Blog – Page 6 – Systems Lab

February 6, 2023February 12, 2023

TasmoAdmin and Updating CloudFree Smart Plugs

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.

January 30, 2023December 17, 2022

Using DeepNest and LightBurn to Optimize Laser Cutting

DeepNest is a software package to optimize part placement in laser cutting designs. It works out very well for maximizing your usage of material and avoiding unnecessary waste. I’ve started using it combined with Boxes.py in order to part out wooden boxes and position them onto sheets to try and maximize the number of boxes fitting.

January 23, 2023December 4, 2022

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!

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.