Home Automation with Home Assistant and ESP8266, 3D Printing, and other Technology
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.
I wrote about the Nelly WiFi Doorbell a little over a year ago. At first, I was pretty happy with it. But after a while, it needed to be reset a couple time and it would need a reboot every couple of weeks. It was just a pain to look after it. It’s probably still one of the best options if you require local recording. In my case, I would love to have local recording, but not with this much hassle. I suspect that there’s a chance that the issues may have been the fact that the transformer was 10VA, and that it may have need a little more juice. But I couldn’t find any details as to what it required. I didn’t feel like experimenting with it, so I decided to go with the Ring Pro.
I am currently paying around $27 a month for my monitored home security system. And that's just a system with 3 door sensors, 2 motion, and cellular/battery backup. It's just a dumb system with no connection to the Internet. I have to be at the one keypad to be able to arm it. When I learned Ring has a system that would only have a monthly fee of $10/mo or $100/yr, I decided to take a deep look into it. After a couple hours of reading, it seemed like a no-brainer.
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
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.