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smart home tech

A collection of 9 posts

Finally! Serious Backups for Home Assistant

Finally! Serious Backups for Home Assistant

Super easy local AND off-site encrypted backups for Home Assistant. You need this!

Get Smart Alerts from Dumb Smoke/CO Detectors

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

Zooz ZEN37 Wireless Remote

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

Trying to Use Matter

Matter Standard

Trying to Use Matter

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

Home Assistant Repair Center and MQTT

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,

Migrating from a Raspberry Pi to the Home Assistant Yellow

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

Bluetooth Proxies in Home Assistant

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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

Keeping Tabs on your Network

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

The Inevitable SD Card Failure

The Inevitable SD Card Failure

At some point in your Home Assistant, or IT, existence, you are going to have an SD card failure. It's a fact of life that is unavoidable. What happens next depends on how well you have prepared for this terrible eventuality. When it comes to Home Assistant, you