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”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.
Continue reading “ESPHome’s fan-tastic rescue”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.
Continue reading “Taking the old ceiling fan for a smart spin”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.
Continue reading “Illuminated Stairs”Home Network – Home Server
I have had a server at home for more than 20 years. This all started as a simple router back when my flatmate and I got a copper leased line back to the ISP’s office we were working for and used 56kbit/s US Robotics modems on both ends for a permanent Internet connection.
A bit later the home server morphed into a file server and media server setup, and in recent years has become more important for home automation.
Continue reading “Home Network – Home Server”Home Network – Design Overview
In the following article I will provide a high-level overview of my network design, some details on the physical network devices I picked, and a few more implementation details.
Continue reading “Home Network – Design Overview”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.
Continue reading “All Green Lights on Cable Modem Connection Status”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.
Continue reading “Smarter Swimming Pool 5: Under the Surface”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?
Continue reading “Fire Danger Rating”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.
Continue reading “Hold your Breath for this Air Quality Sensor”