With automations under my belt and the house knowing we when we came and went it was time to get some lights in on the action. I avoided smart bulbs as I was not allowed to impact normal people operation of the lights. I also avoided Wi-Fi devices as those tend to have a reliance on cloud services and Wi-Fi is not a control network, so reliability might falter at times. So the showdown was between Zigbee and Z-Wave. Both…
If you want to be inspired to automate more of your house and learn about cool tech that needs to be on your wish list, you need to listen to the Home Assistant Podcast! I recently found the podcast and I decided to go back and see what I had missed. These guys provide great insight on recent changes and new integrations in Home assistant as well home automation news in general. They also have guests on the podcast from…
My thermostat has a nice away mode feature but I’m not going to remember to enable that every time we leave the house and we would forget to disable it when we come home (until the temperature was far enough off in the house). So I decided it was time to let my house track whether I was home or not. I had read through forum and blog posts about different ways to let Home Assistant know your location and…
I finally did it. After having a home automation system running in my house for awhile, giving another way to open the garage and adjust my thermostat, I finally automated something. Since I have an LED strip Home Assistant can turn on and HA knows when the garage door its open, I created my first automation. I still don’t get YAML completely but thanks to various examples online I now have part of my LED strip turning red when the…
I had seen Adafruit’s Neopixels in many designs over the years but I never had an application that inspired me to buy some. Then the rope lights I use for ambient lighting in the living room died during post Christmas cleanup. They have been gone for some time now and instead of doing something simple like buying new rope lights I thought it would be cool to use Neopixels since they provide so many more options than just on and off. Adafruit’s…