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Make Your Reolink Camera Speak with Home Assistant TTS & AI
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! - · 1 min read read 1822 views
Weather Cards in Home Assistant: My Top Picks
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. - · 1 min read read 1091 views
Home Assistant Backup in 2025
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. - · 1 min read read 126 views
Our 2024 Solar Power Performance
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. - · 1 min read read 2782 views
Automate Reolink camera notifications with Home Assistant
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. - · 1 min read read 8119 views
How to Integrate Reolink Cameras into Home Assistant
Smart homes are increasingly using temperature and humidity sensors for automation, and I've installed over 10 throughout my house, including the garden, loft, fridge and pool. ZigBee sensors are ideal for this because of their low power consumption and reliable communication, allowing them to run on batteries for months or even years. - · 1 min read read 8514 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. - · 1 min read read 12849 views
The digital notepad box - a DIY e-ink project
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. - · 1 min read read 319 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. - · 1 min read read 2433 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. - · 1 min read read 24646 views
Home Assistant backup to Synology NAS
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. - · 1 min read read 142 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 read 4293 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. - · 1 min read read 20772 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. - · 1 min read read 23316 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. - · 1 min read read 341 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. - · 1 min read read 411 views
Going Green: Installing a Solar System
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. - · 1 min read read 1204 views
The Moving Spiders
For this year's Halloween project I built something without pumpkins. The small moving spiders are to scare our guests. - · 1 min read read 20362 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. - · 1 min read read 10984 views
Green grass with Home Assistant
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. - · 1 min read read 29669 views
Water tank monitoring with ESPHome
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. - · 1 min read read 37448 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. - · 1 min read read < 100 views
Mia's Dino Facts
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. - · 1 min read 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. - · 1 min read read 460 views
Mini plant watering project
I would like to show you my new 30 min, no coding holiday plant watering project. - · 1 min read read 859 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. - · 1 min read read 2696 views
Home Assistant: You have got mail
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. - · 1 min read read 916 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 over 12 months. This is our setup. - · 1 min read read 1550 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. - · 1 min read read 1067 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. - · 1 min read read 237 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. - · 1 min read 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 read 1738 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. - · 1 min read read 301 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.
My recent projects
Projects I worked on recently - check them out. Also see the archive with all of my posts.