Skylar Sadlier's blog about Home Automation, Programming, Technology, Rants, and Gaming.
Random packet loss and internet dropouts pushed me to build an automated monitoring system with Node-RED and Home Assistant. It tracks latency and packet loss across multiple endpoints and automatically reboots my modem when conditions degrade.
Control Home Assistant smart home directly from your Pebble smartwatch! This app uses WebSockets for real-time updates and control of your Home Assistant devices and entities.
I haven't posted in a while so figured I would start off with one of my weird side projects. There is an indie video game creator named Eric Hartman who goes by BadSpot online. He created Blockland and Age of Time . These games are special to me because
I've been using a self-hosted federated Matrix server for chatting with family members and recently deployed it for one of my clients and needed a decent way to administrate the server. This is where I decided to make node-red-contrib-matrix-chat to accomplish just this. node-red-contrib-matrix-chat Matrix chat server client
Currently I am building software in Symfony 5.2 and noticed that my remember me was not working correctly (many of my users kept complaining about getting logged out everyday). I debugged it and found that concurrent requests can actually break the remember me system because for some reason the
In application development you usually have migrations you run to pre-seed default application schema and data into the database (it is also used for updating and rolling back database changes). There is an issue if you use this approach with Fixtures though because Fixtures will automatically clear every table when
When working with code locally on your machine there are often times you need a public URL pointing to your local machine (such as webhooks). You could easily just open up the internet on your router and allow access to your local machine port but this is complicated, time consuming,
You've always been able to create custom components for Home Assistant by creating a custom_components folder inside your HA directory but did you know you can use this method to override default components that HA ships with? Using this method allows you to add, revert, or change
I've been building a bunch of Sync code for a CRM and custom website recently and needed a quick and efficient way to track what entities/fields actually got changed. This lead me to google to see if anyone else had a clever solution to this and it
Time tracking is essential for freelancers, small businesses, and other critical use cases. I have a full time job and do a bunch of consulting and programming on the side that I need to track. I also need a system that lets me generate nice invoices and track what has
I use MQTT for all of the sensors in my Home Automation setup. It runs on my home server and all of my devices/sensors connect to it to publish their data. I then have software like Home Assistant or Node-RED use this data for doing automations. I also log
I prefer to keep only active devices displaying in Home Assistant's front-end to keep things clean and was previously using Node-RED to accomplish this. Now with recent update's to Home Assistant's Lovelace interface we can do this all within Home Assistant by using Conditional
Lots of smart devices these days require you to use the cloud and have an active internet connection in order to use the device. This is pretty crazy because in my opinion my smart home shouldn't stop functioning just because the internet is down. Especially since the functionality
Having a quick view of triggered sensors can be extremely handy (such as if you forgot to close a door or want to know where motion is currently occurring). In this post I will show how I accomplished this using the Entity Filter card for the Lovelace Home Assistant front-end.
I recently added Redis as a cache for my Nextcloud instance to increase it's performance. This has mainly reduced MySQL database queries and cleared up some errors I was getting from hitting MySQL tables during locks. Although this post is written for Unraid users it can easily be