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.
homeassistant
Monitor Your Systems with Glances and Home Assistant
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…]
Create Telegram Bot for Home Assistant
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.
DIY Bed Presence Detection in Home Assistant
Ever want to create an automation around someone sitting on a chair or laying in bed? Using an ESP8266, load cells, an MQTT broker and Home Assistant you can create a DIY weight sensor attached to your bed to form a smart bed! This that will allow you to detect these events and trigger automations.
While you could use this to accurately measure the weight of something, I’m focused on detecting presence on a piece of furniture. You can use this data to create automations based on where people are currently located in your home.
Some hardware you’ll need:
Start Docker Compose using systemd on Debian
How do you start up your multi-container application? Lots of the time these multi-container setups have dependencies between them and you need to start them in a specific order? How can you get this done automatically on bootup? Today I’m going over how to use Docker Compose and systemd to automatically launch all your containers in the correct order on bootup leveraging systemd on a Debian host.
So if you’ve got an MQTT broker (or another service) that must start up before your Home Assistant service and you’re already using Docker Compose this is an article for you! This method works great on a Raspberry Pi but should also work on anything using systemd as the initilization system.
Home Assistant Notification Showdown
Notifications are an important part of a Home Automation platform. Users typically want to get alerted when things happen and there are various degrees of importance for notifications. Right now in Home Assistant 0.76.2 there are 60 different notification platforms! In this post I’m going to review several different notification platforms supported in Home Assistant. You probably don’t want an email when your garage door doesn’t close but an email might make sense for a weekly electricity usage report, I’ll go over some use cases for each type of notification.
We’re an Android household so this review is coming from that perspective, if you’re using iOS there is a Home Assistant iOS App that supports notifications that I’ve heard good things about. You may also find some of the other notification platforms discussed in this post to be useful to supplement.
DIY Smart Garage Door Opener
My wife and I use the garage every day to go in and out our house. Wouldn’t you like to automatically make sure your garage door is closed at night? Or know the status of it when you’re away from the house? Today I’m going to use some inexpensive electronics to turn your standard garage door into a “smart” garage door. This design still keeps all the original functionality of your garage door intact, you won’t have to use an app or website to open the garage door, it just brings the garage door into the digital world.
For this project, we’re going to hook up an ESP8266 to our garage door opener to control over Home Assistant using MQTT. Some hardware you’ll need for this project:
From a software perspective, you’re going to need Home Assistant running with an MQTT broker and an ESP8266 running MicroPython. Check out these blog posts for setting those up:
Setting up MQTT Broker for DIY Home Assistant Sensors
I’m planning on creating some DIY sensors and switches across my house (more on that in future posts!) and was looking for a good way to communicate over WiFi with them from Home Assistant. If you’ve never heard of MQTT it is described as a “publish-subscribe-based messaging protocol that works on top of TCP/IP”. It … [Read more…]
Add a Z-Wave+ Dimmer Switch to Home Assistant
Automating your lights are a great place to get started with Home Automation. In today’s article, I replaced a traditional light switch with a Z-Wave Plus dimmer switch (GE 14294). Using Home Assistant, my lights automatically dim when someone starts playing content on the Chromecast in my Living Room after sunset. We find it useful to have a very dim light on during the movie so that we can still get up without stepping on stuff and still be able to see what we’re eating.
Some supplies I used:
- Z-Wave Plus Dimmer Switch from GE. Model 14294.
- Dimmable Light Bulbs (I used these)
- Ideal Connectors (optional, but these make it easier)
- A Z-Wave Plus Hub (I use the Aeotec Z-Stack Gen 5)
Visualizing Data using Grafana
Grafana is a really powerful tool used throughout the tech industry to visualize time series data. It’s open source software that allows you to create visual dashboards comprised of panels so that you can view and analyze your data. People frequently use it to monitor the health of their network and connected devices but in our setting, we can visualize any data we collect via Home Assistant.
Check out my last article on setting up InfluxDB to learn about a time series database and how to set one up.