How to – Page 3 – Systems Lab

January 16, 2023January 7, 2023

Setting up Zigbee in Home Assistant on Proxmox

I have Z-Wave setup on my home assistant and a reasonable network of devices. I haven’t been able to find some types of devices using Z-Wave however, only on ZigBee, so it is time to setup another radio in home assistant.

January 9, 2023December 4, 2022

Converting STL to STEP

Catia is my CAD of choice for most things, mostly because it’s what I know best. It however doesn’t have great support for STL files. We’ll be using FreeCAD to convert them to STEP files which Catia supports well. First we want to open our STL file with FreeCAD.

January 2, 2023December 4, 2022

Z-Wave Firmware Updates in HASS

I may be a bit late to the story, but home assistant now has the ability to update Z-Wave device firmwares. This is good for keeping IOT devices more secure and eliminate bugs in the devices. The updates show up in the same list in the settings menu as add-on upgrades and home assistant core updates.

Though there isn’t much in the update details for my GE switches, the update did improve the responsiveness of the physical switch, now button press to light change is much faster (minimal lag) than before the update (maybe 500ms lag).

August 8, 2022February 17, 2023

Updating my IOT Devices

Keeping IOT devices up to date is a hard task, since they come in all sorts of different ecosystems, software projects, companies, etc. I run all FOSS IOT devices in order to avoid the problem with proprietary software and companies going out of business. In this, I’ll go over how I’m keeping my 3 types of devices up to date (ESPHome, WLED, and Tasmota).

August 1, 2022March 4, 2023

Using IKEA pm2.5 Air Quality Sensors in Home Assistant

I’ve been doing research on making some custom air quality sensors for inside and outside my house. The laser cutter is a main focus point for these as it would be nice to know how it affects air quality (and in the future, maybe activate an air filter based off the sensors readings). When I found out IKEA makes some simple air quality sensors that can be easily hacked using an ESP device, I decided to try it out.

July 25, 2022July 23, 2022

Fixing the Unifi MDNS Repeater

I managed to get MDNS working earlier this year to enable my ESPHome projects to avoid having all static IP addresses and let home assistant auto-detect them. However… after some firewall tweaking recently, it all broke. So it was time again to figure out how to get MDNS to work in the Unifi system.

July 11, 2022June 6, 2022

Enabling Quick Sync For Plex on Unraid

Quick sync is a great way to handle hardware transcoding in plex, and also comes on most intel CPUs, so using it becomes more a why wouldn’t you question. In my plex installation, I hadn’t even realized that I was leaving this performance on the table, so here’s how I enabled it and got it to run.

July 4, 2022April 30, 2022

Catia V5 Shortcut Keys

I’ve had an 8 key macro pad on my desk for a while now and haven’t been making very good use of it. Since I’ve been doing a bit more CAD work, why not setup some macros for CATIA.

June 27, 2022April 16, 2022

Renaming ESP Devices in ESPHome

I recently started trying out the ESPHome Add-On in home assistant. With this, I was able to add and upgrade some ESP devices, however I soon realized after adding one of them, that the auto-generated name may not be wanted (or if you’re moving a device around and want a new name). So I did some research and worked out the process for renaming the device in ESPHome.

June 20, 2022April 6, 2022

Using Z-Wave Groups vs Home Assistant Automations

I installed two Z-wave switches into my house that i wanted to be synchronized, turn on one light switch, have the other turn on too, and vice versa. I first created a home assistant automation that worked using Z-Wave JS to MQTT, this worked but had a lag of a few seconds. I was hoping to find a way to have less latency to make everything work, so in comes Z-Wave Group Associations.