Tag: homeassistant
Should you buy smart home tech from supermarkets?
Look, it's a blog post where the title is a question, and therefore, as per Betteridge's law of headlines, the short answer is 'no'. But that wouldn't make for a very interesting blog post, and so I'll attempt to offer some more nuance. Most supermarkets, and many discount stores like B&M, have a hardware section...
Creating a bedtime button in Home Assistant
To help our ten-year-old get to sleep, we play some sleepy music in their bedroom each night. I've now automated this, using Home Assistant and a Zigbee scene button, so a single button press starts the automation and plays the correct Spotify playlist. Here's how I went about it. The button I bought the button...
Home Assistant, Thread & Matter Across Multiple VLANs
Almost every "get Thread/Matter working with Home Assistant" guide ends with the same shrug: "just put all your IoT stuff on the same VLAN as Home Assistant." And sure — that works, and is almost definitely the easier alternative. It also throws away the entire reason a lot of us segment our networks in the first place. My smart home gear is exactly the pile of cheap, chatty, questionably-updated devices I most want to keep away from my main LAN.
Surfacing Home Assistant Voice Timers on a Custom Display
I've been building a little Stream-Deck-style control panel for my desk that talks to Home Assistant (future more in-depth blog post coming soon). However, I wanted to put out this potentially helpful tidbit first.
Controlling multi-colour lights with WLED
WLED is custom firmware for controlling multi-colour LED lights. It's designed for string lights, with lots of individual LEDs that can be controlled independently. I've recently given it a try for the first time. ESP devices WLED runs on Espressif's ESP32 and ESP8266 chips (although the latter isn't recommended for new installs). That means it's...
When URLs go IRL: AKA The only way I'm letting my kid near YouTube
I built a system that allows my 3-year-old to select videos from a printed binder using a cheap QR code scanner. No remote, no distracting thumbnails, no YouTube app at all! Here's what I did.
HomeAssistant RaspberryPi 4
Quick wrap up of how to install HomeAssistant on a fresh RaspberryPi OS (32-bit) install.