Internet of things

I wanted to create a simple chart to show electricity consumption vs. the outdoor temperature. Prerequisites: There are a lot of guides and videos of how to install HACS and ApexCharts if you don’t already have it. Just Google it 🙂 Summary Measure power usage I have a lot of different heating options, like floor-heating, heat pump and panel oven. …

Testing Home Assistant Glow for reading my electricity usage in Home Assistant.

Buying Reolink Argus 2 for off-grid mount on cabin in the woods.

I bought a Philips Hue Being ceiling lamp. This is pre-paired with a remote and can be added to the Hue bridge with its serial number. This a nice feature and easy if you have a Hue-bridge, but how do you get it into deCONZ? The manual does not say anything about how to unpair it. When I google, I …

For almost two years ago, I wrote an article about controlling by garagedoor with the Qubino Flush 1D Relay. I always had a plan to add some status-sensor to the garage door. I started with a 433MHz sensor, but it was never a success. It was hard to place a magnet-sensor and 433MHz is not the best option – so …

For some reason the Leaf-component in Home Assistant has not been working for some time. Since November 2020 according to the community forum. UPDATE: Before you read any futher… Home Assistant bumped pycarwings2 to 2.10 in the last 2020.12.2 release. I actually found this out just when I was going to add the data from the solution below, into HA. …

Migrate from Zwave-integration to OpenZwave (beta)

After using two workdays to configure four Sonos speakers for a youth club at work, I found that Sonos has big issues with their onboarding. There are several of forums with problems around Sonos and UniFi-network, but I think this is more a Sonos- or timing-issue, than a network issue. I gave up the Sonos Beam the first day, after …

It is about 5 months since i wrote Housegard Note – Smokealarm (it works, kinda). I can happily say that we have had no fire in the house since I started to test these – but there have not been any false alarms either. I bought this for testing when we started renovating an apartment in the basement. As the …

I installed Home Assistant on a old computer with Ubuntu server back in 2016. Lately they have released Hass.io, HassOS and changed the name of the basic Home Assistant to Home Assistant Core… I think… There has been a lot of names to keep track on here. I believe I had Home Assistant Core and migrated to HassOS/Hass.io now. My …

I recently bought two Housegard Note smokealarms, with the hub. They kinda works, but it’s not «Apple». Before I get to the Housegard, I will say something about my testing and choices so far. In the last five years, I have tested four Fibaro smoke detectors. When I first bought them, there wasn’t a lot of choices – it was …

In this post, I created a simple PHP-to-MQTT integration for Telldus Tellstick. I used CloudMQTT as a broker, but after upgrading HA to 0.107 it stopped working for some reason. When I started to troubleshoot this, I started wondering why I have used a third-party broker. Maybe it was before I started with docker… So i just fired up an …

My Roborock started to make some weird noises. Sounded like the start of a broken fan/motor. I googled a bit, and found that I was not the first one. I found a similar problem from another person that uploaded a video on YouTube. I contacted Xiaomi support and got this response 40 minutes later: You could try methods below.1. Empty …

I have been using cameras at home since late 90’s, mostly for fun. When we bought a house in 2011, the usage changed. I started with a camera to check if the garage door was open or closed, then a weather-camera, then a camera in the stable to check on the horses and so on.

Time goes fast. It’s almost 1 1/2 year since (07.08.2018 to be exact) we bought the Xiaomi Roborock vacuum cleaner, and it’s one of my best investment ever made!

I recently got a new 4K Apple TV. I replaced this with my old Apple TV 4 in the living-room. Suddenly I could not turn off my TV anymore. When I turned off the TV and/or put the Apple TV to sleep, it took 2-3 seconds and it turned itself on again. I googled and started debugging. All the steps …

Follow Source: https://certbot.eff.org/lets-encrypt/ubuntubionic-other Source: https://serverfault.com/questions/750902/how-to-use-lets-encrypt-dns-challenge-validation Before pressing enter, I added the TXT record in my DNS. After adding it, I waited a couple of minutes before pressing enter. Add to Home Assistant For now, I copied the certificates from /etc/letsencrypt/live/… to a SSL folder under my Home Assistant config. Renew It looks like the domain-registrar has to support a script …

It’s now 4 years since I first connected a RX-Multi to control my garagedoors from Telldus. Since then I have slowly moved towards Home Assistant and Z-wave.

