My Experience with ESPHome on Home Assistant Using and ESP32 Camera/Motion Module
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
Using the Xiaomi Aqara buttons with Home Assistant via Zigbee2MQTT
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.
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.
Toggle Lights and Switches with an Amazon Echo Button
Use an Echo Button to Toggle Devices On and Off via Home Assistant.
First Experience with Hubitat and Bridging it with Home Assistant via MQTT
Setup Hubitat and link it with Home Assistant via MQTT. Along with a mini Hubitat review.
Using a Z-Wave USB Stick with Home Assistant
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.
Installing a Smart/Connected Thermostat
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
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.
WiFi Controlled Car with a Self Hosted HTML/JS Joystick Using a Wemos D1 Mini/ESP8266
The most recent project I decided to work on was a line following robot. However, as I was testing it to make sure the direction code was working, I decided to develop something that I can control from my smartphone. It turned out much better than I was expecting, so I figured I should make a blog post about it.