2025.1 Finally! Serious Backups for Home Assistant Super easy local AND off-site encrypted backups for Home Assistant. You need this!
Home Assistant Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition Local Voice Control Has Never Been Easier! Home Assistant has released the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition Hardware. It is designed with privacy in mind, is open source, and seamlessly connects to Home Assistant. 💡Watch the associated video to see the device in action. I was fortunate enough to receive
Home Assistant More New Things for My Home Assistant Dashboard! It's time to update my Home Assistant Dashboard with new Section Heading entities, Windrose cards, mini-graph cards, and Uptime Kuma alerts.
Home Assistant Node-RED vs Home Assistant Automations It's time to move from Node-RED to native Home Assistant automations. I show you step-by-step how to move one of my more complex automations.
backup home assistant Better Home Assistant Backups Using Auto Backup Making backups is SUPER important. I show you the EASY way to back up Home Assistant with Auto Backup.
Apollo Automation Monitor Your Air Quality with the Apollo Automation AIR-1 Check the air quality in your home or environment using this amazing AIR-1 sensor.
ZEN55 Get Smart Alerts from Dumb Smoke/CO Detectors My new house (circa 2023) was built with wired, interconnected smoke/CO detectors. These devices do not tie into any alerting other than sound. Unless I am in the house at the time of an alert, I won't know anything is going on. 💡Watch the video for this
SMLIGHT SMLIGHT Zigbee Coordinators. So Many Options! I review some of the SMLIGHT Zigbee coordinators that you should use in your smart home with Home Assistant, Zigbee2MQTT, and ZHA.
ApolloAutomation Apollo Automation MSR-1 Presence and More Sensor This all-in-one very compact sensor is a great addition to your home automation and Home Assistant Setup. It is ESPHome based so can be used in all types of systems.
Home Assistant Top HACS Integrations and custom cards for Home Assistant 💡Watch the related video HERE! I recently did a video on the top (critical) Home Assistant add-ons that power my smart home. Based on your feedback in the video, I am also going to cover my top HACS integrations and frontend components. If you are not familiar with HACS, it
Zooz Zooz ZEN37 Wireless Remote 💡Watch the video on this topic here! I have always wanted to try a wireless Z-Wave button device. I recently came across the ZEN37 from Zooz. There are probably many options is this arena but I have the Zooz ZEN32 wired scene controller and the ZEN37 fits right in with
assist pipeline Custom Voice Control Sentences in Home Assistant Create your OWN sentences for LOCAL VOICE CONTROL in Home Assistant with Node-RED or basic YAML configurations.
Frigate Frigate NVR Updates It's been a while since I did any videos or blog posts on the Frigate NVR. Someone mentioned to me some new functionality that might be in version 13 (which is in beta as of this writing) so I thought I would check it out.
Linptech Human Here? My First Presence Sensor Trying out the Linptech 24g MmWave human presence detector and Home Assistant.
Home Assistant Voice Hands-Free Control with Wake Words Home Assistant continues to make great strides in local voice control for their platform. That latest installment "Year of the Voice Chapter 4" has some nice surprises, the most exciting of which is the ability to use a wake word. 💡The video for this blog can be found
Automation My Top 5 Automations in Home Assistant Smart homes run on automations. Here are my TOP 5 in Home Assistant and Node-RED
2023.7 Conversations and Service Call Data in Home Assistant Make your IoT work for you. Conversations and Sentence Triggers with Automations in Home Assistant.
Home Assistant Using Your VOIP Phone to Control Your House Home Assistant has been working on local voice control and adding functionality to extend that to more than just the typical smart speakers. They do this through integrations and what they call "assist pipelines". 💡Watch my related video here. Assist pipelines include speech-to-text and text-to-speech. For those, they
Home Assistant Finally! Adding Fan Speed Controls I recently moved to a new house and one of the things about the old house that drove me crazy was having ceiling fans that ran all the time, even when no one was home. I vowed (with the proper approvals) to add fan controls to my Home Assistant setup.
Ecowitt Integration Home Assistant Home Assistant 2023.5 Broke Ecowitt I'm a long-time weather enthusiast and I like having the awareness and insight that a hyper-local weather station brings. In this case, directly from my backyard. The recent update to Home Assistant 2023.5 broke the HACS Ecowitt integration that I had been using for years. It turns
Home Assistant Caddy 2 Reverse Proxy for Local Network Device Access I've talked a lot about different ways to access devices in your local network. Cloudflare, Tailscale, Nginx Reverse Proxy, DuckDNS to name a few. In this short article, I am going to take a look at Caddy "The Ultimate Server". Caddy claims to be "a
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
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!
