These are the steps I used to successfully pair a CT101 Z-Wave thermostat with my USB Z-Wave stick running with Home Assistant. These steps were not totally clear in the instructions that came with the thermostat, so I wanted to write them down here. Put the Z-Wave USB stick into pairing mode; this varies depending […]
I recently purchased an Aqara vibration sensor, but the default sensitivity wasn’t working for my application. The sensor was connected to Home Assistant via the Zigbee Home Automation (ZHA) integration using a GoControl HUSBZB-1. I didn’t see an obvious way to change the sensitivity on the sensor, but fortunately I came across a forum post […]
I recently created a custom SharePoint Framework (SPFx) web part that had some text fields in the property pane with character limits. I wanted the page authors to have some feedback as they typed so they knew how many characters were left, so I used the description property with some string concatenation to make it […]
GitHub provides some documentation on how to keep your fork in sync with the original (i.e. “upstream”) repo that you forked from. This is essential if you are working on some changes for a long time and the original repo is getting updated with other pull requests in the meantime. There are a couple rules […]
I recently helped a client create a COVID-19 page on their intranet, which is still using on-premises SharePoint 2013. To add some visual flair to the page, I used emojis in the web part titles. It’s funny, I haven’t done a lot of work on SharePoint Classic pages in years, and back then emojis were […]
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 […]
Update 2021-03-16: You can now use the UI to upload a picture for a person entity, which is much faster and easier than following my original instructions below. See https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/person/#customizing-the-picture-for-a-person. 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 […]
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 […]