All-time Favorites

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.

Watering our 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.

Regularly backing up your Home Assistant configuration is critical to protecting your smart home deployment. This article explains how to back up your Home Assistant to a NAS.

I received many questions about using an ultrasonic distance sensor with ESPHome for their water tank project, leading them to create a short guide.

The third part of my Our Own Electricity series describes how I integrated our photovoltaic system into Home Assistant.

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.

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.

Inspired by the Home Assistant community, I built a desk-friendly e-paper display using ESPHome. This blog post details my journey from gathering components to creating a custom home automation dashboard that delivers real-time data in a sleek wooden case. Discover how rewarding and accessible e-paper displays can be for your smart home.

Automate your lawn sprinklers for effortless, intelligent watering using Home Assistant. This guide details how to connect your system to create smart schedules based on weather and soil conditions. Get a healthier, greener lawn while optimizing water usage.

In this post, I 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.

This Home Assistant guide compares popular weather cards including the built-in Weather Forecast Card and community alternatives like Clock Weather Card, Platinum Weather Card, and Simple Weather Card. The author provides setup instructions and recommendations for choosing between minimalist or feature-rich weather displays for your dashboard.

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.

Automate Reolink camera notifications with Home Assistant to overcome app limitations such as geo-fencing and scheduling. Create custom notifications based on location, time or other conditions by configuring simple YAML scripts, increasing the flexibility and intelligence of your home security system.

Today I want to share a little holiday project I am building this week: a mailbox sensor to make a dumb mailbox smart and notify us when we get new mail. I'm talking about real physical mail - letters, postcards, newspapers, etc. that get dropped into our mailbox.

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.

Home Assistant's 2025 backup system introduces native cloud storage, flexible encryption, and automated scheduling following the 3-2-1 backup rule. The article covers setting up automatic backups to Synology NAS, Google Drive, OneDrive, and Home Assistant Cloud with configuration steps and recovery best practices.

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.

Follow this detailed technical guide to set up and configure evcc with real-world examples. Learn how to integrate your solar inverter, EV charger, and vehicle for optimal solar surplus charging.

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.

For this year's Halloween project I built something without pumpkins. The small moving spiders are to scare our guests.

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.

Use Home Assistant to turn camera motion into AI-powered spoken descriptions. Snapshot, analyze with AI, and push to your speaker with text-to-speech. Your smart home can now tell you what's happening outside!

Our Home Assistant setup is pretty simple - everything currently runs on a single board computer - smooth and stable for over 12 months. This is our setup.

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.

I would like to show you my new 30 min, no coding holiday plant watering project.

Discover how we cut our electricity bills and achieved energy independence by installing a 9.45kW solar system with battery storage. Learn about our motivation, technical setup, and real-world journey to producing your own clean electricity.

Two weeks into using evcc for solar EV charging - here's my complete introduction to this open-source charging controller and why it's a game-changer for electric vehicle owners.

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.

In this annual update I give an update on the 2023 performance of our photovoltaic system and comparing it with previous years' data.

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.

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.

Watch how Adobe's App Builder and API Mesh can transform headless commerce development by seamlessly blending content management with e-commerce functionality. Discover the end-to-end process of building modern storefronts that combine AEM content with Commerce data in this recorded presentation.

Our home’s solar energy system continued its upward trajectory in 2024. In fact, compared to previous years, it provided a slight increase in energy production. This post looks at our solar performance in 2024, highlighting key trends and comparing them with the results from 2021, 2022 and 2023.

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.

Learn how to automate secure access to your EV charger using Home Assistant! This tutorial shows you how to automatically unlock and authorize charging only when your specific car is detected. Ditch the RFID cards and ensure only authorized vehicles can charge effortlessly.

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.

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.

Learn how to create intuitive content structures that empower authors in AEM Edge Delivery projects using familiar tools like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Discover best practices and avoid common pitfalls when implementing document-based authoring workflows.

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 Service.

The future of AEM Sites at AdaptTo 2023 conference - an intro into Edge Delivery Services and Document-based Authoring.

An intro and summary about some professional writing I did in the last few weeks and months for the Adobe Tech Blog.

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.

Discover how AEM Edge Delivery Services has evolved beyond basic websites to power complex, multilingual enterprise projects. Learn the strategic approaches and real-world insights from this adaptTo() conference presentation on scaling global AEM implementations.

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.

Learn how to seamlessly integrate custom eCommerce solutions with Adobe Experience Manager using the Commerce Integration Framework and App Builder. This Adobe Developers Live talk reveals practical extensibility patterns and GraphQL integration techniques for building powerful commerce experiences.

I held a session on “Content and Commerce with Adobe Experience Manager” at the recent Adobe Developers Live. The recording for my talk is now up. If you couldn’t join the session, please watch and learn about how to get started with Commerce on Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service.

Meet Mia, a 7-year-old dinosaur expert who got her own website to share fascinating dino facts with the world. Discover how a father built the perfect platform for his daughter's paleontology passion using modern web technologies.

Learn how AuthorBus and Universal Editor are transforming Adobe Edge Delivery Services authoring with flexible workflows for modern content creation.