Zigbee to MQTT gateway for less than $10

It's been a few months since my post about Hubitat, and I have not been too happy with it. The MQTT bridge works, but sometimes things get out of sync. For example, if I turn the power on the Zigbee bulb off and then on again, I can't control the bulb through Home Assistant until I turn it on and off through Hubitat first. So I started my quest for an alternative. It costs almost nothing, so I decided to try out the CC2531 Zigbee stick.

Installing the Nelly Security WiFi Video Doorbell

Ever since Ring released their video doorbell a few years ago, I've been waiting for a WiFi video doorbell that didn't rely on the cloud (and a monthly fee), was powered by hard wire, and still looked decent. I've only had it for a few days, but I think that the Nelly Security doorbell accomplishes this. Unfortunately, it looks like the Nelly version is out of stock at the time of writing, but this doorbell has been rebranded by a bunch of other companies, one of which is Nelly.

Modify the Xiaomi Xiaofang Camera to Work With Home Assistant and Other Video Recording Software

I was looking for a simple and cheap Wifi camera that would work with Home Assistant and doesn’t rely solely on cloud recording since that can get expensive very quickly. In my search, I came across the Xiaomi Xiaofang camera. Although this camera is ‘cloud only’ by default, @samtap on GitHub has created FangHacks, which is a set of scripts that can be installed on the Xiaofang to enable RTSP, along with a bunch of other features. It will also show you how to add this into Home Assistant. This post will go through the steps involved in installing these modifications. Read more...

Using the Home Assistant Alert Component with Telegram Acknowledge

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.

WindyWire (Buzz Wire) Game Using a Wemos D1 Mini/ESP8266

I've seen these games around, and I wanted to make my own. The object is simple. The metal wand has a loop with a long windy wire going through it, and the object is to get from one end of the wire to the other, without touching the wand to the wire. It automatically detects when the game is starting and when it ends, and records the last time and record time. It also displays this information on the OLED display and it buzzes when the wire is touched.