Another semi-useless spot on the web…
Now that I have Home Assistant running pretty well, I’ve started seeing what else I can add to it. There are several components for monitoring energy usage, but sadly none for my Rain Forest Automation Eagle Energy device. After a quick search, I found a Node-RED flow that looked promising. It would query the local …
Continue reading “Adding Energy Monitoring to Home Assistant”
I’ve spent parts of the last 9 months playing with Home Assistant and have written about some of my adventures. A few weeks ago, I finally decided to go all in with Home Assistant and ditch my Vera. I bought an Aeotec Z-Stick Gen5 Z-Wave dongle and starting moving all my devices over to it. …
I’ve been so pleased with Home Assistant that I decided to see if I could migrate completely away from Vera and run all my Z-Wave devices on Home Assistant. Currently Home Assistant uses OpenZwave as the base and has basic support for a lot of Z-Wave devices. While OpenZwave isn’t as mature as Vera in …
Continue reading “Setting up a Leviton VRCZ4-M0Z for use with Home Assistant”
Earlier this year I started experimenting with Home Assistant and wrote some thoughts about it. It brought together enough pieces that I keep tinkering with it. A friend of mine had mentioned a project called Node-RED which is supposed to more easily link together IoT components and perform actions based on different inputs. At the …
Continue reading “Home Assistant and Node-RED, automation perfected?”
Last week I read that Ubiquiti Networks had hired the main author of the Home Assistant home automation project. I looked at the project and at first I couldn’t understand what the project would do, but after poking at it, I realized that it is the glue that connects disparate automation systems. I wrote about …
Ever since I can remember, my dad has told me that any piece of electrical equipment that has a cord or is hardwired should be Underwriters Laboratories listed. UL listing means that a sample of the product has undergone testing and meets certain criteria for the type of device it is. Does this mean that …
Continue reading “A look at UL/ETL Certification and Home Automation”
I’ve been a huge fan of CarPlay for 5 years and can’t imagine a car without it. Lately I’ve been reading about adapters to make wired CarPlay into wireless CarPlay. This sounded perfect as I wouldn’t have to take my phone out of my pocket and still be able to use CarPlay. There are a …
With the recent fires in California, I’ve been concerned about the air quality as it tells me if I should run, if we should go on our daily walk and if we should leave our doors open like we usually do. The EPA uses air quality sensors around the country to collect data and displays …
[Update: Here is a new Node-RED flow that works better with Home Assistant’s Energy Dashboard.] After years of waffling on if I should install solar on my house, I finally decided that it would be a good investment. While the federal tax credit went down from 30% to 26%, I would still get a bit …
One of the lazy things that I’ve tried to do was have the Amazon Echo turn my TV on and off. When I had Home Assistant running on my Raspberry Pi, I used a component that controlled the TV and Apple TV via HDMI CEC. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite reliable and I lost the ability …