I hooked up my front door lock to my z-wave network recently and wanted to setup some automations around it. One of the automations was to be a notification from home assistant if the lock was unlocked for more than some time period, with two actions on it, one to immediately lock the door, and the other to do nothing.
Continue reading “Actionable Notifications with Home Assistant”Installing Music Assistant on Home Assistant
I’ve been going down the route of researching and building out infrastructure for a home audio system, and the next stop on this is installing music assistant and checking out some of its features.
Continue reading “Installing Music Assistant on Home Assistant”Updating to HACS 2.0
HACS just released a new major version, with a large redesign using help from the Open Home Foundation. The install process for some major updates can have potential hiccups in it, however this one is very nice and easy to do. This is how I went about installing the update on my home assistant instance along with initial impressions of the new version.
Continue reading “Updating to HACS 2.0”Home Audio Plan
I’ve had an itch for years to get a whole home audio setup working, but I’ve always wanted to avoid the large cloud in the room thats normally there around these systems. I’m finally feeling to start working things out piece by piece to try and build a system intuitive to use and just works™.
Continue reading “Home Audio Plan”Home Assistant Markdown Cards
I have had XKCD comics in my home assistant dashboard for a while now, but never had the alt text or the title in the dashboard. I wasn’t entirely sure how to get those into the UI in a nice clean way (I’m not very good with the templates yet). I finally found the nice clean way to do it that should be pretty flexible to use in the future too, markdown cards.
Continue reading “Home Assistant Markdown Cards”Playing Music on a Tag Reader
The tag reader, and it’s relative the NFCDeck have piezo buzzers in them. These can be used to play monotone music via PWM signal from an ESP. As an addition to this, there’s a simple music file format from the early years of cellphones that’s also supported by this system. Combine these together and we have an interesting little music box.
Continue reading “Playing Music on a Tag Reader”ESP32 Bluetooth Proxy and BLE Tracking
I recently started using ESP32s for my projects, mostly out of necessity for the flash sizes and GPIO capabilities, but they do bring in another interesting feature I haven’t made use of yet, Bluetooth capabilities. Each ESP32 can be used by home assistant as a Bluetooth proxy and BLE tracker. It should be a simple addition to the ESPHome yaml too!
Continue reading “ESP32 Bluetooth Proxy and BLE Tracking”Proxmox Backup Server on Unraid
I’ve learned that the proxmox backup server can save a lot of space, and my vm backups are a large amount of storage on both my NAS and in my cloud backups. So I’m going to try setting up Proxmox backup server on docker in unraid to server as my Proxmox backup destination.
Continue reading “Proxmox Backup Server on Unraid”Upgrading my NextCloud to use Redis and fix Cron
I’ve had NextCloud installed for a while now and part of my core infrastructure, however it hasn’t been running well. I’ve always had issues getting the cron jobs to run and occasional problems with file locking in it. Recently the file locking problems got worse and I finally decided to fix both issues in one hopefully straightforward action.
Continue reading “Upgrading my NextCloud to use Redis and fix Cron”Max7219 display in esphome
I saw a really cool blanking panel for a server rack recently that used a bunch of LED displays to show information powered by an ESP and home assistant. I thought the displays were pretty cool and decided to get some and try them out. I may also have some ulterior motives with a project I’ve started working on as well.
Continue reading “Max7219 display in esphome”