Tagged with 'home assistant'

Creating a Differential Sensor In Home Assistant

• Posted on March 25, 2024
• Read time: 3 minutes
• Tagged with 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

• Posted on January 15, 2024
• Read time: 7 minutes
• Tagged with 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

• Posted on December 11, 2023
• Read time: 4 minutes
• Tagged with 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

• Posted on July 10, 2023
• Read time: 5 minutes
• Tagged with 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

• Posted on March 27, 2023
• Read time: 10 minutes
• Tagged with 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

• Posted on October 24, 2022
• Read time: 6 minutes
• Tagged with 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

• Posted on September 26, 2022
• Read time: 8 minutes
• Tagged with 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

• Posted on September 12, 2022
• Read time: 6 minutes
• Tagged with 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.