Inspect My Gadgets – My adventures of Home Automation and other tech toys.

Secure the SynoCommunity Mosquitto broker in 2023

Recently I was upgrading packages on my Synology NAS, with one of those packages being SynoCommunity Mosquitto Broker. Shortly after the upgrade, I noticed the MQTT based devices in my Home Assistant server went off-line. It was then I realised that the upgrade to 2.0.15 had reset the MQTT username and password. When I checked out my previous post on how to add a user and password to the SynoCommunity Mosquitto Broker, I noted that a few things have changed slightly with this latest version, so I will document the current process below.

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Home Assistant Backups to Synology NAS

If you have ever run Home Assistant for a while, you will understand the importance of regular backups that are kept off the system that is running Home Assistant. This is especially important for those who run their system off an SD card on a Raspberry Pi. While I have played with cloud backup plugins in the past, I have ended up removing them as I was not that happy with them. My recent backup regime results in me manually copying off the regular backups, which is a less than ideal situation. Fortunately, with the release of Home Assistant 2023.6 the option of saving your backups to a NAS drive is now an option. This new feature safely saves my Home Assistant’s backups to my NAS which is a totally separate system to my Home Assistant server. Read on to see how easy this is to set up with Home Assistant and a Synology NAS.

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Wenzhi / Tuya human presence sensor WZ-M100 review

Not to be confused with PIR sensors, human presence sensors have been available for quite some time but have generally been priced out of reach of the average home user and have mostly been used is commercial settings. Recently, a flood of mmWave human presence sensors have become available at very reasonable prices, ranging from DIY boards for only a few dollars, up to more plug and play Wi-Fi and Zigbee solutions ranging up to the sub $100 mark. In this post I am going to look at a mid-range Zigbee mmWave sensor from Wenzhi / Tuya that I found on AliExpress known as the WZ-M100-W.
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Install and Review of Frigate Beta 0.12

The post is a follow-up to my previous post about my installation of Frigate. In case you missed it, Frigate is an open source network video recorder that has some smart AI detection of cars, people, pets, boxes etc. All the processing of the AI detection is done locally, this and the fact that this was an open source project that integrates well with Home Assistant is what drew me to install it in the first place. The Frigate project is fairly young, having its first release in 2019. Several versions have been released since that time, with each version improving on the last. In this post, I will install and check out what is coming up in version 0.12.

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Yale Unity Screen Door Lock Review

I recently needed to use up some Bunnings gift cards, so I decided to splurge on a smart lock to help beef up my home security. What I ended up buying was Yale’s Unity screen door lock, this lock is designed to retrofit in place of the standard screen door lock like I have had installed at my house since the 1980s.
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Washing machine notifier – version 3 – ESPHome

One of my first IOT projects and the first post on this blog was my washing machine notifier. It is based around the ESP8266 and a LDR (light dependent resistor) placed over the top of the power LED of my Fisher and Paykel Washing Machine. The first iteration of this project used my own LUA code connecting to IFTTT. The second version swapped out the IFTTT code for code written by a YouTuber to connect to Home Assistant via MQTT. In this third crack at this project, I convert the device to ESPHome and simplify my Home Assistant setup. Continue reading “Washing machine notifier – version 3 – ESPHome”

Frigate NVR + Docker under Proxmox

For a few months now, I have been trialling Frigate, a popular NVR solution most commonly used as a Home Assistant add on that provides fantastic object and person detection from your camera streams. The Frigate project is based on a Docker container, so not only does it work well as a Home Assistant OS add on, but also by itself on a separate Docker host. For a few reasons (mainly the space used by the recordings) I now plan to run Frigate outside Home Assistant on a separate Proxmox PC I have running as a development machine. To do this, I will need to get Docker running on this Proxmox PC, and I plan to do this via a TurnKey Core Linux container that I will document below.
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SmartThings Vs Home Assistant Review

Regular readers of my blog will know that my smart home is powered by Home Assistant, what I have not mentioned before is that I have been a closet user of a SmartThings hub. Below, I will document my experiences of using it with Home Assistant and my thoughts about the SmartThings platform. Continue reading “SmartThings Vs Home Assistant Review”

A LIDAR based Letterbox Notifier

Smart mailbox notifiers are a fun and challenging project that have increased in popularity thanks to microcontrollers like the ESP8266 and others. Often located in a remote environment that will often need to be able to be powered by a battery and solar and take advantage of deep sleep to conserve battery life. My mailbox presented an extra challenge in the fact that there is no door on it in order to add a switch that would detect it opening once mail was inserted in it. It is this reason I decided to use a Micro Lidar based distance sensor to measure the distance across the mailbox in order to determine if there is something in the box. This will be powered by a solar based ESP8266 running ESPHome and sending me notifications via Home Assistant. Continue reading “A LIDAR based Letterbox Notifier”

Making Ikea’s Air Purifier and Air Quality sensor smart

With a lot of talk around air purifiers in the news lately, I decided to purchase my own. While I often look for some smart device, I found that the range of smart air purifiers way too expensive for what I wanted to spend, so I went for two good value Ikea products that I planned to make smart via Home Assistant with a bit of hacking and a smart plug. Continue reading “Making Ikea’s Air Purifier and Air Quality sensor smart”