Category: Smart Home

Reolink Doorbell Keeps Disconnecting from Blue Iris

I recently purchased a Reolink PoE Doorbell to replace a DoorBird D101. I was able to add it to Blue Iris, but it kept disconnecting randomly. I found a post on Reddit that mentioned the Reolink PoE Doorbell can only handle two concurrent main streams using ONVIF. I had Blue Iris streaming both the main…

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CodeProject.AI identifying a car in a security camera image

Fix CodeProject.AI Service Not Starting in Windows

I run CodeProject.AI alongside Blue Iris on a refurbished Dell Optiplex 7050 to enable person/vehicle detection for my security cameras. Things generally have worked well since moving away from DeepStack to CodeProject.AI, but recently I started getting AI timeouts in my Blue Iris logs. It turns out CodeProject.AI was not running, and I couldn’t get…

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Zemismart Blinds Device Page

Home Assistant Not Autodiscovering Cover Entity with Zigbee2MQTT Addon

I recently purchased a new Sonoff Zigbee USB dongle and wanted to try running Zigbee2MQTT again instead of Home Assistant’s built-in ZHA integration. ZHA has a nice UI for managing devices, but it didn’t always work great with my Zemismart blind motor and Zigbee2MQTT has been updated quite a bit since I last used it…

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Update DeepStack in Windows 10 for Blue Iris

I’m running Blue Iris with the DeepStack AI integration using the officially supported method with DeepStack running in Windows 10 on the same hardware as Blue Iris. I recently wanted to update DeepStack but couldn’t find Blue Iris-specific documentation on how to do this. It turns out to be very straightforward if things are done…

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Truncate the home-assistant.log file Using a Shell Command

When my Home Assistant instance goes a couple weeks between restarts, the home-assistant.log file can grow to nearly a gigabyte in size if there are any integrations that are throwing error messages regularly. Even on an Intel NUC with a 128GB SSD this was making my snapshots/backups too large in size and using up all…

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Adding a CT101 Z-Wave Thermostat to Home Assistant

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…

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How to Increase Sensitivity on Aqara Vibration Sensor with Home Assistant ZHA

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…

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Fix Aeotec Water Sensor Not Working with Home Assistant

Update 2022-05-12: This was originally posted when the legacy Z-Wave integration was in use. Using Z-Wave JS I believe you will need to enable the parameter 121 setting for “On Trigger: Send Binary Sensor Report” is toggled on as shown in the next screenshot. The original article follows the screenshot: I picked up a couple…

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Use an Image for a Person Entity in Home Assistant

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…

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Issues Adding GE 12730 Z-Wave Fan Controller to Home Assistant

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…

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