#Home Assistant

I bought some of those Sonoff BASIC smart switches off Amazon and flashed them with Tasmota. It’s a pretty painless affair, the programming contacts are right there on the board, and the case comes apart with your fingernails.

It’s my opinion that if you’re going to fill your home with smart devices, they need to be easy to control and monitor. Having to pull a phone out a pocket just to switch some lights on is annoying. Equally, having to open a browser just to see the state of everything is equally annoying.

I have a whole house battery solar system with 3kW of roof mounted panels and 9.6kWh of battery storage. I can monitor this using Home Assistant and it’s interesting to see my power usage and generation stats. Interesting, but not that relevant to daily life.

What is relevant is knowing how long the battery has left, especially now we’re in autumn/winter and the typical British weather is in full effect. As I look out my window right now it’s misty, yesterday it rained all day.

Our energy prices are ridiculous and even taking into account recent “world events” I find it hard to understand why electricity is so expensive. So I figured I’d try to do something about it by installing my own battery and solar system on my shed. The idea being to power my servers from the sun.

Let’s make the Internet of Things a bit more useful, and less like The Internet of Turd by hacking some smart plugs so they no longer phone home to China.

This is an update to a [previous blog post]https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/freeing-smart-devices-with-tasmota/ I wrote about modifying [smart sockets]https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/hacking-smart-home-devices-literally/.

This week I have literally been hacking smart home devices. With a Dremel and a knife…

I think I’ve managed to make Home assistant tell me how much money the solar power I’m generating would be worth from the grid, and how much running things off solar/battery instead of the grid is saving me.