Home Assistant

A collection of 23 posts

Home Assistant

Build a Last Assistant Sensor Guide

One of the big issues with Voice commands in Home Assistant, is out of the box Home Assistant has no context about where you are when you issue a voice command. But we can solve that with a simple template based sensor. This guide goes along with the Video on

Home Assistant

Building a Daily Briefing

If you saw my recent video on building a Daily Briefing in Home Assistant and you are here for some code, thanks for checking out my videos. If you haven’t seen the video you might wan to check it out first: Building a Daily Briefing has the potential to

Automations

Home Assistant Webhook Primer

I recently did a video talking through using web hooks in home Assistant to create some automations to monitor another home assistant instance. And while its not a universal use case, it did allow me to create a video showing how to create a web hook, and leverage automation triggers

Advance Automation

Randomized Lighting in Home Assistant

I recently did a video on how to setup randomized lighting to simulate human presence over on my YouTube channel. If you haven’t checked that out, you should watch it first. In this post I walk you through how I set up this randomized lighting effect in more detail.

Amazon Echo

I'm Ditching Amazon Echo for Google Home.

Until now I have had both Amazon Echos and Google Homes scattered through the house. But it is time to chose one. Here are are the reason why I’m ditching the amazon Echo:

Home Assistant

Is Home Assistant the Platform for you?

When I sat down to write this I was planning on doing a video on the reasons you should pick Home Assistant. Because if you are building a smart home Home Assistant is the platform you need. But no solution will ever be perfect for everyone. And I think we

getting started

Migrating from a Raspberry Pi4 to Home Assistant Blue

In my last post I told you about my first impressions of Home Assistant Blue. It really is a pretty nice little device, and it has everything to get started with Home Assistant. Heck, I think it has everything most people running home assistant need. And that includes me. So

Home Assistant

My Review of Home Assistant Blue

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

Automations

Improve Home Assistant User Experience With Helpers

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

Home Assistant

Try Home Assistant While Running SmartThings

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

Add-on

Add Acurite Weather Sensors to Home Assistant

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

Automation

Smarter Automations in Home Assistant Using Choose

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

Apple iCloud

Installing Presence Detection in Home Assistant

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

Automation

How To Use Modes in Home Assistant Automations

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

Home Assistant

Build Smarter Automations in Home Assistant Using Scripts

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

Hardware

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

DIY

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

firmware

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?

Automation

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

Configuration

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

Configuration

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

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

Configuration

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