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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Posts Categorised: SmartHome & IoT
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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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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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Getting the most out of HikVision Cameras
I have a 4Mpix HikVision mini dome camera for CCTV on the house. It provides a pretty reasonable picture considering the price, but the management interface is a bit rubbish and getting it set up with anything is a bit of a nuisance, so heres some notes on getting it working…
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Setting up an XBee ZigBee repeater
As part of the gradual expansion of my smarthome (might as well do something during lockdown right?) I decided to set up an XBee to improve the reach of my SmartThings hub. Good information for total beginners is a bit of a mission to find so I thought I’d put together a basic summary to start with.
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Expanding smarthome on the cheap
As I’ve written about before, I have begun to experiment with the world of smarthome devices, and currently use a smartthings hub and a google home mini. So far these have just turned on lamps and other “plugged in” devices via smartplugs, but with more compatible devices at reasonable prices finally starting to appear I wanted to start documenting more of what I’ve tried
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Cheap WiFi SmartPlugs with SmartThings
SmartThings compatible smart plugs are annoyingly expensive — typically around £40. This is far too expensive to consider buying many of. There are however WiFi plugs available online for around £10 that don’t officially work with SmartThings. Most of them are based on the ESP8266 chip which can be reflashed with new firmware that will work with SmartThings. Below I document my trials and tribulations with hacking these plugs
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Energenie Mi|Home
I decided to try expanding my smartHome setup with some cheaper smartplugs from Energenie. Below I summarise my findings so far.
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Connect SmartThings to Windows PC’s and Kodi
I have several windows PCs in my house that run Kodi. I wanted to connect them to SmartThings for a range of purposes. There are various things that can be done depending on the functionality you want.
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