Category: Home Assistant

Google Assistant morning announcement with Home Assistant

I have been using both Home Assistant and several Google Home devices for a few years now and a while back I decided to get them to be a bit more talkative to me. If you have seen my previous washer and dryer notification projects you may have noticed I am using Home Assistant’s Google TTS (text to speech) service to tell me when either machine is done. Below I am taking this TTS service further to give me a Good Morning weather announcement when I enter my kitchen.

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Wemo Maker garage door opener with Home Assistant

Wemo Maker Rear

A while back a mate asked me to connect his garage door to his phone. Seeing most garage doors have terminals on them to connect up a push button switch, it is pretty easy to connect up a smart device that can trigger the door, when we did this the only option in our region was using a Wemo Maker. Continue reading “Wemo Maker garage door opener with Home Assistant”

ESP8266 Washing Machine Notifier version 2

One of my first esp82266 projects was my washing machine notifier that connected to ifttt to send me an email when my wash was done.  I published this project to hackster.io back in December 2016 and it can also be found on my blog here. Since then I have found Home Assistant and my IOT devices around the home has grown with all of them connecting back to Home Assistant, so it was time I converted my washing machine notifier over from ifttt.

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Wemos D1 Mini IR blaster using Tasmota

 

This post is a follow on from my previous post about using ESP Easy on a Wemos D1 Mini to create an IR blaster. The hardware side of things is exactly the same so head on over that post if you need more info on the hardware side first. What we are creating here is an IR blaster using a Wemos D1 Mini that connects to Home Assistant via MQTT so we are assuming you have these set up as well. Continue reading “Wemos D1 Mini IR blaster using Tasmota”

Adding Temp Sensors to a Raspberry pi with Hass.io

Got a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant and would like to add some cheap temperature sensors to it? Well it’s pretty easy to do via several methods, Today we will focus on sensors directly connected to the pi. The below I used with Hass.io, but the same code should be usable on other versions of Home Assistant.

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Wemos D1 Mini IR blaster using ESP Easy

Background
As I slowly add more smart devices to my house I keep finding the need to add some smarts to some of my older stuff. My 10 year old Samsung TV is one such device that occasionally doesn’t turn off when you hit the button on the front, so if I could automate an off command via an IR blaster when I leave the house or go to bed I would save a bit of power.

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Making a dumb dryer smart

When I first started automating stuff around my house, Notifications from my washer and dryer were high on the list of things to do. I created a notifier for my washer using a wemos D1 mini and IFTT (project can be found here) as one of my first projects. It was a lot of messing around but it was cheap and has worked well for some time. I needed to find a different solution for my dryer as it had no running led that I could use to passively get the status from. After a lot of messing around with a vibration sensor I gave up when I saw a TP-link HS110 smart plug on sale.

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