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Migrating Home Assistant from Raspberry Pi3 to a Raspberry Pi4

Migrating Home Assistant from Raspberry Pi3 to a Raspberry Pi4

My Home Assistant instance has been on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ for the last three years. In that time, it has been a reliable platform. I have read lots of horror stories on the various forums about failing SD Cards, but I have been using the same 64 gig card

WLED Powered LED Strips and Home Assistant.

WLED Powered LED Strips and Home Assistant.

Ever since watching DrZz’s video on WLED Christmas lights I have wanted to take the plunge and try them out. Then my son asked for a Loft Bed which gave me the perfect place to try them. If you want a good primer on WLED and all your LED

Zigbee2Mqtt and OTA Device Firmware Updates

Zigbee2Mqtt and OTA Device Firmware Updates

A while back I migrated off of Smartthings to Zigbee2Mqtt so that I could have local control of my Zigbee devices. I haven’t looked back. So I was caught off guard when I was scrolling through my states page (as we all do right?…or Im the only one?

Swapping out DuckDNS For Cloudflare

Swapping out DuckDNS For Cloudflare

This is a repost of an article I posted on Medium. I have given it a slight edit to update it with my current config and published it here as part of my efforts to consolidate my Home Assistant content A while back I decided to simplify my Home Assistant

Where We Are Going, We Need Dog Mode

Where We Are Going, We Need Dog Mode

If you have read my post on My Three Laws of Home Automation or my two part series on How I Secured my Home Using Home Assistant it won’t be a surprise that I designed my Home Assistant security system around not having to physically interact with it. It

How I Secured My Home Using Home Assistant - Part Two

How I Secured My Home Using Home Assistant - Part Two

As I mentioned in Part One of this series, I prioritized my Home Assistant based security system around letting us know when there was an intrusion. It was important that the system let any intruders know their presence was known, and to make sure that we could respond whether we

How I Secured My Home Using Home Assistant - Part One

How I Secured My Home Using Home Assistant - Part One

I’m going to say something that might be unpopular…Residential Monitored Security Systems are a waste of money. Don’t @ me. Just kidding. If you think I am wrong I would love to hear why. Because I might actually be wrong. But before you do let me bring you

Migrating from the Darksky API to NWS Weather API (Updated)

Migrating from the Darksky API to NWS Weather API (Updated)

Apple’s recent purchase of Darksky means the API that many of use have been using for weather information is shutting down. I first saw it from @CCOSTAN’s retweet (if you are not following him you should): Or from Darksky’s own blog post. Technically we currently have until

Migrating from Hassbian to Home Assistant (Formally Known as Hassio)

Migrating from Hassbian to Home Assistant (Formally Known as Hassio)

I’m sure you have heard the news by now. Hassbian was sunsetted…sunset..sunsettered…anyway…the last update to the image was back in Q4 of 2019. So that means it was time for me to migrate to Hassio….I mean Home Assistant. In-between me actually doing this migration

How I Turned My House into Disney's Haunted Mansion using Home Assistant

How I Turned My House into Disney's Haunted Mansion using Home Assistant

If you haven’t guess from the topic of this article we are Disney fans in this house. I mean Annual Passholder Card Carrying Disney fans. So after getting Home Assistant setup to automate the house I decided I could use the platform to do a little Disney Imagineering. Now

My Three Laws of Home Automation

My Three Laws of Home Automation

I’ve seen a lot of comments and articles and videos about how the current standard in home automation isn’t really automation. And they are right. It is closer to remote control than full automation. What I want is something that is closer to J.A.R.V.I.

Welcome to JS Home Automation!

Welcome to JS Home Automation!

I’ve decided to get a little more focused on producing content around Home Automation. I’ve dabbled in some Youtube videos, and posted How-To’s on Medium and my own hosted site, but I decided I would try to get more organized. I’m going to focus on writing

My Custom Alpha Vantage Integration for Home Assistant

My Custom Alpha Vantage Integration for Home Assistant

I recently added the Alpha Vantage component to my Home Assistant setup, and quickly realized it wasn’t going to meet my needs. First off there appears to be a pretty critical bug with the component that severely hampers the built in components usability. You can read about it at

My Home Assistant Configuration (v4)

In the last couple of weeks I have been furiously working on my home-assisstant.io config, and have recently migrated my Github repo to the new version. Previous versions are archived as branches for those that want to see where things have been. With each release Home Assistant gets better