Back at the 2020 Home Assistant Conference, the Home Assistant team announced Home Assistant Blue. The perfect platform to run Home Assistant on. And while the question of perfection is based on your specific used case, I do think Blue has some magic that will make it easier for new users to get started. Home… Continue reading My Review of Home Assistant Blue
My smart home journey has not always been smooth. In fact there have been times my great ideas didn’t quite work out. And by not quite work out, I mean the automation or script I built had a mind of its own and turning it off required fumbling through the developers tools panel while trying… Continue reading Improve Home Assistant User Experience With Helpers
Getting started in Home Automation can be risky. First, there is all the smart home protocols like Zwave, Zigbee, Wifi, RF, X10, and no clear winner. Second, everyone these days seems to be building a hub or platform to control your Smart Home Tech. Thankfully there are lots of platforms that support most if not… Continue reading Try Home Assistant While Running SmartThings
Home Assistant has lots of options for getting weather data, but a lot of them are cloud based. And while that isn’t bad, it does introduce some risk. Weather Underground, World Wide Lightning Network, and Darksky have all announced they were closing their apis or moving behind a paywall in the last year or two. … Continue reading Add Acurite Weather Sensors to Home Assistant
In a previous post I talked about how you could use scripts with your Home Assistant automations to add some simple decision logic. But in keeping with the Choose-Your-Own adventure take on building a smart home, Home Assistant gives you another way to accomplish the same thing. Back in version .113, the Home Assistant team… Continue reading Smarter Automations in Home Assistant Using Choose
If you want Home Assistant to know whether you are home, you are going to need at least one presence detection integration. Which integration you use is going to be based on your use case. Do you need to know which room people are in, or do you need to just know they are someone… Continue reading Installing Presence Detection in Home Assistant
Back in version .115 Home Assistant added some mode options for automations, and gave us more control over the flow. And if you are like me you may not have paid much attention to them at first. These new modes add the ability to define how an automation handles getting triggered or more specifically trigger… Continue reading How To Use Modes in Home Assistant Automations
Presence detection is critical to a smart home. In fact it might be the most important piece on data your smart home needs, and there is no single way to do this. But if I am being honest this is one of those areas I have struggled with the most. The biggest problem I have… Continue reading How I Set Up Presence Detection in Home Assistant
Automations may be the one thing that brings all of smart home enthusiasts to the yard. After all, its is the in the name Home Automation. However, the problem is unless you are willing to invest time writing code, the automation you can build out of the box with most platforms is a slightly more… Continue reading Build Smarter Automations in Home Assistant Using Scripts
One of the cool things you can do in Home Assistant is randomize the actions of your automations. While this could be used for some super practical like creating a vacation protocol that randomizes which lights turn on or off thats not what I did. I created a haunted house for Halloween because who doesn't… Continue reading Using Home Assistant Automations to Create a Haunted House
