mostlychris

A collection of 25 posts

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.

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.

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

Home Assistant Voice

More Voice More Voice More Voice (Local Control)

I recently made a video and blog post about controlling Home Assistant entities via a VOIP phone that I have on my desk. This was in answer to being able to use a standard analog telephone with an analog telephone adapter. I wanted to see if the VOIP phone would

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

smart home

Automatically Back Up Home Assistant

It is important to backup Home Assistant. I show you two VERY EASY ways to make backups, both locally and off-site.