A Powerful Combination For Driving HVAC Efficiency : Polyaire AirTouch 5 + SMA Energy Meter + Amazon Alexa + Door Sensors + Home Assistant

Recently after a some deliberation in living with a undersized and under performing cooling system for 15 years, my family decided to replace our multi zone gas ducted heating and evaportative cooling system with a Fujitsu R2 High Static Cooling Solution (16.5 KW Cool / 20.5KW heating). As usual lets start with a video to … Read more

Setting up MRTG Traffic Monitoring On Cisco / Ubiquiti devices in 15 minutes

Before we get into this post. Let’s start with the solution. Let me show you my installation and what you will build. You can access my installation of MRTG here, and click through my ports. Have a play. Traffic monitoring, do you monitor your switch ports? If you don’t I urge you to. In a … Read more

Using A Raspberry Pi 5 & Ubuntu 23.10 As A Desktop Replacement (2024)

It’s the start of the year and I am between jobs. Most people have multiple devices, but I don’t. I am not one to have a device for this and a device for that. I live and breathe off one device and this is by choice. So whilst I am between jobs, I still need … Read more

Battle of the NAS’es – Why are QNAP NAS’es attacking my Synology NAS?

Are QNAP NAS’es trying to destroy all Synology NAS’es? Hang on let me explain, but before I do that a NAS is a Network Storage device, that typically today runs an embedded Linux OS, has a variety of applications and provides storage in the form of NFS, SMB and other protocols (even ISCSI) to devices … Read more

Building My Super DoorBell – Part 1 Integrating Home Assistant Notifications via Amazon Alexa with TTS and Alexa Media Player

Note– Amazon Alexa now requires 2FA App Integration. This tutorial is accurate at the time of authoring (January 2024). If you have Google powered voice assistants, this post could be applied to Google NEST by using Onju Voice My humble doorbell has been a journey, yes it still rings a traditional doorbell chime (16V AC) … Read more

Updating a DNS A Record Based On Your Home IP Address Using FreeDNS , Amazon Route53 and Azure DNS

Let me ask you some questions… If you answered yes to all of the above questions, then read on. This website and other services I rely on daily, is hosted from my house and yes, my IP address changes from time to time, but my services are reliable. From my VPN to Home Assistant, this … Read more

Flashing Tasmota on a Sonoff Basic R4 & Configuring for Home Assistant

In October of 2023 Itead released their latest Sonoff Basic appliance module the Basic R4. It is now based off an ESP32 chip, versus the ESP82xx of prior models and provides increased load capabilities at 2400w. This appliance module is cheap and is perfect for attaching to a desk lamp, inline in a power board … Read more

Beyond Speed and Specs – Why Genuine SBC and MCU’s are the right choice for your project

Decisions, we all make them. You may make a decision based on specifications, performance, time to value supportability and so on. There are many dimensions, and we all have choice. In the last 15-20 years I have been an avid user of both SBC’s (Single Board Computers), PLC’s (Programable Logic Controllers) and MCU’s (Micro Controller … Read more

Controlling Bathroom Exhaust Fans With Honeywell Humidity Sensors

Automation and technology are amazing, but is automation in your mind the basics, such as lighting, you might ask Alexa or Google Assistant to turn on something. These are science experiments, purely because it involves an utterance, the magic in automation is when it ‘just’ works. No asking, just like Event Driven Architecture, it happens … Read more