Price Gang Needs Neutral? Installation (1-5) Build Quality (1-5) Dimmable Idle Power Consumption Pairing Method Acts as router? Works in HA Alan’s Arbitrary Score (1-10) Notes Moes WS-EUB Zigbee…
My new smart home runs Proxmox, on a rack mounted self built server. Check out this video to see how I researched what to buy, how I built it, how I installed Proxmox, and how I eventually installed Home Assistant on a Virtual Machine using Prox Mox. This article documents, step by step, how I installed Proxmox on my home server, and then installed Home Assistant. Installing Proxmox Start off by…
Installing the Home Assistant Operating System onto an old PC or Intel NUC is a great way to get a powerful home automation system. Here is how you go about installing the Home Assistant OS onto an Intel NUC, but the instructions are the same for any x86 based PC. You'll need two USB drives for this, with a decent storage capacity. Firstly, download the latest Ubuntu LTS version and also download…
I use Home Assistant to set my smart light brightness and colour temperature to different values based on the time of day and position of the sun. This (apparently) helps keep your lights in line with your circadian rhythms for better sleep and mental alertness. This is done with a combination of template sensors, automations and a HACS integration called Circadian Lighting. Check out the YouTube…
I ran into this error on Home Assistant Container, on Docker. Failed to start Bluetooth: [org.bluez.Error.NotReady] Resource Not Ready To resolve this, I opened a terminal into my Home Assistant Container, using Portainer and ran the following command bluetoothctl power on Unfortunately, each time I restarted my Home Assistant container, the problem came back, so I had to find a way to make it…
I recently tried to add Bluetooth support to Home Assistant Container using the new Bluetooth integration . It should have been relatively easy, but I ran into an annoying error message. Failed to start BlueTooth: [org.bluez.Error.InvalidArguments] Invalid arguments in method call Luckily I came across a GitHub issue that seemed similar and suggested that the version of BlueZ (which is required by…
To install Z-Wave JS with Docker Compose you'll need to actually use the zwavejs2mqtt application. You can find the official instructions on the Z-Wave JS documentation page, but I'll briefly describe below what I did to get it running in my smart home. Firstly, you'll need to add an entry to your docker-compose.yaml file to spin up the zwavejs2mqtt application. Here is the one I use in my smart…
Frigate uses AI to detect people and other objects in your IP camera streams without sending any of your data or video footage to the cloud. In this video I show you how I have set up Frigate to reliably detect people, dogs and cats in my camera streams. I've achieved this by tweaking the Frigate configuration file to get the best results. Here is my full Frigate config.yaml file. mqtt: host:…
This post captures all the links and commands that I show you in my Installing Zigbee2MQTT with Home Assistant video. Recommended Zigbee USB Adaptors Related YouTube Videos: What is Zigbee ? What is MQTT and how can you use it with Home Assistant? Zigbee2MQTT vs ZHA Installation Instructions: Zigbee2MQTT as an Add-On Zigbee2MQTT as a Docker Container Finding location of USB Stick in Linux/Docker…