Posts

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…

Read more

Setting Up Git and Working with GitHub in Windows

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,…

Read more

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…

Read more

You Can’t Set Up an Old iPhone without a SIM Card

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…

Read more

Fix Onkyo App and Home Assistant Not Connecting to Onkyo Receiver

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…

Read more

Editing the Embed Code for a SharePoint 2013 Video Content Type

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…

Read more

Setting Up a Samba Share to Edit Home Assistant Configuration Files

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…

Read more

Incorporate a Motorola WiFi Baby Monitor into Home Assistant

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…

Read more