9 posts tagged Home Automation
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.
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.
After a week of testing and tweaking, my DIY solar shed upgrade is complete. And it seems to work pretty well!
Last week I bought a solar panel, inverter and some lead acid batteries and set up a solar system in my shed, with the intention of powering my servers. It seems to work pretty well and I have it all integrated into Home Assistant. I’m going to do a load of videos on it and Home Assistant in general.
I have a load of smart devices in my house that all have ESP8266 microcontrollers inside them. They all work with the Tuya SmartLife app on my phone, and the Tuya integration in HomeAssistant. They also all talk to China to do anything. I’d rather they didn’t. China doesn’t need to know I want to turn my lighting on.
Sometimes you have to type out almost identical lines of code, and it’s either time consuming or error prone. Here’s how to avoid it all by using some clever Excel techniques.
