Home Assistant

A collection of 39 posts

Automation

My Top 5 Automations in Home Assistant

Smart homes run on automations. Here are my TOP 5 in Home Assistant and Node-RED

2023.7

Conversations and Service Call Data in Home Assistant

Make your IoT work for you. Conversations and Sentence Triggers with Automations in Home Assistant.

Home Assistant

Using Your VOIP Phone to Control Your House

Home Assistant has been working on local voice control and adding functionality to extend that to more than just the typical smart speakers. They do this through integrations and what they call "assist pipelines". 💡Watch my related video here. Assist pipelines include speech-to-text and text-to-speech. For those, they use Whisper

Home Assistant

Finally! Adding Fan Speed Controls

I recently moved to a new house and one of the things about the old house that drove me crazy was having ceiling fans that ran all the time, even when no one was home. I vowed (with the proper approvals) to add fan controls to my Home Assistant setup.

Ecowitt Integration Home Assistant

Home Assistant 2023.5 Broke Ecowitt

I'm a long-time weather enthusiast and I like having the awareness and insight that a hyper-local weather station brings. In this case, directly from my backyard. The recent update to Home Assistant 2023.5 broke the HACS Ecowitt integration that I had been using for years. It turns out that

Home Assistant

Caddy 2 Reverse Proxy for Local Network Device Access

I've talked a lot about different ways to access devices in your local network. Cloudflare, Tailscale, Nginx Reverse Proxy, DuckDNS to name a few. In this short article, I am going to take a look at Caddy "The Ultimate Server". Caddy claims to be "a powerful, enterprise-ready, open source webserver

Home Assistant Add-On

Top Home Assistant Add-ons 2023 Edition

We are a couple of months (ok three) into 2023 and I think it's finally time to do my annual top add-ons video and blog post. I like to highlight what is most important to my home automation setup and what I think are invaluable. NOTE: I am going to

Matter Standard

Trying to Use Matter

I tried to use Matter with Home Assistant. It didn't work.

mostlychris

Using Home Assistant Local Calendar to Schedule Stuff!

Home Assistant added a local calendar to their list of integrations in December of 2022. In January, they made some updates that make it even more useful. Calendars don't usually get much love since they are so utilitarian. However, this calendar allows you to automate things easily so I thought

Home Assistant

Ditching LastPass for Bitwarden

LastPass has had a serious data breach. Maybe it's time to take control of your passwords!

mostly chris home assistant

Find Missing Entities in Home Assistant

The longer I run Home Assistant, the more I find that I have missing, unavailable, and orphaned entities and services. It's hard to keep tabs on all the changes that happen when an integration or add-on is updated. Sometimes changes to entities or services are required. Even though things might

2022.12

Home Assistant 2022.12 Update

Just like clockwork, Home Assistant has done their monthly release for December 2022. As with many of their releases, this one has many new features, a couple of which I'm extra excited about. Home Assistant has finally released their first Alpha, or as they call it, the "developer preview" version

Home Assistant remote access

Using the Cloudflared Add-On

I wrote an article and made a video on how to remotely connect to Home Assistant and other internal network resources using Cloudflare Tunnels. I got a ton of feedback on that asking why I didn't use the Cloudflared Home Assistant add-on instead. The simple answer is that although I'd

Cameras

Frigate NVR with Docker and Home Assistant

I have been using Frigate for a while now and recently I moved my whole Frigate setup first from Home Assistant as an add-on to a VirtualBox VM, and finally to a Dell Optiplex Micro running Frigate in a Docker Container. This post and related video are at the request

Home Automation

Home Assistant Release 2022.11

Home Assistant version 2022.11 is now released. With that, some of your WTH (What the Heck?)  suggestions and feedback have been introduced. If you don't know what WTH is, it's a month in which the Home Assistant team takes in suggestions and feedback outside of normal PR requests. It's

Home Assistant

Home Assistant Remote Access with Cloudflare Argo Tunnel

Home Assistant sits inside your local network (I hope) and that means it is behind your ISP router and connection. There are MANY ways to connect to Home Assistant in this type of setup. By far, the easiest way is to sign up for a Nabu Casa account and then

Home Assistant

Home Assistant Repair Center and MQTT

If you are not familiar with the Home Assistant Repair center, you should be. It's a fantastic tool that helps you know when there are potential issues with your Home Assistant instance and suggests corrective actions. Take a look at my video if you want more details. Recently, I've been

Home Assistant

Migrating from a Raspberry Pi to the Home Assistant Yellow

This is one of those videos/posts that almost doesn't need to exist because of how easy it is to do. But sometimes it is also nice to highlight the easy things. Many of my videos are about harder or more complicated topics. This one is much more about how

Home Assistant

EMQX Is the Perfect MQTT Broker to View Your Traffic

In Home Assistant, I have been using the core available Eclipse MQTT Mosquitto Broker for a long time and it has been working flawlessly. The problem with that broker is that in order to view traffic and troubleshoot issues, I have to go to external software OR use different screens

smart home tech Featured

Bluetooth Proxies in Home Assistant

Bluetooth has been a popular protocol and was invented back in the late 1990's. It exists in many products today, such as tablets, phones, media players, headsets, modems, watches, and many more. In the smart home world, Bluetooth Low Energy is more useful and this comes in the form of

2022.9

Home Assistant 2022.9 Release Highlights

It's that time of the month again. The time when the hard-working Home Assistant developers release the latest update of Home Assistant. The team at Home Assistant/Nabu Casa do a good job of pointing out all the new, shiny things in their release party, which you can watch on

Home Assistant

Home Assistant Control and Notifications on Your PC

Hass.Agent on your Windows PC tied together with Home Assistant can do a LOT of things. Controlling aspects of your PC from Home Assistant and controlling entities in Home Assistant from your PC are just a few of those things. HASS.Agent is a Windows-based client (companion) application for

Home Assistant

Add Custom Button Cards to your Dashboard

In my opinion, one of the most useful dashboard elements in Home Assistant is the Button Card by @RomRider. Why do I say that? The feature list alone tells the story. Take a look at what you get with Button Cards as listed on the GitHub page: * works with any

Home Assistant

Keeping Tabs on your Network

If you run a home lab or run anything of importance in your home network, it is important to know when things are not working as expected. I've had many occasions in which something went down and I was either notified by the owner of the service I was providing

Home Assistant

Home Assistant Yellow First Look

I recently had the fortune of acquiring a Home Assistant Yellow. For those of you that have been following along with this project, you might know it as the Home Assistant Amber. The Yellow is the same project but was renamed for various reasons. In this week's video, I unbox