I use a ConBee II USB stick for my zigbee mesh in Home Assistant. I wanted to update the firmware and found it is easiest to do this by shutting down HA, unplugging the stick and using a windows machine to update it, then putting it back into the HA system and booting HA back up. There are full instructions for the process in Windows on Dresden Elektronik’s website
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Air Quality in Home Assistant
I recently wrote about how to show bin collection information in Home Assistant, and my next project was to pull some air quality information. Fortunately I have a ‘Tado’ account which meant I could pull this information from their API using the following code
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Bin collections in Home Assistant
I’ve been developing my Home Assistant based smarthome setup for around a year now (since leaving SmartThings) and after an initial steep learning curve I’ve been veyr happy with home assistant so I have started working to expand the things it does as I am conifdent it offers a long term basis for my smarthome. One thing I wanted to add was bin collection data to remind me which bin is due when. As I live in Sheffield I needed to pull this data from the local authorities out-sources provider (veolia). The following details how I did this, building very much on the work of others who have done it already for other regions
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Getting OpenZWave working with Home Assistant
I am slowly migrating my smarthome setup to HomeAssistant which, as with most open-source projects, is pretty unfriendly to start with and takes some learning to use. I have an Aeotec ZStick and an Aeotec Doorbell 6 which work via Z‑Wave and I wanted to customise the tones and reduce the volume a little. You’d think it would be easy right?
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The perfect HTPC power supply 2020?
I recently got a new GPU for my HTPC which required a replacement power supply as the old one wasn’t suitable for powering a GPU with an 8 pin PCIe power cable. The HTPC is in use for an average of around 6 hours per day and with electricity at 15p/kWh any reduction in power at the wall works out at 33p a year per Watt. This isn’t a big saving, but if consumption is reduced by several watts the saving can add up.
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3 ways to run WP-CRON manually
I’ve recently been looking at how best to run wp-cron manually from the system to avoid a performance hit when a visitor loads the site. I’ve so far found 3 different ways to run this. There may be others.
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Updating cheap SmartPlugs
I have previously written about modifying cheap £10 smartplugs to run open source firmware. Now I have quite a number of them I needed an efficient way to update them. In this article I document how to do
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Old Foscam FI8918W in Milestone XProtect
I’ve recently been on a tool buying spree and decided I now need a degree of security for my garage. I also have an old VGA foscam camera sat unused in a box and a functioning CCTV server system, so I figured I might as well set the foscam up inside the garage — not only would it help identify anyone who was in there who shouldn’t be, it will also help me know where I left that tool I just can’t find, and if the neighbours cat has got locked in there again
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Classic games cloned as open source
I’ve long been a big fan of Transport Tycoon and have been playing OpenTTD for many years. I recently thought I’d look to see if any other classic games have been similarly cloned, and it turns out quite a few have!
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Embed a live RTSP stream in a webpage
I have recently been working on my smarthome setup and one of the things I’ve been meaning to get set up is a tablet with a touch-screen web interface to manage my smart home. One of the first problems I had to crack was how to stream my cctv feed to a web browser…
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