My recent projects

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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...

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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...

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.