neon.ninja

18/06/202002/05/2022

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

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.

15/08/201915/08/2019

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.

18/07/201915/08/2019

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.

18/04/201931/10/2020

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.

12/03/201928/03/2022

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.

02/02/201931/10/2020

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?

17/01/201901/11/2021

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.