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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…