Plays with tech.
Plays with tech.
The project: Clann (Irish for family), a self-hosted family tree app. One Docker container, one SQLite file, your data on your own hardware. The experiment: if AI does nearly all the engineering, what’s left of the product job? The itch…
After a couple years of use from my old Raspberry Pi x OpenWRT Travel Router, it was time to upgrade. The brief was pretty simple – it has to be smaller, faster, based on a Raspberry Pi and most importantly,…
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…
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…
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…