homeautomation

OpenZWave (beta) for Home Assistant

New OpenZWave (beta) for Home Assistant

If you’re a Z-Wave user and been following the latest Home Assistant news, you might have noticed a new “OpenZWave (beta)” integration that keeps getting mentioned. This Home Assistant integration aims to improve the Z-Wave experience within Home Assistant by controlling your Z-Wave network over MQTT. In today’s article I’m going to be discussing how … [Read more…]

Create Your Own WiFi Connected RGB LED Strips

WiFi Connected RGB LED Strip

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.

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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:

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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:

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