Cheers Plex, hello Jellyfin
Here’s my story about migrating my media from Plex to Jellyfin. A few weeks ago Plex published a blog post which announced two big changes – a big price increase for their Plex Pass and remote streaming will become a…
Tristam
Plays with tech.
Tristam
Plays with tech.
ESPHome voice assistant with local wake word
Update June 2025: I’ve made further updates to resolve the PSRAM and rmt_channel issues. The config should work withou any mods now 🙂 Update November 2024: I have made some updates to the ESPHome .yaml config in an attempt to…
ESP32 based voice assistant with wake word
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…
Making your dumb home alarm smart with an ESP32
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…
Raspberry Pi Storage Server/NAS with space for 2 x 2.5′ drives
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…
Installing ESPHome on a Sonoff TX Ultimate
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…
Setting up Cloudflare Dynamic DNS in OPNsense
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…
Using a pulse meter with Home Assistant to read your smart electricity meter
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…
Raspberry Pi OpenWRT router – OpenVPN vs Wireguard client
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…