Home Automation Central Coast | DEW IT & Web Services

New Tasmota Firmware for Sonoff 6.4.x and Home Assistant Discovery

David Williams - DEW IT Home Automation Central Coast September 3, 2019Home Assistant, MQTT, Sonoff Tasmota 0 Comment

Originally posted 2019-01-10 12:50:58. This post is my latest in a series of posts about using Sonoff devices in Home Assistant over MQTT. The main reason for yet another post is that the latest version 6.4.x firmware for Tasmota has changed the way it interacts with Home Assistant MQTT Discovery and there are also some other gotchas with the Arduino Core version used. OK I’ll stop talking jargon real soon I promise and hopefully that will make everything more clear. First though, I’m just going to recap and post links to all my articles on the Sonoff Switches and Tasmota

Simplifying Automations in Home Assistant

David Williams - DEW IT Home Automation Central Coast September 3, 2019Google Home, Home Assistant, Home Automation 0 Comment

Originally posted 2018-04-21 13:56:11. Automating my Coffee Maker This article is about simplifying my automations in Home Assistant. Before I did this, I had 8 different automations controlling my coffee maker. (first-world problems right). These did the following: Weekdays turn coffee maker on at 7am Weekends turn coffee maker on at 8am Weekdays turn coffee maker off at 2pm Every night turn coffee maker on at 7pm Every night turn coffee maker off at 10pm Every 4th Sunday turn coffee maker on at 7:15am Every 4th Sunday turn coffee maker off at 8:30am Every 4th Sunday turn coffee maker on

Installing Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 3 and running from a USB stick

David Williams - DEW IT Home Automation Central Coast September 3, 2019Google Home, Home Assistant, Home Automation 3 Comments

Originally posted 2018-02-20 14:36:19. This article is an adaptation of an article on the home assistant community forum. The forum post was great but like a lot of posts, everything makes perfect sense in retrospect and often some of the intermediate steps are unclear even when you know what you are trying to achieve. This is a comprehensive step-by-step approach. For some us us (like me) Linux is not a fluent second language and I need more than just general directions to work things out sometimes. Note: This is only for the old ResinOS installation. There is currently no way

Home Automation Kariong

David Williams - DEW IT Home Automation Central Coast September 3, 2019Google Home, Home Automation 0 Comment

Originally posted 2017-09-06 14:57:44. One of the most exciting new products recently released in Australia is the Google Home device. The RRP is currently $199 but various online vendors like Kogan have them for around $169. The Google Home is a personal digital assistant which you control using voice commands. You can issue commands for it to set an alarm for instance. Or it is also a speaker and if you use Google Play Music or Spotify to listen to music, you can issue a voice command for it to play an artist or playlist and it does it directly

How to use a Sonoff Switch with Home Assistant

David Williams - DEW IT Home Automation Central Coast September 3, 2019Google Home, Home Assistant, IFTTT, MQTT 5 Comments

Originally posted 2018-04-21 10:13:41. This tutorial covers the ways to integrate a Sonoff S22 switch into Home Assistant using Sonoff MQTT and flashing Tasmota to replace the supplied Sonoff firmware. I’m going to cover two different methods to get the switch working in Home Assistant. The first just uses the S22 as it comes out-of-the-box. The second requires flashing Tasmota onto the switch and setting up MQTT in Home Assistant. Honestly sometimes it seems MQTT is build up as the greatest thing and it is useful however depending on what you want to achievt, it’s not necessarily the best option.