With ConBee USB and deCONZ

After watching the LED-strip tutorial on BRUH Automation, I decided I needed some LED-strips!

If you are running internal server/services that need to be reached on the Internet, you probably have a DNS set up for them. To reach this services on their DNS, from your local network, you need edit the host-file on the USG. For my case, one of the services was Home Assistant, which is configured with DNS and certificates. This …

My girlfriend has a horse. The horse needed a house. So we built a house (stable). The stable is about 10 meters from our house. To smartify the stable (controlling lights and monitoring temperature, humidity and CO2) I needed cabled network and a new smarthome-gateway. I already have Home Assistant and a Z-wave network in the house, but the stable is …

After problem upgrading to v0.65, I moved my Home Assistant (HA) to docker. Trying to upgrade in virtual environment (VE) was giving an error message that i needed Python 3.5.3.

It’s about a year ago since i wrote about a panic button setup with the Fibaro Button and Telldus/Tellstick. As I moved my Z-wave devices to Home Assistant, the Button scenes hasn’t been supported and therefore my button has been put away until now.

One of the main reasons for getting into more advanced smarthome, was smoke detectors. I was looking for a control panel for smoke detectors that could notify me if anything triggers, and especially if something triggers in my rental apartment. I ended up with Fibaro smoke sensor (FGSD002) and Home Assistant (HA).

I recently bought an IKEA Trådfri gateway and some bulbs. This was a great and cheap supplement for automating my last missing lights. I have two ceiling lights in my hallway. I bought a Double Switch from Fibaro, but it’s a tight fit behind the switch on the wall. Buying two new separate relays for each light would cost too …

Home Assistant is probably the most flexible and powerful smart home-gateway at this moment!

I found this: https://github.com/glynhudson/leaf-python-mqtt, and thought it was a simple task… But nooooo. I have very little experience with MQTT, other than the basics, so this took some time 🙂

I was so impressed with this car-stereo/player that I have to write some few words about it 🙂 First a little history We have an old Volvo V40 (2000-mod). The default car-stereo has radio, cd and cassette, which is not that bad for this old car. In the first 6 months of this year (2017), Norway has switched from radio/FM …

I wanted to test a camera with WiFi this time for easier placement, so I bought two different cameras – one from Ebay and the other from Alibaba. It was not before I got the packages that I realized they were basically the same cameras. Both cameras is branded HJT and it looks like they have the same firmware. The …

Telldus has realeased local plugins for beta-testing (04-04.2017). I love it! You can read the announcement here: http://developer.telldus.se/blog/2017/04/04/testers-wanted-for-tellstick-plugins

Heatmiser has now released gen 2 of their NeoHub, with Apple HomeKit. I was quick to preorder – and I just received and connected it. It is now 1 1/2 year since I mounted my Neohub (first generation) and the neoStat thermostat; see my post about it here. I don’t think there is a lot to say about Gen 2. It has …

As I’m renting out part of my house, it’s important for me to know if anyone tries to tamper with the smoke-alarms. Fibaro smoke sensor has a tamper-switch, but it doesn’t look like Telldus Live supports an event for the tamper yet – or I don’t know how to.

I recently bought a NorthQ Power Reader (NQ-9021-EU) from Proshop. The Power Reader supports Z-wave and should be compatible with Telldus/Tellstick Znet. The Power Reader reads your power consumption from the power meter in or next to your fuse box. This helps you track your power consumption. At first, everything looked great, but it has been a long road to get …

When I was a little boy, almost every home had a simple phone connected to a landline. I don’t know how old I was when I started to call my friends and family by pushing in the numbers from a note, but I was probably pretty young. So in case of an emergency, I could probably just call for help. Now …

I just got my Tellstick ZNet Lite v2 that I bought from Netonnet for 1290 NOK. I also have the first Znet Lite, so this isn’t the biggest upgrade for me. I only bought it because it can send and receive 433 MHz, so now I can replace my old Tellstick Net and Znet Lite with just this one box.

