Home Automation Central Coast

Using Proxmox with Home Assistant and Chrome

David Williams - DEW IT Home Automation Central Coast , , 0 Comment
proxmox and chrome self signed certificates

So with Home Assistant announcing their intention to depreciate the generic linux installation of Home Assistant (now on-hold due to an outcry) I am looking at migrating my setup to use Proxmox and then setup Home Assistant Supervised (formerly known as Hass.io) in a virtual machine. It really suited me having the generic linux install as then I could have other docker containers etc on the same host machine without causing problems. Anyway… that was fun while it lasted. I have been playing around with Proxmox for some time. I purchased a cheapie mini-pc from Alibaba (XCY) along with an
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Home Assistant and Google Actions

David Williams - DEW IT Home Automation Central Coast , , 0 Comment
google home mini

Originally posted 2017-10-31 13:40:06. So I just got another Google Home – but this one is a Google Home Mini. I got this one for my office so I can listen to background music easily without blasting music everywhere at home. I’m also planning on getting a mini for our bedroom to listen to music with the new sleep timer that was recently introduced. However, the purpose of this post is to speak about the Google Actions Integration with Home Assistant. You will remember from my previous blog posts about controlling my Limitless LED lights with Google Home that I
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Sonoff Switches with Tasmota and new MQTT Addon Home Assistant

David Williams - DEW IT Home Automation Central Coast , , , 0 Comment
sonoff s22 switch mqtt firmware

Originally posted 2018-11-14 12:41:45. I know I have done a few articles now about Sonoff switches and MQTT in Home Assistant. However a lot has changed – also my understanding has changed and so it’s time for another post about this. I’m also going to take a crack at making a video showing how to flash a sonoff switch with Tasmota. For reference, my previous posts can be found here: Home Assistant Updates May 2018 and Sonoff-Tasmota update How to use a Sonoff Switch with Home Assistant So lets look at the changes in MQTT introduced with the new MQTT
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Setting Home Assistant up for Secure access over the Internet

David Williams - DEW IT Home Automation Central Coast , , , 4 Comments
home assistant configuration

Originally posted 2018-06-05 15:35:04. Lets have a conversation about security when your Home Assistant is opened up so you can access it over the Internet. If you take a look over on the Home Assistant Community forums here there are threads about user’s home assistant instances being hacked with ‘friendly’ hackers who have just changed a few things and left some warnings about their insecure home assistant setups. Traditionally or ‘normally’ external access to your system over the internet means that you would open up some ports on your router so that you can connect over the internet. This would
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Caddy Server and Home Assistant DNS Validation

David Williams - DEW IT Home Automation Central Coast , , 0 Comment

Originally posted 2019-09-03 13:57:09. NOTE CADDY 2.x has been released and this information is a GUIDE for installing that only. I will be doing an updated blog post for the new version soon.   One of the really great things about using the Caddy addon for home assistant has been that it provides a more secure system as it provides automatic SSL certificates and a reverse proxy and manages renewing the certificates before expiry. I had always been unhappy however that since LetsEncrypt dropped support for https certificate validation that it required port 80 to be opened and forwarded on
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