visitors this year: 348 Smart devices often find their best uses in Home Assistant ‘automations’. ‘Automations’ are better known as ‘routines’ and they make quite unrelated devices interact with each other as will be...
visitors this year: 2,017 I’ve been using the Wireguard or nginx to access my home network* securely and I’ve explained in other posts (links below) how they’re used and set up. Tailscale however is...
visitors this year: 5,910 You can graph temperature on this cute display and use buttons to turn on the heater as needed – the project works with Home Assistant and needs very little else...
handling data from experiments / home & garden / monitoring at home
by Roger · Published Mar 2022 · Last modified Mar 2023
visitors this year: 1,684 I know that I ought not leave things powered on. Knowing that is easier than remembering that an e-bike or drone or laptop battery is still connected. Below I show...
visitors this year: 307 , If you’re a casual electronics hobbyist like me, the idea of using a LCD magnifier or microscope may seem attractive. For example this music spectrum display kit requires soldering...
visitors this year: 20,449 Why do this? At an early point on the journey to network heaven you may have a need to connect from some holiday location say, to a camera, your computer,...
visitors this year: 6,231 The Home Assistant home automation hub is more useful if you can access it remotely. In addition to having anywhere access with a browser URL, there’s an excellent phone app...
visitors this year: 19,209 If you need to access Home Assistant remotely away from home, skip this page and instead go to access your Home Assistant remotely using DuckDNS, Letsencrypt and the nginx SSL...
visitors this year: 824 If you need to know when a device, like a dryer or washing machine has finished working, get a ‘smart plug with energy monitoring‘. Amazon list many of them but...
visitors this year: 7,587 This ceiling ‘coffer’ is lit by four 5m LED strips – each is cut to fit the space. When my kitchen lights turn on they fade up in a few...
visitors this year: 3,984 If you use Home Assistant you can show temperature, time and other sensor entities on this cute display. The inspiration for this mini-project came from a need to display my...
visitors this year: 1,142 Ovens may have digital controllers or analogue temperature controllers and cooks seem to have blind faith in their settings. In this household the cooks were burning food so I checked...
visitors this year: 1,572 or how to selectively expose Home Assistant entities to Alexa with emulated hue Home automation platforms like Alexa, Google Home and Home Assistant show major differences in the devices that...
visitors this year: 2,954 If you want to use a GitHub project with Arduino software follow this step-by-step guide. We’ll make an ESP32 camera web server using the Github code from ‘easytarget’. An ESP32-CAM...
visitors this year: 1,825 In a previous project I set up temperature sensors in my room and sent the data via Bluetooth to Home Assistant, the home automation platform. Home Assistant is software that...
visitors this year: 7,608 Toggling a light switch means that a press of the switch will turn the light off or on depending it what it was last doing. There is nothing clever about...
visitors this year: 1,547 I wouldn’t especially recommend the D-Link DCS-D150 motion sensor but it does have some features that had me buy it. Firstly it plugs into a wall socket above a worktop...
visitors this year: 241 smart sockets have uses. A smart socket adds a little cleverness to a table lamp or electric heater. They connect to your Internet wifi though some work on local 433MHz...
visitors this year: 3,250 they work together but not everything is possible As an early adopter I’ve come to feel that Philips Hue lighting system gains more praise than it needs. Dozens of other...
visitors this year: 150 smart bulbs and sockets have select uses. A smart socket adds a little on/off cleverness to a table lamp, electric heater or the printer upstairs that takes five minutes before...
visitors this year: 414 When you look for home automation equipment you find many systems. They turn on lights and plug sockets; water the garden; unlock a door, turn up the heating; record a...
visitors this year: 550 In the beginning there was the smart bulb that changed colour and convinced me that here was something trivial and fanciful. Today I’m surprised by the usefulness of the smart...
visitors this year: 11,014 Home Assistant is software that connects smart devices. It enables them to have a useful life outside of the app that they come with. You will gain unusual flexibility where...
visitors this year: 1,135 ‘own’ your own devices THE FOLLOWING PROCESS IS STILL USEFUL – HOWEVER SONOFF DEVICES CAN WORK WITHOUT MODIFICATION IN HOME ASSISTANT (SEE HERE) AND THE EWElink app. THE ADVANTAGE OF...
visitors this year: 726 The Sonoff POWR2 can replace the timer on a hot water immersion heater. This model also measures electricity as volts, amps and current. This feature provides the key to saving...
visitors this year: 837 Dupont leads connect up projects. They come as male to male pin / female to female / male pin to female types. You can solder the male ends to a...
visitors this year: 319 There are a variety of camera types to help monitor the drive, a pet, a baby, a device, a bird feeder – whatever. You might want to know what’s eating...
visitors this year: 774 The LED striplights in a kitchen use 12v transformers and they are powered through smart plugs / sockets. The sockets are by TP-link – and they remember their on-off state...
rogerfrost.com is a compendium of ideas for using technology with sciencey questions in mind. Started in 1995 to offer ideas to school science teachers, its coverage now extends to gadgets, home automation, home living and sensors to help understand what’s going on around the house.
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Roger Frost (his cv) has been writing about technology since 1988 and this web includes his articles; tutorials, lesson outlines and radio interviews.
HOME AUTOMATION:
