Home Automation

Home Assistant Updates May 2018 and Sonoff-Tasmota update

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

Originally posted 2018-05-21 12:56:29. May 2018 will see the release of the latest version of Home Assistant. Home Assistant has been in ‘beta’ for as long as it has been generally available and it seems it is soon to be going to be released as a real ‘product’ if chat on the support chat forum on discord is to be believed. Home Assistant recently changed the way releases are handled so as to release more stable .0 releases than has sometimes been the case and the accompanying up to 6 ‘dot’ releases to fix errors introduced in the new release.
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Simplifying Automations in Home Assistant

David Williams - DEW IT Home Automation Central Coast , , 0 Comment
kodi runs on a raspberry pi

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

David Williams - DEW IT Home Automation Central Coast , , 3 Comments
kodi runs on a raspberry pi

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
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Home Automation Kariong

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

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
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Automations with Home Assistant

David Williams - DEW IT Home Automation Central Coast , , 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
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