iOT

ESP32-S3 Local Voice Assistant for Home Assistant

by

I built an ESP32-S3 voice satellite for the office. It worked. Then I set a timer, the timer went off, and I discovered I couldn’t turn it off by voice — because the alarm was so loud the microphone couldn’t hear me over it. Fixing that properly meant ripping out the entire audio layer and … Read more

Ordio – Home Assistant Music Streamer

by

A physical Spotify player: NFC disks, an OLED, and Home Assistant I wanted music my household could hold. Streaming is convenient to the point of being forgettable — you tap a name in a list and sound happens. So I built a slot reader: 3.5″ 3D-printed disks, each with an NFC tag inside and a … Read more

Home Assistant – ESP32-S3 Dashboard

by

The Elecrow CrowPanel 5.0″ is a fantastic little ESP32-S3 based touchscreen display — 800×480 resolution, capacitive touch, built-in WiFi and Bluetooth, and 8MB of PSRAM. It’s ideal for a wall-mounted Home Assistant control panel. But getting it running smoothly with ESPHome? That took some work.

Setting Up an Alarm Clock with Home Assistant and Alexa: A Complete Guide

by

In this post, I will cover off how to set up a simple alarm clock using Home Assistant and Alexa. For this, you will need the following: a reliable internet connection, a Home Assistant server, an Alexa-enabled device, and some basic knowledge of YAML scripting. First, we will walk through installing and configuring Home Assistant … Read more

Node Red flow for Motion activated lights

by

In my house, I have two motion sensors, one at the bottom of the stairs, and one at the top. These sensors are motion only, and don’t report on LUX levels.

I wanted an automation that depending on the time of the day would turn them on to a preset brightness level, wait until there was no motion then turn them off.

Node Red flow for Ring Doorbell & Outside light

by
Ring Flow

One of the issues with using the motion detection trigger of the ring doorbell to turn on a light is that, well, it gets stuck in a loop: Motion Detected – Turn on Light – Turn off light – Turning off light triggers motion. This cycle can quickly become problematic, especially if it keeps triggering … Read more

Homebridge on Raspberry PI

by

Running HomeBridge on a Raspberry Pi is fairly simple. These instructions have been tested on a Raspberry Pi 3 with default Raspbian + PIXEL Desktop  SSH to your Pi First thing is to connect to your Raspberry pi via SSH. I use the excellent MobaXterm package for Windows All operations require elevation, so let’s issue … Read more