- · 6 min read 35133 views
Arlo Cameras in Home Assistant
Home Assistant & Arlo cameras go together very well. I'm using them since our entire setup got migrated from OpenHab to Home Assistant and I'm happy with the integration. - · 6 min read 25639 views
Water tank monitoring with ESPHome
Watering your lawn and plants around the house wasn't one of my favourite things to do. This had to be done better - fully automatically and without intervention. - · 6 min read 18354 views
HC-SR04 & JSN-SR04T ultrasonic distance sensors in ESPHome
I received many questions about using an ultrasonic distance sensor with ESPHome for their water tank project, leading them to create a short guide. - · 5 min read 17525 views
Home Assistant backup to Synology NAS
Regularly backing up your Home Assistant configuration is crucial to protect your smart home deployment. This article explains how you can backup your Home Assistant to NAS. - · 3 min read 17379 views
The world of Wemos D1 Mini Boards
Some readers recently asked me about the Wemos D1 mini usage in my projects, the pinout sheet and names and ho to use it with ESPHome. - · 6 min read 15930 views
Going Green: SolarEdge & Home Assistant
The third part of my Our Own Electricity series describes how I integrated our photovoltaic system into Home Assistant. - · 8 min read 11267 views
The digital notepad box - a DIY e-ink project
Inspired by the Home Assistant community, I built a desk-friendly e-paper display with ESPHome. This blog post details my journey from gathering components to creating a custom home automation dashboard, offering real-time data in a sleek, wooden case. Discover how rewarding and accessible e-ink displays can be for your smart home. - · 5 min read 10076 views
Green grass with Home Assistant
Home Assistant controlled garden watering part 2 - are you ready? In my previous post, I explained how I measured the level of water in our garden cistern using ESPHome. In this post, I will describe... - · 3 min read 3015 views
Building a Mario Bros. Clock
I recently found a DIY project that makes a custom LED Mario Bros. clock that is very cool. Since I'm huge fan of Super Mario I absolutely had to rebuild it. - · 3 min read 2253 views
Home Assistant: You have got mail
Today I want to share a little holiday project I build this week: a mailbox sensor to make a dumb mailbox smart and notifying us if we got new mail. I’m talking about real physical mail here - letters, postcards, newspapers etc. dropped into our mailbox. - · 5 min read 1934 views
Home Assistant 2024
Since sharing our initial insights into the Home Assistant setup at my first post about our Home Assistant setup, a lot has transformed. It's time for an update. This article will walk you through the changes, replacements of devices and integrations, additions of new elements, and the tried-and-true components that have proven to be reliable. - · 6 min read 1713 views
How to Integrate Reolink Cameras into Home Assistant
In this post, we will walk through the process of integrating Reolink Network Cameras into Home Assistant. With this integration, you can stream live footage, set up motion detection automations, and even record clips based on events. - · 5 min read 1650 views
ZigBee Temperature and Humidity Sensors: A Comparison
Smart homes increasingly use temperature and humidity sensors for automation, and I've installed over 10 throughout my house, including the garden, attic, fridge, and pool. ZigBee sensors are ideal for this due to their low power consumption and reliable communication, allowing them to operate on batteries for months or even years. - · 2 min read 1516 views
433Mhz <-> MQTT gateway with some extras
This project is a simple bidirectional gateway to transmit and receive 433Mhz RF signals connected to MQTT. It is built with a cost-effective ESP8266 WiFi chip, simple 433Mhz RF modules and an additional BMP085 sensor. - · 3 min read 1328 views
Home Assistant - Homematic HM-Dis-EP-WM55 e-paper display
My second Home Assistant project is about the integration of the Homematic HM-Dis-EP-WM55 e-paper display in my HA setup. I am sharing some reusable scripts for this or similar devices. - · 4 min read 1012 views
The Moving Spiders
For this year's Halloween project I built something without pumpkins. The small moving spiders are to scare our guests. - · 4 min read 953 views
Home Assistant - The big move
This project is about the change I did from OpenHab to Home Assistant for our smart home automation system. Ok maybe the headline sounds a bit too sensational but change our entire home automation setup from one system we used for 2+ years now to a completely new one requires quite some heavy lifting. - · 2 min read 812 views
Our home sweet smart home
Our Home Assistant setup is pretty simple - everything currently runs on a single board computer - smooth and stable for 12+ months. This is how our setup looks like. - · 5 min read 694 views
Arduino Dollhouse Mini TV
The dollhouse Mini TV is a small Arduino project using a ESP8266 chip and an SSD1306 OLED display to build a small working TV for my daughter's birthday. - · 4 min read 626 views
Automate Reolink camera notifications with Home Assistant
