Home Assistant

A collection of 50 posts

backup home assistant

Better Home Assistant Backups Using Auto Backup

Making backups is SUPER important. I show you the EASY way to back up Home Assistant with Auto Backup.

Apollo Automation

Monitor Your Air Quality with the Apollo Automation AIR-1

Check the air quality in your home or environment using this amazing AIR-1 sensor.

ZEN55

Get Smart Alerts from Dumb Smoke/CO Detectors

My new house (circa 2023) was built with wired, interconnected smoke/CO detectors. These devices do not tie into any alerting other than sound. Unless I am in the house at the time of an alert, I won't know anything is going on. 💡Watch the video for this

SMLIGHT

SMLIGHT Zigbee Coordinators. So Many Options!

I review some of the SMLIGHT Zigbee coordinators that you should use in your smart home with Home Assistant, Zigbee2MQTT, and ZHA.

ApolloAutomation

Apollo Automation MSR-1 Presence and More Sensor

This all-in-one very compact sensor is a great addition to your home automation and Home Assistant Setup. It is ESPHome based so can be used in all types of systems.

Home Assistant

Top HACS Integrations and custom cards for Home Assistant

💡Watch the related video HERE! I recently did a video on the top (critical) Home Assistant add-ons that power my smart home. Based on your feedback in the video, I am also going to cover my top HACS integrations and frontend components. If you are not familiar with HACS, it

Zooz

Zooz ZEN37 Wireless Remote

💡Watch the video on this topic here! I have always wanted to try a wireless Z-Wave button device. I recently came across the ZEN37 from Zooz. There are probably many options is this arena but I have the Zooz ZEN32 wired scene controller and the ZEN37 fits right in with

assist pipeline

Custom Voice Control Sentences in Home Assistant

Create your OWN sentences for LOCAL VOICE CONTROL in Home Assistant with Node-RED or basic YAML configurations.

Frigate

Frigate NVR Updates

It's been a while since I did any videos or blog posts on the Frigate NVR. Someone mentioned to me some new functionality that might be in version 13 (which is in beta as of this writing) so I thought I would check it out.

Linptech

Human Here? My First Presence Sensor

Trying out the Linptech 24g MmWave human presence detector and Home Assistant.

Home Assistant Voice

Hands-Free Control with Wake Words

Home Assistant continues to make great strides in local voice control for their platform. That latest installment "Year of the Voice Chapter 4" has some nice surprises, the most exciting of which is the ability to use a wake word. 💡The video for this blog can be found

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 "

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

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