An overview of my latest posts on home automation and home assistant. View all tech posts.
In this quick tutorial, we will work on how to configure automatic dark mode for Home Assistant. It works with any theme and Lovelace interface as long as you have a dark and light version of the preferred theme. It’s easy to set up and a nice feature for wall-mounted...
This is the second post of my series on face recognition for presence detection in Home Asssistant. In this series, I am investigating how to set up a face recognition system for my smart home that works locally, without the need for cloud services or internet access, and is fully...
Face recognition can be a nice way of adding presence detection to your smart home. A simple camera at your front door could detect who is home and trigger certain automations in Home Assistant. However, with all camera-based systems, this comes with a risk for user privacy. How are camera...
Recently, I migrated my whole home automation setup from a group of Raspberry Pis to an Intel NUC; specifically the Intel NUC8i5BEK. Due to an increasingly larger set of devices, a single Pi for running Home Assistant and Node-RED did not cut it anymore. See my post on my hardware...
On this page I keep track of my current Smart Home setup, built around Home Assistant, Deconz and Node-RED. So, if you are interested in my setup please read on. The list of devices I use has grown organically over time, sometimes based on a certain need (like a proper...
In a previous post I showed a wake-up light using Home Assistant and the default YAML configuration. In this post I’ll show my current setup which makes use of Node-RED. As with my previous system, this wake-up light’s function is to light up my complete bedroom just before I need...
In my smart home I use multiple IKEA Tradfri lights in combination with a Conbee Zigbee hub and Home Assistant. Recently I encountered a problem when trying to set both the brightness and the color temperature in a Home Assistant service call (light.turn_on). Apparently, the Tradfri bulbs only respond to...
Home Assistant (HA) can be easily controlled using the web interface of one of the mobile apps. However, there are more fun ways to communicate with your home. In this blog post I discuss talking (or chatting) to your home using a Telegram bot. I show how you can easily...
Recently I started using Home Assistant (HA) as a tool to control the lights in my home. My previous system was based on Homekit and, while working fairly good, lacked tools to further customize the automations. To get more control I switched to HA. One of the first things I...