I’ve now got around 30 tasmota-based smart plugs around the house. I’ve recently been tinkering with the settings on a few to optimise them for the roles they have
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ਪੋਸਟ ਸ਼੍ਰੇਣੀ: SmartHome & IoT
0Problems flashing an ESP32
I recently needed to set up a new ESP32 device to extend my plant monitoring BLE network. I hit one or 2 issues doing so that were worth noting
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4MiFlora Plant Sensors in Home Assistant
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.
0Home Assistant Tweaks
I’ve made a number of improvements to my home assistant instance of late and wanted to document what they were
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1Remove any device from home assistant
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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0Aeotec doorbell 6 in HA — how to trigger the bell
I’ve had a Z‑Wave AeoTec Doorbell 6 for a while and had it linked to Home Assistant successfully, but have never been able to trigger the bell from within home assistant. Until now…
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2Updating firmware on Conbee II stick for Home Assistant
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
2Air 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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0Bin 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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0Getting 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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“Hi James I realise it has been a long while, but I just checked this on windows 11 (build 23H2)…”