home-automation

Home Assistant - Better Proxmox Monitoring with InfluxDB

In this post I will show how I used the External Metric Server feature in Proxmox to set up the best possible integration between Proxmox and Home Assistant.

paperless-ngx

Paperless-ngx Push Notifications

Here is a guide on how I set up mobile push notifications to my android phone whenever a document is consumed in paperless-ngx.

home-assistant

Home Assistant: Add Camera Snapshots to Push Notifications

In this post I will share an easy way to add real-time camera snapshots to your Home Assistant push notifications. This is a great way to level up your push notifications, allowing you to actually see what is happening at the instant a notification was pushed.

blue-iris

Fully Offline Video Doorbell for Home Assistant

Today I am sharing my setup for a fully offline video doorbell in Home Assistant. The camera, motion sensor, and doorbell are all integrated over local IP.

home-assistant

Home Assistant - Better Blue Iris Integration

In this post, I will show how I greatly improved the performance of my Blue Iris cameras in Home Assistant. Rather than using the camera component, I am using iframes to directly embed the UI3 interface into Lovelace.

last-watch-ai Featured

Last Watch AI - Blue Iris Walkthrough

In this post I will walk through setting up Last Watch AI to process motion events from Blue Iris. I will show how to feed motion alerts from BI into Last Watch, and how to trigger recordings in BI if certain objects are detected.

home-assistant Featured

Car Presence Sensor with Home Assistant and Last Watch AI

This guide will show how to set up a vehicle presence sensor in Home Assistant using some key new features in Last Watch. In this example, I have a camera set up on my driveway running on Blue Iris. By using two detection profiles in Last Watch, I was able

home-automation

Last Watch AI - Ubuntu Installation and Upgrade Guide

The preferred method to install Last Watch on Ubuntu is directly from the source code. Installing from source makes it much easier to upgrade in the future by just pulling the latest code and rebuilding. Alternatively, you can install using the official releases. For a full walkthrough on setting up

home-automation

Last Watch - Getting Started Guide

This guide will introduce the key concepts and features of Last Watch by walking through a very basic setup. More advanced features will also be introduced at the end of this guide. If you have not installed Last Watch yet, please refer to the setup guide. 1. Detection Profiles The

home-automation Featured

Introducing: Last Watch AI

Last Watch is an all-in-one tool for creating If-Then automations based on AI computer vision.

home-automation

Simple Node-RED Sub-flow to Look Up Username

Here is a quick helper for Node-RED to fetch the Home Assistant user who triggered a state change...

home-assistant

Camera Motion Event Notifications with Locally-Processed AI

In this post I will share how I set up push notifications for my home security camera by integrating Home Assistant with Blue Iris. Motion events from the camera are filtered by locally-processed computer vision so that alerts are only generated by objects such as cars or people. I will

home-automation

Home Assistant + Nginx: Unencrypted Local Traffic

In this post, I will explain some of the hidden benefits of using a reverse proxy to keep local connections to Home Assistant unencrypted. Importantly, I will explain in simple terms what a reverse proxy is, and what it is doing under the hood. Finally, I will show how I

home-automation

HASS + Proxmox: Automatic Backups to Synology NAS

This week I checked off another goal for my Home Assistant setup – automated backups! Once a week, my entire Home Assistant VM is backed up to my Synology NAS which is protected with RAID 1. This setup gives me good protection against all hardware and software failures, and it gives

home-assistant

Proxmox + Home Assistant: Host System Hardware Monitoring

This post will show how I set up CPU Temperature monitoring for Home Assistant running on a virtual machine in Proxmox. Virtualized hardware does not report temperatures, so I used a python script running on the host system to periodically send the CPU temp to Home Assistant. Last week, I

home-assistant

Fully Kiosk Rest API Integration in Home Assistant

10/25/20 Update - The isScreenOn property has been changed to screenOn in later versions of Fully Kiosk. Check your JSON output for the correct name In this post I'll show how I exposed the backlight of my crappy old Android tablet as a Light in Home Assistant using

home-assistant

Alexa Voice Commands to Control Home Assistant

The Amazon Echo is an impressive piece of technology hamstrung by it's shallow feature set and half-assed app store. The language recognition is a very powerful tool, but it's wasted on "skills" that do simple things like reading the weather forecast or telling dad-jokes. To be fair, the newer models

home-automation

Using Tasker to Trigger Android Tasks from Home Assistant

Tasker is the best automation app for Android devices. It can hook into practically any event and trigger whatever action you want. If you also install its companion app, AutoRemote, then you can trigger tasks on your phone from any web client, such as HomeAssistant. Here are some example automations

home-automation

Replacing Smart Hubs with Deconz Conbee II

The primary reason I made the jump to Home Assistant was to break free from the unnecessary cloud services and spyware that sat between me and my smart devices. My first experience with smart devices was the first gen Wink Hub way back in 2014. My GE Link bulbs worked

home-automation

Xiaomi Vacuum Custom Reminders Part 3

In parts 1 and 2 we set up custom booleans to track when it's time to run or service the vacuum. In this post I'll show how I set up my lovelace UI suited to my automation needs. Lovelace UI My goal was to keep the UI simple and focused

home-automation

Xiaomi Vacuum Custom Reminders Part 2

In my last post we saw how to set up HA to track and remind us when to empty our vacuum's dust bin and clean the brush head. Now we want to add automation to remind us that it's time to run a cleanup. Part 2 - Cleanup Reminders Back-end

home-automation

Xiaomi Vacuum Custom Reminders Part 1

The first automation we needed was reminders to empty the dust bin and clean the brush head. We want to see dismissible notifications in the HA front-end and we want to see push notifications on our phone when service is due.