Sharing enlightening moments of home automation
Four years ago I bought a Kaadas K8 smart lock and now I am replacing it with one from a different manufacturer. The following review is based on my own experience with the lock and somewhat anecdotal, and I hope it helps others when going on the journey to find and assess a suitable smart door lock.
Continue reading “Smart Lock – Kaadas K8 Post Mortem”
I have recently found myself building a small indoor greenhouse as a prototype for a bigger one in the future. I am not a gardening expert myself, but I couldn’t resist in using some smart home technologies in this in-house commissioned project.
Continue reading “Gleaming Greenhouse Guide”
A subfloor ventilation system is probably something that most people get installed, configured and then forget about. And in many cases that might be fine, but if you had the opportunity, wouldn’t it be better to take more control over such a system? I decided to do exactly that and control the ventilation system based on environmental sensors.
Continue reading “Subfloor Ventilation Made Easy”
My old pool chlorinator motor broke and instead of forking out another $600 on an overpriced pool accessory I decided to fix it using a new reduction gear motor, connect it to an ESP and control dosing liquid chlorine via Home Assistant.
Continue reading “Smarter Swimming Pool 6: Chlorinator”
IKEA is selling their air quality sensor VINDRIKTNING for some time now and it finally arrived here in Australia. I bought my own device a couple of months ago with the plan to modify and integrate it into Home Assistant. Some clever people have already done all the heavy lifting and there is a thread in the Home Assistant forum where people share what they have done.
Continue reading “Yet Another Vindriktning Modification Tale”
Still holding your breath after building your outside air quality sensor? Well, here comes the sequel where you are going to learn how to build a really simple but powerful indoor air quality sensor and how to process and present the sensor readings in Home Assistant.
Continue reading “Breathe better with this Indoor Air Quality Sensor”
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.
Continue reading “Winter is coming – Local Control for Smart Panel Heater”
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”