Home Automation Central Coast | DEW IT & Web Services

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

David Williams - DEW IT Home Automation Central Coast January 10, 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 January 10, 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 January 10, 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.

Automations with Home Assistant

David Williams - DEW IT Home Automation Central Coast January 10, 2019Google Home, Home Assistant, Home Automation 0 Comment

incorrect use of automations in home assistant

Originally posted 2018-03-23 12:28:35. In a previous article, I blogged about Integrating Google Home with Home Assistant. In that article I made a connection between doing this and setting up automations which is incorrect. So in this article, I want to correct the record and make the correct case for automations. So what’s wrong with doing it like this? Well these automations will ‘work’ in that if you click on the text and click on trigger, they will turn the light on or off then and there. But how is that better than just clicking the on/off toggle on the

Integrating Google Home with Limitless LED Lights Part 1

David Williams - DEW IT Home Automation Central Coast January 10, 2019Google Home, Home Assistant, IFTTT, LimitlessLED 0 Comment

Originally posted 2017-09-22 12:07:35. Home Automation The next logical step with Home Automation and my Google Home is to integrate some LED lights so I started doing some research and came across the Limitless LED lights. As it turns out, I didn’t look far enough and ended up with a few challenges getting everything working. Even posting on and searching forums I found that there was so much assumed knowledge and jargon that it was difficult to get to where I needed to be. So this post chronicles my journey into Home Automation nirvana (for now and for LED Lights