Sharing enlightening moments of home automation
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.
Continue reading “Sparkling Lights – WS2812B fairy light with WLED”
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).
Continue reading “Fire Danger Rating component now on HACS”
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.
Continue reading “Working from Home – Teams Availability”
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.
Continue reading “RF Bridge the Gap to make another Ceiling Fan smart”
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.
Continue reading “ESPHome’s fan-tastic rescue”
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.
Continue reading “Taking the old ceiling fan for a smart spin”
This project is a simple IKEA hack that I wanted to share because it just looks great. The lights are integrated into Home Assistant and are fully automated – no light switch necessary.
Continue reading “Illuminated Stairs”
While I am still waiting to be connected to the NBN I have had quite a few shorter outages on my existing cable Internet connection, and wanted to improve the way Home Assistant recognises and deals with the loss of connectivity.
Continue reading “All Green Lights on Cable Modem Connection Status”
My ESP8266 based device that is measuring water temperature, water level and liquid chlorine level is happily running for quite some time now.
However, the eco-system around Home Assistant and ESP has evolved, and I just wanted to quickly share how that has changed the setup of my smart swimming pool.
Continue reading “Smarter Swimming Pool 5: Under the Surface”
Each time I drive past our local fire station I see that fire danger rating sign and take a quick look. Wouldn’t it be great to have this information right in your favourite home automation system?
Continue reading “Fire Danger Rating”