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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. - · 6 min read <100 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 104 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. - · 8 min read 10594 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. - · 2 min read 238 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. - · 5 min read 1680 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. - · 5 min read 15101 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 124 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. - · 3 min read 2554 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. - · 6 min read 14065 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. - · 6 min read 16008 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 278 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. - · 6 min read 336 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... - · 4 min read 937 views
The Moving Spiders
For this year's Halloween project I built something without pumpkins. The small moving spiders are to scare our guests. - · 3 min read 16067 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. - · 5 min read 9826 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... - · 6 min read 23760 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 33804 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. - · 2 min read 221 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... - · 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... - · 3 min read 379 views
Mini plant watering project
I would like to show you my new half 30 minutes no coding holiday Home Assistant project. - · 5 min read 645 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. - · 3 min read 2112 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. - · 2 min read 773 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. - · 3 min read 1234 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 924 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. - · 4 min read 148 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 <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. - · 2 min read 1397 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. - · 2 min read 242 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.