Automate Reolink camera notifications with Home Assistant to overcome app limitations like geo-fencing and scheduling. Create custom notifications based on location, time, or other conditions by configuring simple YAML scripts, improving the flexibility and intelligence of your home security system. - · 3 min read 402 views
Mini plant watering project
I would like to show you my new half 30 minutes no coding holiday Home Assistant project. - · 6 min read 360 views
Going Green: Installing a Solar System
This one has been in my draft folder for a few weeks. Our photovoltaic system was installed in spring 2020 and I wanted to report on it earlier. I finally had some time to finish the article over the... - · 5 min read 298 views
Going Green: Our Own Electricity
Part 2 of my "Our Own Electricity" series gives an insight into our electricity production and consumption. After I explained our setup I will share details on the installation costs, our break even calculation. - · 2 min read 266 views
Harnessing the Power of the Sun: A Year in Review
In this annual update I give an update on the 2023 performance of our photovoltaic system and comparing it with previous years' data. - · 2 min read 257 views
Homie Sensor project with BME280
The mqtt-bme280-homie project is a small and easy to integrate temperature, air pressure and humidity monitoring solution with an extra SSD1306 OLED display. Sensor data is send via MQTT and displayed on the small screen. - · 2 min read 236 views
Mia's Dino Facts
My daughter Mia is a huge dinosaur fan, almost a little dinosaur nerd. We are overwhelmed with information about dinosaurs every day. It starts during breakfast and doesn’t stop before she falls... - · 1 min read 216 views
New Talk: How to Build Content and Commerce Experiences Using App Builder and API Mesh
Last November, Adobe hosted the Adobe Developers Live Headless. The event focused on building modern experiences with AEM Sites headless. Together with my colleagues Mark & James I gave a... - · 4 min read 212 views
IoT enabled Jack-O-Lantern Flamethrower
A flame-throwing Jack-O-Lantern is a real Halloween highlight and definitely something to impress the trick-or-treaters and your neighbors. An internet controlled IoT flame throwing Jack-O-Lantern is even better. - · 3 min read 133 views
Need for Speed: Why Website Performance Matters
As I have run this website for a few years now I have always thought about how the website performs for my users. Core Web Vitals and that website performance are important. - · 1 min read <100 views
New Talk: Developing a good editor experience with Microsoft 365/Google Workspace
In May Adobe hosted the Adobe Developers Live virtual conference for Adobe Experience Manager. The conference focused on building next generation composable services, universal editor, edge delivery... - · 3 min read <100 views
Website History
In this post I will briefly describe my personal website’s history. It started in 1998. At this point, I have already gone through six iterations. I had already completely forgotten two of them. My... - · 1 min read <100 views
AdaptTo 2023: Unveiling the Future of Adobe AEM Sites
The future of AEM Sites at AdaptTo 2023 conference - an intro into Edge Delivery Services and Document-based Authoring. - · 3 min read <100 views
Creepy Halloween Eyes
Halloween is coming in a few days and here is the first of my Halloween projects for 2018 - a creepy pumpkin watching you. Every step you take, every move you make is seen by this little guy. - · 1 min read <100 views
CIF on Adobe Tech Blog
An intro and summary about some professional writing I did in the last few weeks and months for the Adobe Tech Blog. - · 1 min read <100 views
Building Experiences - AEM & Magento Commerce Integration
On July 28th I was a guest on Mark Szulc's Building Experiences using Adobe Experience Cloud show. We discussed how Adobe Experience Manager works together with Magento, using the latest release of the Commerce Integration Framework. - · 1 min read <100 views
Build your first website with Edge Delivery and document based authoring
For zero to go-live of your first website in 30 min. Is that possible? In this developer step-by-step walkthrough I show you how to build and launch your first size using Adobe’s new Edge Delivery... - · 1 min read <100 views
AEM's Headless Extension for Adobe Commerce PWA Studio
Together with my colleague Mark J. Becker I wrote an introduction and instructions on how to use AEM Content Fragments together with the Adobe Commerce (aka. Magento) PWA. We provide step-by-step... - · 1 min read <100 views
New Talk: Extend AEM Content & Commerce
At the last Adobe Developers Live conference I gave a talk about how to extend AEM Content & Commerce with new Adobe Developer App Builder. In this talk I discuss AEM Commerce integration &... - · 1 min read <100 views
Content and Commerce with Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service
I held a session on “Content and Commerce with Adobe Experience Manager” at the recent Adobe Developers Live | Content conference. The recording for my talk is now up. If you couldn’t join the... - · 1 min read <100 views
adaptTo() 2024: Implement large-scale projects on AEM Edge Delivery Services
We recently had the opportunity to present at adaptTo() in Berlin, one of the most anticipated tech conferences in the Adobe Experience Manager community. Together with my colleague Anian Weber we...
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