smart home – Page 3 – Systems Lab

December 25, 2023December 7, 2023

Blinking Zooz Light Switch

I installed some new z-wave light switches recently and when working on one of them, I encountered a very peculiar problem, the light would turn on for one second, then flash off and back on again, repeating this constantly. I was unsure what was going on since I thought I had wired the switch correctly.

The switch box had 3 wires, 2 going up and out one side, and a third going up and out the other. This was in a closet with 2 lights in it, so I figured the two were for the lights and the third was for the incoming power. I was quite wrong. The two were for the incoming power (incoming power and the rest of that breaker) and the third was for the two overhead lights.

With it wired up correctly this time, the switch turned on and off correctly, no flashing on and off. I hadn’t seen a smart switch do this before, but now I know it was from receiving the line and the load.

November 13, 2023November 5, 2023

Making LED Acrylic Signs

Now that I have a CO2 laser available, it opens up some new things that I can do, like cutting and engraving clear acrylic. Adding some side lighting to that and we can make a pretty sweet sign. I also plan on making a few more of these for gifts, so this first one is my experiment piece to try out all the techniques needed.

November 6, 2023November 6, 2023

NFC Tag Readers in Home Assistant

This is the first step in my home audio setup. I need an easy way to select music to play from my collection, and having EspDeck buttons for each choice would end up being a bit too clumsy. I plan on making some tag readers and a small collection of NFC tags for the various bands, playlist, etc available.

September 25, 2023August 14, 2023

IR Remote with WLED

I do small experiments from time to time to try out features or functionality before building them into a project (or project design even). In this case I wanted to try out the IR functionality in WLED for a project that may not have WiFi for access to the full fledged WLED feature set.

September 21, 2023September 26, 2023

Adding the Bambu Lab X1C to Home Assistant

Since setting up my pair of Bambu Labs X1 Carbons, I’ve been itching to get the data off the onboard computer and into home assistant. I don’t need Home Assistant to control the machine, but being able to monitor it and notify me of anything is absolutely something I want (and maybe turn on air filters when they’re running or other actions).

September 18, 2023August 1, 2023

EspHome Device Randomly Disconnects from Wi-Fi

While I built my Air Gradients a while ago, there was a bug with their wifi connections that I’ve been chasing for a while. They drop off the network and don’t reconnect, forcing me to hard reboot them by cutting power to get them to reconnect. I think I’ve finally figured how to get them to at least be mildly stable and keep them from disconnecting for days at a time.

September 11, 2023August 1, 2023

unRAID API and Home Assistant

In a drive to add more things to home assistant, I found the unRAID API. This container provides unRAID server information to home assistant via MQTT. I figured this could be interesting to add to my stack, and potentially pretty useful in the long run, so I decided to get it going.

May 15, 2023August 18, 2023

Using ntfy.sh from Home Assistant

While surfing Reddit one day I ran across a post about Unified Push and setting up ones own self hosted push notification system. A push notification system that can be self hosted and isn’t owned by any of the big tech companies, which I’m all for. So I decided to test it out by setting up home assistant notifications through it. While here I won’t be installing and setting up my own ntfy.sh server right now, I will probably be doing that part in the future.

May 1, 2023February 12, 2023

Network Layout

Here is a rough guide of how I have my network laid out. I haven’t really documented it before, so hopefully this covers the major points. I use a number of VLANS in my network to keep the IOT devices from being security threats, and prevent security devices from being able to access the internet (like security cameras).

I will write up a longer guide later on when I have some time, for now the short of it. The hardware is mostly Unifi gear with a Unifi controller running on my Proxmox host. This is the same host I run home assistant on (all virtual machines). The Unifi controller lets me configure my whole network in one pane of glass, its a bit of a pain at times, but for me the convenience has outweighed the higher price and limitations so far.

April 24, 2023February 12, 2023

Fixing network problems in HASS

Recently I have been working on fixing the configuration issues in my home assistant installation. I run the supervised mode on an Ubuntu VM that I setup myself with some scripts (since it’s not supported by the official installer). Due to this, I encountered a problem with network manager in home assistant that caused home assistant to lose Internet access (so unable to download updates) even though the VM has no problems accessing the Internet as a whole.