Home Automation with Home Assistant and ESP8266
Recently, Amazon was selling the refurbished Fire 7 tablet for less than $40. The new one runs for juts $10 more. So I figured I would order it and see if it would be an option. After spending an hour with it, I felt confident that I can make it work. I’ve been running it for a couple weeks at the time of writing, and it’s been awesome.
So as someone that has a blog that mainly has posts that either relate to the ESP8266 or Home Assistant, I feel like I should have been using ESPHome a long time ago
I had recently put Sengled Zigbee bulbs in my nightstand lamps to pair with Zigbee2MQTT on Home Assistant. I was using them to automatically turn the lights off/on when playing/pausing a movie on the TV. However, we found ourselves cutting power to the night stand to turn them off since pulling out our phone to turn them off was too much of a hassle. So when they had no power, the automation for those bulbs wouldn't work unless I manually turned them back on. Not an ideal situation.
Use an Echo Button to Toggle Devices On and Off via Home Assistant.
Setup Hubitat and link it with Home Assistant via MQTT. Along with a mini Hubitat review.
In my Last Post I talked about doing a physical installation of some Z-Wave thermostats. In this post, I’m going to talk about what I had to go through to get an Aeotec Z-Stick Gen5 working with Home Assistant running on Lubuntu. I was actually surprised how easy everything was; I had no idea that Home Assistant’s Z-Wave integration was so well done.
NOTE: If you are replacing a thermostat, be sure to cut power to the board on your furnace that powers the thermostat. I made the mistake of just turning off the breaker labeled ‘AC’. The board still had power. As I was replacing the first thermostat, I must have shorted wires, which is likely to happen to most people. Lucky for me, this simply burned the fuse
This is an update to my post about the Garage Door Notification which was based on my Wifi Garage Door Controller .About a week after my post about sending a repeating notification through Home Assistant, the developers created a new 'Alert' component that basically made my post obsolete. So I decided to switch over to the Alert component and add some extra features.
After installing my Garage Door Controller, I wanted my next project to be something cooler. Of course, there’s nothing cooler than a smart gas fireplace.
Here is a list of things you will need to get started:
This blog post builds on my last post about the Wemos D1 Mini Garage Door Controller.
Sending a notification via Home Assistant is a simple process, and it is mostly well documented. However, I had trouble finding a solution that repeatedly sends a notification about a device state until that state changes. In this case, I wanted something to notify me when my garage door is open for a while, and then continue sending me notifications every 30 minutes until it’s closed.