Don’t know what to get your loved one for the holidays? Just starting to get into DIY electronics and Home Automation and wondering what to ask for? Today, I’m highlighting some of my favorite tools and products that would be great for any DIYer or Home Automation enthusiast.
Everything I’m recommending I’ve used and owned myself. I’ve purposely chosen tools and products in a range of price ranges to make it easy to choose something in your budget.
Today I’ve got another Z-Wave product from Zooz that I’m trying out and setting up. It’s the Zooz Z-Wave Plus Power Strip (ZEN20) that features 5 outlet ports and 2 USB ports. I’ll be setting up the device in Home Assitant in our nursery to control a lamp, white noise machine, and humidifier. My goal … [Read more…]
Running your own private MQTT broker on your local network? This is great for all your local Home Automation devices but would about things that are outside your network? Apps like OwnTracks can communicate your GPS to an MQTT broker but you’ll need to open up your network to the outside.
Today’s article details a hybrid-cloud solution using an external MQTT broker in conjunction with a private MQTT broker running on your local network. Home Assistant (or any Home Automation platform) can subscribe to topics on your local MQTT broker while still receiving messages from the external one.
Ever get an expensive power bill and want to know what appliance was the culprit? Maybe you want to learn how much an appliance is costing you? In today’s article, I show how you can use the Zooz Z-Wave Plus Power Switch with Home Assistant, InfluxDB and Grafana to track and plot an appliance’s energy usage and cost. The result is an easy to digest Grafana dashboard you can use to track what time of day your appliances are consuming the most energy and how much it’s costing you!
I’m using Z-Wave in this article, but feel free to substitute for whatever protocol your Home Automation setup is using. As long as you can get energy measurements for an appliance into Home Assistant you should be good to go!
Ever wanted to be alerted when an appliance has been on for too long? What about switch a device on and off from your phone or through an automation? This is the perfect application for a smart switch! Today I’m going to be looking at the Zooz Z-Wave Plus Power Switch (ZEN15) and integrating it with Home Assistant with notifications.
There are a ton of smart home switches on Amazon. I have invested in a Z-Wave Plus mesh network in my house, so I went searching for a great Z-Wave Plus switch that measures energy usage. Z-Wave communication is all local so you don’t need to rely on any cloud service being up or any companies taking your data. It also works at a lower frequency band (908 MHz) than WiFi. So it won’t cause congestion on your 2.4 GHz wireless spectrum at your home that your WiFi and Bluetooth devices already use. If you’re interested in Z-Wave Plus check out my article on Adding a Z-Wave Plus Dimmer Switch to Home Assistant.
Part of your house not covered by your current WiFi Network? Have an old access point or router laying around that you’re not using? Even though today’s routers are more powerful than ever, you still may have dead zones at your house. I enjoy listening to music and podcasts while working in my garage and … [Read more…]
Continuing off of my post from last week creating a WiFi Connected RGB LED Strip, I’m adding a new effect: music visualization. The goals of the project are:
LED light strips can make a great accent to your desk, TV, kitchen or elsewhere in your home. Wouldn’t it be great to build one that can be controlled over WiFi? How about making cool animations that go with a holiday, sports team or time of day. Today, I’m giving my implementation of a WiFi Connected RGB LED Strip that you can use to add some lights and fun to your home.
Do you have any home servers running on your network? Maybe some Raspberry Pis? Wouldn’t it be great to know how they are all performing at any given time? Receive an alert when disk space is running low? Today’s article is going to focus on Glances, a cross-platform monitoring tool for your systems. Our objective is … [Read more…]
Ever wanted to interact with your Home Assistant configuration when you’re not on the network? Want to run Home Assistant services and automations? The solution may be to create a telegram bot for Home Assistant.
A bot allows you to interact with your Home Assistant instance over a messaging platform. You can send custom commands to your bot to run automations, services and query different sensors in your setup. Today’s article goes through the installation and configuration steps to get a Telegram bot working in Home Assistant.