Simplifying Gadgets and Technology, is my passion!
There’s a new voice assistant in town, and this one can work locally in your home without phoning home to its corporate overloads. This week, the popular hobbyist smart home platform Home Assistant officially launched […]
Home Assistant is an incredible platform that reduces the complexity of managing all your smart appliances. From its remote monitoring features to compatibility with most smart gadgets and IoT devices, Home Assistant can turn any […]
My solar system also only reads its full power usage without seeing what power is going direct to the geysers. In my case, I’m using a Hall sensor with an Efergy cloud based system to […]
Pseudonymous maker “Aquaticus” has designed a kit to get your energy, water, or other IEC 62056-21-compatible meter talking to Home Assistant or other smart home platforms, dubbed the PiggyMeter — thanks to its snout-like appearance. […]
About two months ago we got woken in the middle of the night to the UPS system alarm screaming, and pitch darkness. The UPS keeps the Internet router alive, with the main solar system powering […]
This is an interesting project to get a simple motorised garage door opener to connect with some intelligence via Home Assistant. One could split this into two phases, with the first being really simple and […]
Yes I know the EskomSePush mobile apps will give either a 15 minute or 55 minute warning ahead of the scheduled load shedding window for a zone area in South Africa, but sometimes you need […]
In this video I (try to) explain how I used battery current readings and the battery state of charge, to display gauges on my Home Assistant dashboard showing the amount of battery time left based […]
This is interesting as I’ve never actually looked at, or used, Traefik Hub. I’ve generally called DuckDNS to monitor the chnaging of my home public IP address, and pointed my domain name to the DuckDNS […]
Cloud server dependence is a recurring problem with smart home devices. Yet another one… which is why it is always absolute first prize to get a device with MQTT or Modbus comms so that you […]