Home Automation

28/05/202113/08/2021

Winter is coming – Local Control for Smart Panel Heater

Two winters ago in 2019 I bought an Arlec smart panel heater from Bunnings and finally took some time to integrate it into Home Assistant. Luckily it was old enough so that tuya convert worked without any problems. Initially I thought the heater would have the usual ESP-MCU combination built in, so I tried going with a ESPHome firmware and the Tuya MCU component. Unfortunately any attempts to talk to the MCU were unsuccessful, and I decided to switch to Tasmota which turned out to be the right choice for this device.

09/01/202127/09/2021

Sparkling Lights – WS2812B fairy light with WLED

With many of my neighbours putting up their decorative light shows for Christmas I was wondering if there would be something new on the market to replace the old solar powered fairy lights on our terrace which were cheap but kept dying every other year or so.

So, I found a WS2812B based fairy string light which promised to be IP65 rated at a reasonable price.

01/11/202001/11/2020

Fire Danger Rating component now on HACS

If you have been using my Fire Danger Rating custom component, thanks for your interest. As summer is approaching quickly and with it another bushfire season, I decided to publish a new version of this custom component and also make it available for the Home Assistant Community Store (HACS).

08/10/202017/03/2021

Working from Home – Teams Availability

In this post I am going to explain how I make my status in Microsoft Teams running on my work laptop available in Home Assistant.

18/06/202007/12/2020

RF Bridge the Gap to make another Ceiling Fan smart

When we bought a new Brilliant Bahama ceiling fan for the living room recently, style was deemed more important than an easy home automation integration. The fan came with an RF remote control , so I thought to give the RF route a go to integrate this ceiling fan into Home Assistant for local control.

09/06/202031/10/2020

ESPHome’s fan-tastic rescue

After successfully retrofitting a smart fan controller onto an older ceiling fan, it was time to install and upgrade more ceiling fans around the house. In this post I am describing how I integrated a Brilliant Bahama smart ceiling fan into Home Assistant, and in the next post I am going to show how I integrated a ceiling fan using Sonoff’s RF controller.

30/12/201906/09/2021

Taking the old ceiling fan for a smart spin

I have recently bought a Brilliant Smart WiFi Ceiling Fan Controller for a bedroom ceiling fan in our house. This is a Tuya device but I wanted to avoid signing up to the Tuya cloud service to operate my ceiling fan under all circumstances. In this article I just wanted to share a few learnings and observations.

28/09/201931/10/2020