MQTT

Ditch the Remote: Aesthetically clean control for Ventair SkyFan DC with Clipsal, Sonoff, MQTT, Tasmota Home Assistant & TUYA

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Do you like the trend of remotes for appliances? I don’t. They often look our of place, require you to drill tiny holes in walls for mounts and even still, they can go missing. Let alone, they need batteries and you never can find them when you need them. But modern devices do more than … Read more

Monitoring Compressor Tank Pressure and Counting Refill Cycles Using a Pressure Transducer, an Arduino, Home Assistant and MQTT

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I am the kind of person who operates on data. I also like tools and want to maintain them well. For many of my small engines I use hour meters to provide me the data to indicate when to perform maintenance . I was looking for a project of late and thought, what could I … Read more

Building Frigate With Google Coral TPU, Portainer, Docker On A Raspberry Pi 5 with NFS Storage & Home Assistant Integration

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NVR (Network Video Recording) and false positives. Two words if you have been in this game long enough you will be familiar with. Tree’s that move, a spider all create noise to the point you tune out. Argh. I never have relied on the smarts of my Geovision camera’s but have used SightHound, Synology Surveillance … Read more

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

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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

Aesthetically Clean Remote Switching Using MQTT with Sonoff and Shelly Modules

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Automation and technology are amazing, modern advances allow us to automate almost everything in our daily lives, before we get into this post, here is an end-2-end example of this solution, enjoy. So now you know what we will be building, lets get in to it. There are almost no systems in my house that … Read more

Using an Arduino & A 1602 LCD Screen With Polyglot Code To Display Your Next Outlook Meeting

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In a prior post I discussed how you can connect a 1602 LCD screen via i2C to an Arduino compliant MCU, with the aid of MQTT and C++ to display metrics that matter. But I realised, other than wanting to know the temperature and metrics around energy consumption there was another key piece of information … Read more

Displaying Metrics With A 1602 LCD, I2C and MQTT

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A few months ago, I solved the problem of having to use a Home Assistant dashboard to view power related metrics that matter to me by using LED’s embedded into my desk. You can read about it here, and these LED’s work really well. The LED’s have saved me looking at Home Assistant, and they … Read more

Monitoring Solar Consumption With A ESP32/8266 and LED Lights

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Since having a PV (Photo Voltaic) solar array installed on my roof earlier in the year I have become a more aware of the energy consumption of my house. In my post ‘Making Data Driven Decisions With A PV Array, Home Assistant and MQTT‘ I am leveraging consumption data to make decisions in my house, … Read more

Automagically Keeping Cool In Zwift

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Cycling has always been something I have been passionate about. With the COVID-19 induced lockdowns I finally decided to purchase an indoor trainer (Garmin TACX Neo 2T) and like so many people around the world, I use Zwift as a means to hit my distance targets each week. Spoiler – Want to see a demo? … Read more