21.01.2016 Telldus announced a closed beta for their Local API on the ZNet Lite. 24.05.2016 they opened the Local API to public beta. Local API let’s you connect and fetch data directly from the Tellstick ZNet without going through Telldus Live, which can be a huge advantage as it’s faster and more stable.

I successfully tested the Fibaro smoke sensor with my (Telldus) Tellstick Znet Lite today. Summary: Add it to Association Group 2 under Device settings in Telldus Live. Test it with REAL smoke, as test-alarm won’t trigger. The Fibaro smoke sensor …is actually a beautiful little thing, compared to other ugly smoke sensors. It has some nice features like tamper-protection/alert and …

In September, I received my floor thermostat from Heatmiser, neoKit-e. I replaced my old standard bathroom thermostat with my new neoStat-e, here in Norway. I have had some positive experience with the heatmiser thermostat earlier, as my brother has two of them on his cabin in Sweden. The heatmiser neoStat is a “smart” thermostat that can be controlled by your …

Today I received my Telldus Znet Lite! I’m not really sure why I bought this, as I already have an Telldus Net. But my passion for home-automation could not resist 🙂 So, what is Telldus Znet Lite? It’s a little box that sends and receive wireless signals to different devices in your home, and let you control these devices from your …

In the last days, I’ve been hunting for alternative surveillance software for iSpy. It has been a fun ride through the Internet! Some of the software’s i visited was: iSpy, Synology, Netcam Studio, Webcam XP, go1984, Yawcam, Contacam, Sighthound Video, Ubiquiti, HomeGuard, TinCam, TeboCam, Security monitor pro, Genius Vision, iVideon, NetCamCenter, Smartvue, CameraFTP, Blue Iris and Xeoma webcam. Some tips …

Today I bought two IP-cameras with Wifi from Biltema (Norway). Price: 649 kr ($79,78) each. Sensor: 1,0 MP / 25FPS CMOS LED range: 20 meters RTSP URL: rtsp://< IP-ADDRESS>:<PORT>/11 Other articles: Kameraovervåkning hjemme (Norwegian) Hardware The hardware looks like a basic “china-camera” and has the same wall mount as my YianTime …

We decided to try the ConiuGo GSM LAN Modem (dead link – removed) at my workplace, as the USB-devices we use now, is a bit tricky running on virtual machines and the virtual COM-ports isn’t always stable. Diafaan has also written a review about this modem. This article is an expanded version of the Diafaan review, with all the details I struggled with. …

We just bought some Netatmo devices (Weather station components) at work, to monitor the air-quality in our office. After using it for 3 days, I am a bit stunned over how much you can use this devices for. The data itself are interesting enough, but when integrating this data in to a smarthome, you can actually «see» where the people …

If you want to control your garage doors with Telldus, you need a wireless receiver and connect it with your garagedoor-motor push-button input. I bought RX-multi from portspesialisten in Norway.

Sparebank 1 (a Norwegian bank) has released a “wristwatch”-bank app for the Pebble smartwatch (named “klokkebank”). It’s a few weeks since they published some news about this, but it seems it took some time to get the iOS companion app to be approved. On 5. december, the iOS app was finally released. I tried the app for the first time …

OpenHAB is a automation software for your home. OpenHAB is open source and supports a huge list of bindings to control all types of smarthouse-gadgets from different suppliers. In this tutorial I will install OpenHAB 1.5.1 with the OpenHAB demo files, on an Ubuntu server 14.04. Note: After installing I found that you could also install it with apt-get. See wiki …

Har du kunne tenkt deg kameraovervåkning hjemme? Kameraer er såpass billige nå, at man trenger ikke lenger å være paranoid for å sette opp overvåkning – det kan brukes til en mengde andre formål enn å bare fange tyver. Coop obs! hadde nylig tilbud på trådløst IP-kamera til 199 kr. Kameraet hadde IR for nattsyn og kunne styres nesten 360 …

I den siste tiden har jeg begynt å se på hjemmeautomasjonsløsninger. Problemet med de fleste løsninger som fås kjøpt i dag er at de er proprietæ´r (altså merkevarebeskyttet). Dette betyr at dersom du kjøper en løsning, er du låst til denne løsningen – Det ofte er dyrt, mangler på funksjonalitet og låst til en spesiell leverandør. Så da startet jeg å …