If you have done anything with home automation before you would have heard of ZigBee. ZigBee is a protocol many smart devices use to communicate with. One of the most well known products is Philips Hue where their range of smart lamps, sensors and switch’s communicate back to their hue bridge that is attached to your network. A benefit of ZigBee is the ability of powered devices like lamps to act as a mesh router so if you lamp at the other end of the house can’t reach your hue bridge its data can hop across a closer lamp that is nearer to your bridge. Continue reading “Improving your ZigBee network with zigbee2mqtt”
Wemos D1 Mini garage door opener with Home Assistant
A mate asked me to connect up his garage door so he could control it from his iPhone, when we did the front garage door we used a Wemo Maker that could be controlled from the Wemo app or via Home Assistant. It worked so well that he decided to add a motor to his rear garage door. By the time he did this not only had Wemo pulled out of Australia but the Wemo Maker was out of production worldwide. So it was up to me to come up with a new solution to which I replied Wemos D1 Mini (no relation to Wemo),a Relay Shield and Tasmota firmware.
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Google Assistant morning announcement with Home Assistant
I have been using both Home Assistant and several Google Home devices for a few years now and a while back I decided to get them to be a bit more talkative to me. If you have seen my previous washer and dryer notification projects you may have noticed I am using Home Assistant’s Google TTS (text to speech) service to tell me when either machine is done. Below I am taking this TTS service further to give me a Good Morning weather announcement when I enter my kitchen.
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Wemo Maker garage door opener with Home Assistant
A while back a mate asked me to connect his garage door to his phone. Seeing most garage doors have terminals on them to connect up a push button switch, it is pretty easy to connect up a smart device that can trigger the door, when we did this the only option in our region was using a Wemo Maker. Continue reading “Wemo Maker garage door opener with Home Assistant”
ESP8266 Washing Machine Notifier version 2
One of my first esp82266 projects was my washing machine notifier that connected to ifttt to send me an email when my wash was done. I published this project to hackster.io back in December 2016 and it can also be found on my blog here. Since then I have found Home Assistant and my IOT devices around the home has grown with all of them connecting back to Home Assistant, so it was time I converted my washing machine notifier over from ifttt.
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3D printed Philips Hue architrave mount
A quick post to show off my latest 3D Printed design that I have just uploaded to Thingiverse, so head there if you you want the design files to make your own. The backstory is below. Continue reading “3D printed Philips Hue architrave mount”
Upgrading my Otto Robot part 1
Recently I built my first Otto Robot that you will see in my blog post here. I decided I wanted him to do a bit more than just dance all day long as well as make use of his sensors and buzzer. The first steps are to add a hc-05 bluetooth module and a TTP223 touch sensor to him to bring him closer to the Otto Plus design outlined here. Continue reading “Upgrading my Otto Robot part 1”
Wemos D1 Mini IR blaster using Tasmota
This post is a follow on from my previous post about using ESP Easy on a Wemos D1 Mini to create an IR blaster. The hardware side of things is exactly the same so head on over that post if you need more info on the hardware side first. What we are creating here is an IR blaster using a Wemos D1 Mini that connects to Home Assistant via MQTT so we are assuming you have these set up as well. Continue reading “Wemos D1 Mini IR blaster using Tasmota”
3D printed lid with a camera cable hole for the official Raspberry Pi Case
A quick post to show off one of my first 3D print designs that may be useful to others. I run octoprint on a Raspberry Pi which is a cool project that also allows for the official raspberry pi camera to be added to the octoprint interface. My Raspberry Pi uses the official case but I didn’t want to hack a cable hole in the official lid in case I re-purpose the Pi for something else later on, so I made this replacement. It’s a pretty simple flat lid with 4 clips in each corner. Printed in PLA, the clips are a tight fit to provide some flex to the top so it contours to the slight convex nature of the official pi case. Continue reading “3D printed lid with a camera cable hole for the official Raspberry Pi Case”
Adding Temp Sensors to a Raspberry pi with Hass.io
Got a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant and would like to add some cheap temperature sensors to it? Well it’s pretty easy to do via several methods, Today we will focus on sensors directly connected to the pi. The below I used with Hass.io, but the same code should be usable on other versions of Home Assistant.
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