Home Assistant Add-On

Top Home Assistant Add-ons 2023 Edition

We are a couple of months (ok three) into 2023 and I think it's finally time to do my annual top add-ons video and blog post. I like to highlight what is most important to my home automation setup and what I think are invaluable. NOTE: I am

Matter Standard

Trying to Use Matter

I tried to use Matter with Home Assistant. It didn't work.

home assistant zigbee

Playing with Home Assistant SkyConnect and Migrating Zigbee

I run a Home Assistant Yellow that has a Zigbee radio already installed (and a matter-ready radio for that matter). Today I'm going to move over to the new Home Assistant SkyConnect on the same device to see how that works and then I will migrate from my

mostlychris

Using Home Assistant Local Calendar to Schedule Stuff!

Home Assistant added a local calendar to their list of integrations in December of 2022. In January, they made some updates that make it even more useful. Calendars don't usually get much love since they are so utilitarian. However, this calendar allows you to automate things easily so

Home Assistant

Ditching LastPass for Bitwarden

LastPass has had a serious data breach. Maybe it's time to take control of your passwords!

mostly chris home assistant

Find Missing Entities in Home Assistant

The longer I run Home Assistant, the more I find that I have missing, unavailable, and orphaned entities and services. It's hard to keep tabs on all the changes that happen when an integration or add-on is updated. Sometimes changes to entities or services are required. Even though

2022.12

Home Assistant 2022.12 Update

Just like clockwork, Home Assistant has done their monthly release for December 2022. As with many of their releases, this one has many new features, a couple of which I'm extra excited about. Home Assistant has finally released their first Alpha, or as they call it, the "

Home Assistant remote access

Using the Cloudflared Add-On

I wrote an article and made a video on how to remotely connect to Home Assistant and other internal network resources using Cloudflare Tunnels. I got a ton of feedback on that asking why I didn't use the Cloudflared Home Assistant add-on instead. The simple answer is that

Cameras

Frigate NVR with Docker and Home Assistant

I have been using Frigate for a while now and recently I moved my whole Frigate setup first from Home Assistant as an add-on to a VirtualBox VM, and finally to a Dell Optiplex Micro running Frigate in a Docker Container. This post and related video are at the request

Home Automation

Home Assistant Release 2022.11

Home Assistant version 2022.11 is now released. With that, some of your WTH (What the Heck?)  suggestions and feedback have been introduced. If you don't know what WTH is, it's a month in which the Home Assistant team takes in suggestions and feedback outside of

Home Assistant

Home Assistant Remote Access with Cloudflare Argo Tunnel

Home Assistant sits inside your local network (I hope) and that means it is behind your ISP router and connection. There are MANY ways to connect to Home Assistant in this type of setup. By far, the easiest way is to sign up for a Nabu Casa account and then

Home Assistant

Home Assistant Repair Center and MQTT

If you are not familiar with the Home Assistant Repair center, you should be. It's a fantastic tool that helps you know when there are potential issues with your Home Assistant instance and suggests corrective actions. Take a look at my video if you want more details. Recently,

Coral TPU

Bringing Back the Coral TPU

I have been using Frigate as my daily driver NVR for quite a while now. I've got a whole video series on camera stuff if you are interested. At one point in my Frigate journey, I decided to move the whole setup from my Home Assistant Blue to

Home Assistant

Migrating from a Raspberry Pi to the Home Assistant Yellow

This is one of those videos/posts that almost doesn't need to exist because of how easy it is to do. But sometimes it is also nice to highlight the easy things. Many of my videos are about harder or more complicated topics. This one is much more

Home Assistant

EMQX Is the Perfect MQTT Broker to View Your Traffic

In Home Assistant, I have been using the core available Eclipse MQTT Mosquitto Broker for a long time and it has been working flawlessly. The problem with that broker is that in order to view traffic and troubleshoot issues, I have to go to external software OR use different screens

smart home tech Featured

Bluetooth Proxies in Home Assistant

Bluetooth has been a popular protocol and was invented back in the late 1990's. It exists in many products today, such as tablets, phones, media players, headsets, modems, watches, and many more. In the smart home world, Bluetooth Low Energy is more useful and this comes in the

2022.9

Home Assistant 2022.9 Release Highlights

It's that time of the month again. The time when the hard-working Home Assistant developers release the latest update of Home Assistant. The team at Home Assistant/Nabu Casa do a good job of pointing out all the new, shiny things in their release party, which you can

Should I Still Use Grafana?

Well... that was going to be the title anyway. As I began writing and filming this post/video I realized that I had a way to do data correlation (cause and effect) using Apex Charts. I use the word correlation loosely and not in any super scientific way. It'

Home Assistant

Home Assistant Control and Notifications on Your PC

Hass.Agent on your Windows PC tied together with Home Assistant can do a LOT of things. Controlling aspects of your PC from Home Assistant and controlling entities in Home Assistant from your PC are just a few of those things. HASS.Agent is a Windows-based client (companion) application for

Home Assistant

Add Custom Button Cards to your Dashboard

In my opinion, one of the most useful dashboard elements in Home Assistant is the Button Card by @RomRider. Why do I say that? The feature list alone tells the story. Take a look at what you get with Button Cards as listed on the GitHub page: * works with any

Repairs Dashboard in Home Assistant

In the 2022.8 release of Home Assistant, they added what I think is one of the best troubleshooting and awareness features--the Repairs Dashboard. Go directly to my video here if you don't want to read on. As of this writing, the dashboard can detect 25 issues that

Home Assistant

Keeping Tabs on your Network

If you run a home lab or run anything of importance in your home network, it is important to know when things are not working as expected. I've had many occasions in which something went down and I was either notified by the owner of the service I

Home Assistant

Home Assistant Yellow First Look

I recently had the fortune of acquiring a Home Assistant Yellow. For those of you that have been following along with this project, you might know it as the Home Assistant Amber. The Yellow is the same project but was renamed for various reasons. In this week's video,

Home Assistant

Nest Integration with Home Assistant

💡NOTE: If you've come here from my YouTube video comment about the application credentials, here is an explanation. If you are getting strange errors or errors related to your application credentials OR you have done this integration before but are starting over, you need to delete your application

Home Assistant

My TOP 5 Ways to Connect to Home Assistant

Quick shout out to Skillshare for supporting the channel and sponsoring the linked video. Get a one-month free trial for any of their thousands of courses with this link. One of the great things about Home Assistant is the ability to choose how and what you integrate, operate, build, experiment