James Ridgway - Software Engineer
This year, I was fortunate enough to attend The Things Conference in Amsterdam – a conference dedicated to the development and application of the Internet of Things (IoT) and LoRaWAN technology. The conference follows a two-day, single-track format of keynotes, workshops, podcast recordings and round table discussions. The
Using precise methods for counting the frequency of events in a data stream becomes infeasible with large volumes. Precise counting methods at scale often require a significant amount of memory to maintain exact counts over a large data set. In contrast, Count-Min Sketch (CMS) offers a probabilistic solution that
Throughout the house, nearly every single light is controlled by a Shelly . Last year, we installed a UniFi G4 Video Doorbell , and whilst we were having this fitted, it made sense to replace some of the outside light fittings and install some Shelly Duo GU10 RGBW bulbs. Out of the
Querying large datasets can often be challenging, especially when performance is a key concern. Achieving performance at scale often comes with an element of trade-off in how a system is designed to achieve the desired functionality and performance at scale. A bloom filter is one example of a probabilistic
I have a handful of helpers in my Home Assistant setup that track the basic state of a few things. For example, we have a simple "guest mode" boolean that will turn on or off certain automatons when we have guests, and for my bin reminder automation , I
When I first got my UniFi G4 Doorbell , I originally set up Home Assistant to announce, "There is someone at the door," using Amazon Alexa. More recently, I have transitioned to playing a chime sound on Alexa when someone rings the doorbell. In this blog post, I outline
Putting in place a successful monitoring solution goes far beyond just picking an appropriate tool (such as Icinga, Nagios, Zabbix, etc). The success and effectiveness of monitoring systems rely on how the tools are used and the culture and behaviour of the team that is responsible for monitoring a given
We have a wall-mounted dashboard for Home Assistant in our Kitchen , which displays what bin day it is via a coloured Mushroom UI icon . Where we live, like most other places in the UK, there are different coloured bins for different types of waste, and each week the rubbish
I have several home automations that run based on the day of the week. For example, there is no point opening the curtains or turning on the heating in my home office if I'm not going to be in there. As a result, most of these day-specific
Losing data sucks. If you've ever accidentally deleted something or had a hard disk fail, you'll know what I mean. This week, one of the disks in my HP Microserver failed. Fortunately, I haven't lost any data because I run the disk cluster in
In the winter months, I get spammed with false CCTV motion alerts. With the winter months being darker, headlights from passing traffic often cast shadows and silhouettes that cause the motion zones to trigger when nothing is really happening. I run a Ubiquiti home network with G3 cameras – if
During the COVID pandemic, I invested in improving my working-from-home setup with a better webcam and an Elgato Key Light . I usually control the Key Light using my Stream Deck (which was another lockdown purchase and project). Over the last few weeks, I've been working from
This week, I discovered that an automatic upgrade to v0.15 of AppDaemon did not go as planned. When I went to bed on Wednesday, I found the screen on the Sonoff NSPanel in our bedroom was still on and was reporting a time of ~16:00. There were a
Whilst breaking a large codebase into a series of smaller services seems logical, the reality is far from simple. You have to ask yourself if the overhead and complexity of moving to microservices is worth your team's time or if you could extract more value from your existing
I have been growing my home automation setup over the past two and a half years, and the setup has evolved to the point where I can keep an eye on the house using Home Assistant even when I'm away – provided that there isn't a