I have a number of Tasmota powered CloudFree smart plugs in my house. They’ve been working great for years now, however since they are Wi-Fi, I wanted some way to be able to update them quickly (not having to log into each of them myself and install updates). I ended up on the TasmoAdmin addon for home assistant which provides the ability to update devices in bulk.
Continue reading “TasmoAdmin and Updating CloudFree Smart Plugs”Adding WLED Previews to Home Assistant Dashboards
I found out recently about the webpage card in home assistant and how it can be used to add a WLED live view to your home assistant dashboard. Not only that, but its pretty simple to do as well!
Continue reading “Adding WLED Previews to Home Assistant Dashboards”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.
Continue reading “Setting up Zigbee in Home Assistant on Proxmox”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).
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).
Continue reading “Updating my IOT Devices”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.
Continue reading “Using IKEA pm2.5 Air Quality Sensors in Home Assistant”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.
Continue reading “Fixing the Unifi MDNS Repeater”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.
Continue reading “Renaming ESP Devices in ESPHome”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.
Continue reading “Using Z-Wave Groups vs Home Assistant Automations”Enabling the Home Assistant API
The home assistant API can be used to build external tools to manipulate information in home assistant and control elements in it. This can be useful for triggering automations with custom code. It can even be triggered using curl on linux, allowing for simple scripts executing home assistant actions.
Continue reading “Enabling the Home Assistant API”