Tagged with 'home assistant'

Creating a Differential Sensor In Home Assistant

• March 25, 2024
• 3 minutes
• automation, home assistant, tech

If you've fiddled enough in Home Assistant over time, you might have encountered the situation in which it is useful to trigger off of, or simply display, a calculated value. There are a few different ways this can be accomplished but this post focuses on creating a specific sensor to do both: be used as a trigger value for automation, and also displayed neatly in a dashboard.

Lighting the Dark Days of Winter with Home Assistant

• January 15, 2024
• 7 minutes
• automation, home assistant, inspiration, tech

This fall, right after the time change, I found myself often working intensely enough to suddenly notice "it was dark outside" in the late afternoon. Good for productivity, I suppose; not so much otherwise? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'd automated a whole bunch of other light situations, mostly with some combination of brightness level (obtained from my Tempest weather station) and/or time-based. But all of those solutions were "binary" (on/off). My thought here was to slowly and incrementally bring up the overhead smart lights in my home office space.

OctoPrint Webhook for Filament Change Notifications

• December 11, 2023
• 4 minutes
• 3d printing, automation, home assistant, inspiration, tech

I've been using OctoPrint to handle nearly all of my 3D printing operations since I moved to it a little over a year ago. It's an absolutely wonderful platform and I can't recommend it enough.

Turn off the fan already! Tales of an automation modification

• July 10, 2023
• 5 minutes
• automation, home assistant, inspiration, tech

It's been a couple months since my last post, and while I had some things in the queue I have lacked time to finish them out due to MMS in early May, being involved in a community theatre production that just wrapped up a couple weeks ago, and for random reasons building a chicken coop of all things. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here's to a return of more regular posts, assuming I have adequate time to write and revise them!

Creating a Reference Sensor Template in Home Assistant

• March 27, 2023
• 10 minutes
• automation, home assistant, inspiration, tech

It's been a while since I wrote about any Home Assistant stuff so I figured this was as a good time to write about something I'm super happy with: custom/reference sensor templates!

Smart Independent Control of a Ceiling Fan & Light with Shelly 1L

• October 24, 2022
• 6 minutes
• automation, home assistant, inspiration, personal, tech

As I've noted before, my 1940's-era house has its own quirks with regard to smart home automation in large part due to 1940's wiring standards.

Smart Control of a 1940's Three-Way Switch with Shelly 1L

• September 26, 2022
• 8 minutes
• automation, home assistant, inspiration, personal, tech

Once I settled on jumping into home automation and Home Assistant (HA), the first "practical" thing I wanted to address was the issue of lights being left on at random throughout the house. Some fixtures were greater offenders than others, but with a control mechanism like HA I could actually begin to address what others wouldn't.

Jumping into Home Assistant: The Installation (and Hiccup) Process

• September 12, 2022
• 6 minutes
• automation, home assistant, inspiration, personal, tech

About a month ago, I took the plunge.

After considering it for a long time and hearing about some cool stuff folks were doing with home automation, I decided it was time to start my own dabbling adventure. A warning to folks: home automation is a little bit like owning horses. There can be a bunch of expense in the process for little obvious reward.