Plays with tech.
Plays with tech.
At the beginning of 2024, I built a voice assistant to celebrate the end of Home Assistant’s Year of the Voice and the beginning of an era of locally controlled voice assistants. The team at Home Assistant team has introduced…
Last year (2023) was Home Assistant’s Year of the Voice so I thought there’d be no better way to start 2024 than by building my own Home Assistant powered smart speaker. It’s based on an ESP32 Lyrat dev board which…
My wife and I were fortunate enough to buy a house recently which has presented many opportunities to integrate items with Home Assistant. The house came with an Aritech CS350 based alarm which was installed in 1994 – when I…
Backups are important but if you’re like me, they often get forgotten about. After some research, I decided to use setup a Raspberry Pi based NAS at a family members house and use TailScale to transfer files via a scheduled…
Jeff Geerling recently made a great video where he explained how smart home solutions should be additive (i.e. when making a light “smart”, you should add smart functionality to it while you retain the ability to control it from the…
There are a few (conflicting) guides online that outline the process of setting up Cloudflare’s Dynamic DNS in OPNsense so I thought I’d create an up to date guide. So… why should you use a Dynamic DNS service? In a…
We recently moved into a house that has an ESB issued smart electricity meter (Kamstrup model 8660) in the utility cupboard outside of the house. Unfortunately the smart meter has no direct integration with Home Assistant so I needed to…
As part of my Raspberry Pi based travel router project, I setup a VPN client on the Pi using OpenVPN because that’s what I’m familiar with. Unfortunately the performance was pretty poor so I decided to move to Wireguard in…
Privacy focused “smart” doorbells seem to be few and far between so I decided to build one that integrates with Home Assistant via ESPHome and is easy to build. This project is aimed at being simple while allowing a ton…