I picked up a couple of Aeotec Z-Wave Water/Flood Sensors for my water heater and under the kitchen sink to add to my Home Assistant instance. We recently had a leak under the kitchen sink and didn’t catch it before it damaged the cabinet, so I was motivated to make sure we receive a notification […]
I recently started using the person component in Home Assistant, but I did not see an obvious way to associate a photo with the person entities I wanted to keep track of. It turns out this is very straightforward, and you can either set the photo via the customization UI or manually using customize.yaml via […]
Like most of the web industry, I use Git for version control, and so far I’ve mainly worked with GitHub remotes, so that’s what I’m set up for now. This post will cover how I install and configure Git to work smoothly in Windows. Disclaimer: I don’t do much web development in Windows these days, […]
I recently moved to HassIO for my Home Assistant instance and migrated off a Raspberry Pi 3B to an Intel NUC. As part of that process I decided to rebuild my Z-Wave network from scratch. I had built much of the network without using a secure network key, so this was a good opportunity to […]
I had to remove and re-add an Ecolink tilt sensor to my Z-Wave network recently. It’s controlled via an Aeotec Z-Stick and it wasn’t obvious at first how to remove the tilt sensor from the network and add it back. It turns out the key is to pull the battery from the sensor before trying […]
I recently needed to wipe and start fresh with an old iPhone 5 to use as a WiFi-only device (essentially like an iPod Touch) but it did not have a SIM card in it anymore and would not let me finish the initial setup without one. This article provides a few suggestions for getting around […]
The other day I noticed that my Onkyo Receiver was not showing up in Home Assistant, nor was the Onkyo Remote app on my phone able to connect to it. After some searching I came across this post suggesting a solution. The fix is to edit the receiver’s name in its Network Settings and remove […]
The other day I needed to change the embed code for a video in a publishing site’s “Images” library that was using the video content type in SharePoint 2013. This content type–based on the document set I believe–allows you to either upload a video file, provide a URL to a video file, or paste in […]
To make editing configuration files easier, I wanted to be able to remotely edit them with my preferred text editor rather than using nano via the command line. Because I'm using Hassbian for my Home Assistant installation, I used the hassbian script for setting up a Samba share. The script shares the /home/homeassistant/.homeassistant directory–which contains […]
We recently purchased a Motorola WiFi baby monitor and i wanted to see if I could incorporate it into Home Assistant. Full disclosure–we ultimately were not happy with the monitor and returned it, but for anyone who uses it and enjoys it, this may be useful. An internet search led me to this blog post […]