The modern Smart Home has a host of new standards to enable what is supposed to be a seamless experience across multiple ecosystems. These new standards include Matter and Thread, both of which the likes of Amazon, Google, Apple, Samsung, and Home Assistant support to various degrees. There's A LOT...
I recently purchased the Apple iPhone 15 Pro and Apple Watch Series 2 Ultra, both of which have "Action Buttons." Since I hadn't explored Apple shortcuts much before, I decided to dive deep into Apple automation. This post focuses on my Apple Watch Ultra action button shortcut. You don't need...
If you are using Home Assistant and want to determine if the Apple Sleep focus mode is on or off so you can use it in automations, this post is for you. While on the surface this may seem like a trivial task, due to Apple's limited Focus APIs and...
If you are running Home Assistant and wish to increase its security by using a FREE trusted SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt, then you are in luck! This post will walk you through the entire process. The process is quick and easy, assuming you already have a public domain via...
One the most important aspects of maintaining Home Assistant is regular backups. Implementing the 3-2-1 backup rule with Home Assistant is now easier than ever, with the 2023.6 release. The 3-2-1 rule states you should have (at least) 3 copies of your data (production + 2 backups), on two different...
A very popular NVR solution that integrates well with Home Assistant is Frigate. It provides fantastic object and person detection from your camera streams. The Frigate project is a Docker container, so it's easy to deploy. You can run Frigate within Home Assistant, but I prefer to run it in...
Matter, the promised home automation wiz kid, is here and some devices are now shipping with native Matter support. But what if you want Home Assistant and Apple Homekit to control the same matter device? What if you don't have a Thread radio on your Home Assistant server? No problem! This...
Brand new to the market is the Aqara FP2 WiFi human presence sensor. It is one of the most exciting smart home products to hit the market in quite a while. It is the successor to the Aqara FP1 which was only officially available in China. This post guides you through...
If you want visually appealing dashboards for your long term Home Assistant data stored in InfluxDB, look no further than Grafana. Grafana allows you to query, visualize, alert on and understand metrics captured by Home Assistant (and MANY other platforms). You can create some really stunning dashboards. Sample Grafana Dashboard...
If you are a Home Assistant enthusiast and are interested in long term storage of sensor and other data, you will be using InfluxDB. InfluxDB is a time-series database, different from SQLite and MariaDB. Over time your InfluxDB database can grow and grow...becoming unwieldy and possibly slow. Fortunately there are...