Home Automation with Home Assistant and ESP8266
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 .
So 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:
Software that you will need:
I created a gallery of all the images for this project in case anyone needs a closer look at any of the wiring.
NOTE: Although the stuff in this post should still work, the HA devs put out an ‘Alert’ component shortly after I wrote this that does pretty much the same thing. I’ve created an updated post about it HERE. I am going to leave this post up as I feel that it might still be useful to accomplish other tasks.
I decided I wanted to be able to control my garage door using my phone. After some research, I decided to use an ESP8266 based Wemos D1 Mini and Home Assistant.
Here are the parts that will be needed:
Software Requirements:
I’m going to assume that Home Assistant, MQTT, and Arduino IDE are all setup. There are plenty of guides out there on how to set those up. If anyone reading this does need help with any of that, feel free to post a comment.