Home Automation

18/06/202019/06/2020

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.

09/06/202015/06/2020

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.

30/12/201915/06/2020

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.

28/09/201922/11/2019

Illuminated Stairs

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.

18/04/201918/04/2019

All Green Lights on Cable Modem Connection Status

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.

12/03/201903/06/2019

Smarter Swimming Pool 5: Under the Surface

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.

02/02/201931/03/2019

Fire Danger Rating

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?

17/01/201919/11/2019

Hold your Breath for this Air Quality Sensor

Recently I discovered the luftdaten.info project that provides a simple blueprint for measuring particulate matter, and in this post I am sharing how I built and set up my own device and integrated it into Home Assistant.

14/03/201818/03/2019

Smarter Swimming Pool 4: Liquid Chlorine Level

My pool requires a regular influx of liquid chlorine that is stored in a large drum next to the automated chlorinator. Every couple of weeks I have to replenish that drum, otherwise the chlorine concentration in the pool water gets too low, and algae starts growing resulting in green-ish pool water. Needless to say, this has already happened a couple of times in the past and each time I had to pour in more chemicals to clean up the mess and wait a few days until the water was clean again.

10/11/201718/03/2019

Smarter Swimming Pool 3: Water Level

Water disappears from an outdoor swimming pool over time – naturally through evaporation or through a small leak in a pipe that is hard to detect. To some degree rain helps to balance the pool water level, but sometimes you will have to top up manually. If your pool is constructed like mine, then if the water is below a certain level, the pool pump will be unable to pull enough water, and instead you get air into the pipes with unwanted consequences. Filtering water is not working efficiently anymore, the cleaning robot might stop, the pump might be damaged (water cools it down).