My adventures of Home Automation and other tech toys.
Regular readers of my blog may recall I purchased a Creality Ender 3 v2 printer a while back. When purchasing it, I also decided to purchase a BL touch auto bed levelling probe. This add-on probe helps in getting a perfectly level bed and therefore much more accurate prints. Continue reading “Install and review of a BL Touch to the Ender 3 V2”
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”
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”
I recently had one of my Arilux LED Controllers die on me, When it came to buying a replacement I found my favourite controller the H801 was out of stock, so I went on to purchase a new model known as the W03 and test that out. Below is my experiences on using it and flashing it with Tasmota.
Continue reading “Flashing the W03 LED Controller with Tasmota”
I recently acquired a fairly new Kogan LX10 robot vacuum cleaner. How I came to receive it was via a mate who received it as a Christmas present. After a few uses, he decided it was not for him, and he told me if I didn’t take it away it was going in the bin. I took him up on the offer to see if it was as bad as he thought, and to review it for this blog.
Continue reading “Kogan LX10 Robot Vacuum Review”
This post is a follow on to my previous post where I installed Home Assistant OS as a virtual machine under Proxmox. I did this on my development PC to see if Proxmox was for me before I moved the VM to my main home automation server. Now that I am happy with Proxmox running Home Assistant, it’s time to upgrade my main server to Proxmox and set up Home Assistant on it. While I could have just done a fresh installation like I did in my previous post very easily, I decided to test out Proxmox’s clustering options that allow the VM to be moved to another PC in the cluster. If this option interests you, read on.
Continue reading “Proxmox – migrate your Home Assistant VM to a new PC via a cluster”
When you get into a hobby like Home Automation or electronics, you inevitably are drawn into the world of 3d Printers. My first experience with one is my friend’s Creality CR10, which I made good use of and have fixed up along the way. I recently had decided to purchase my own printer and decided on the Creality Ender 3 v2. I decided on this model as it was the new kid on the Creality block that improved on the CR10’s shortcomings a fair bit despite its smaller print bed. Continue reading “Build and Review of the Ender 3 v2 3D Printer”
In a previous post I detailed installing Proxmox on an old PC to use as Home Assistant server with Home Assistant’s Virtual Machine image. Today I will go over some changes and tweaks I have done since setting up my Proxmox server. Continue reading “Home Assistant on Proxmox – next steps”
Since Home Assistant introduced the energy dashboard, I have been playing about with the odd energy monitoring smart plug that I had in use and decided I needed to try a few more. I previously used TP-link sockets, but since this Alert I decided against using this brand again. When browsing the Bunnings website, I saw that they have a new range of cheap Tuya based Arlec Smart Plugs. Known as the Arlec Grid Connect Smart Plug-in socket with energy meter, this seems to be a smaller, upgraded version of a previous Arlec plug. At only $17.50 the price was too good to resist, so after stopping by a few stores, I eventually found one in stock, and proceeded to purchase it to try it out.
Continue reading “Arlec PC191HA Smart Energy Meter Socket Review”
In a previous post a while back, I documented how I installed Home Assistant Supervised in Docker under Ubuntu. Since then, that method of install has become the not recommended way to install Home Assistant, as the Home Assistant team have stopped supporting that style of install. While I still run one system like that in a friend’s house, I decided it was time to change up the way my system was set up and have gone with Home Assistant in a VM under Proxmox. Continue reading “Set up a Home Assistant VM on Proxmox”