Home Assistant – Inspect My Gadgets

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.

Continue reading “Home Assistant Backups to Synology NAS”

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”

Proxmox – migrate your Home Assistant VM to a new PC via a cluster

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”

Home Assistant on Proxmox – next steps

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”

Set up a Home Assistant VM on Proxmox

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”

The Sonoff 433MHz RF bridge with Home Assistant

The sonoff RF bridge
If you have played with home automation for some time, you are probably aware of 433MHz devices. They are generally a device like a wall plug relay that is controlled by a small radio remote. While very cheap, their popularity has begun to wane in the past 8 or so years as more and more smart outlets hit the market. While these smart outlets are way better in terms of functionality and reliability, maybe you may have a bunch of 433MHz things lying around that you would prefer to put to a good use if you can do so cheaply. This is where this post comes in.
Continue reading “The Sonoff 433MHz RF bridge with Home Assistant”

Broadlink RM mini IR blaster with Home Assistant

If you have been following my blog you may remember one of my earlier projects where I created an IR blaster with a Wemos D1 mini that I use to control my TV via Home Assistant. Today I am going to list the steps use an off the shelf IR blaster with Home Assistant. The main reason to use an off the shelf device is that the hard work has already been done for you and it is in a neat attractive box rather than a led stuck in front of your set. Continue reading “Broadlink RM mini IR blaster with Home Assistant”

Rubbish Bin Reminders with Home Assistant and Google Calendar

My kitchen has under bench LED strips that are connected to Home Assistant. The first automation I set up with these was to turn on when I entered the room and turn off when I left the room. I have motion sensors in each room so this was pretty easy to set up.

My next automation was a bit of fiddling around but has well been worth the effort. Basically I wanted the lights to change colour the night before rubbish collection day so I know what colour bin to put out. I have done this via Home Assistant’s Google Calendar integration, this allows me access two recurring calendar events I have created in my calendar called yellow and green. My setup and automations on how I have done this are listed below. Continue reading “Rubbish Bin Reminders with Home Assistant and Google Calendar”

Setting up Home Assistant supervised on an Ubuntu Desktop

If you have ever played with home automation at all you most likely would have come across the software Home Assistant, Think of it as a hub like Smartthings or Vera that you build yourself. The most common way to do this is with a Raspberry Pi and a SD card loaded with the Home Assistant image (previously known as the Hass.io image) and soon you will be set to start connecting to the smart devices around your home and automating them. Continue reading “Setting up Home Assistant supervised on an Ubuntu Desktop”

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.

Continue reading “Wemos D1 Mini IR blaster using ESP Easy”