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…
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 was getting tired of playing with the software side of home automation so I picked an item from my wish list that would let me play with some hardware. Time to control the garage door. Besides having the ability to open the door with my phone, I figured I could use the automation part of the system to notify me when the door opens and closes as well as change the color of my LED strip as a visual…
Many years ago I bought some X10 equipment to provide a way of controlling switches from a remote location. I also bought the computer module and had a single automation running to turn the porch light on at dusk and off at 2 am. While this was cool and useful, it wasn’t a smart home. Once I moved, the switches moved with me but the automation was never restored. Since then I have contemplated making my house smarter but I…