Home Automation

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
Read more

How to setup Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi

David Williams - DEW IT Home Automation Central Coast , , 0 Comment
home automation with home assistant

Originally posted 2018-02-12 11:06:20. What can you do with Home Automation and Why should I be interested? I’m assuming upfront that if you have found this article by searching then you are probably interested in home automation of at least have an open mind and would like to know how to setup Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi. I’ll say that my wife is not a fan at all of Home Automation and probably regrets the day that she was given a Google Home device as a work gift to all employees as it opened up a world of possibilities
Read more

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.
Read more

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
Read more

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
Read more