Posts Categorised: SmartHome & IoT

4MiFlora Plant Sensors in Home Assistant

Published by & filed under Home Assistant. Last updated .

I’ve been suing the MiFlora Home Assist­ant integ­ra­tion to get data on vari­ous house plants for a while. How­ever along the way I’ve had to over­come vari­ous hurdles includ­ing lim­ited range of bluetooth, bat­tery life issues, and get­ting the bat­tery val­ues to report. I finally seem to have cracked all of these and now have a sys­tem that works reli­ably with lots of plants around the house. I’ve sum­mar­ised what I’ve used below.

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1Remove any device from home assistant

Published by & filed under Home Assistant. Last updated .

I’ve now been using home assist­ant for sev­er­al years and most of the early chal­lenges and learn­ing-curves have been over-come. How­ever, there has been a long-stand­ing issue that is a con­stant frus­tra­tion — remov­ing old devices does­n’t have a stand­ard approach and in some case is impossible from the GUI. There is a way though.
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2Updating firmware on Conbee II stick for Home Assistant

Published by & filed under Home Assistant. Last updated .

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

0Bin collections in Home Assistant

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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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0Getting OpenZWave working with Home Assistant

Published by & filed under SmartHome & IoT. Last updated .

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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