I recently upgraded to a 4K-capable AV receiver and had to update my Harmony Hub devices and activities. When I did, I noticed that the commands for controlling zone 2 of the new receiver were not available in the Harmony app (whereas they were available for my previous receiver). Initially I thought I’d just need to…
The last part of this series covers setting up the Home Assistant iOS app and enabling notifications. Future posts about Home Assistant will be more ad-hoc now that I have most of my smart home requirements already in-place. This is the process I followed to get the app installed and connected with my Home Assistant…
The next step in my Home Assistant project was to enable secure remote access to it when I’m away from home. Fortunately the documentation covers this topic. Mostly I followed the instructions on the Remote Access with TLS/SSL via Let’s Encrypt page, so I won’t repeat the detailed instructions here. However, I did want to…
At this point in my Home Assistant journey I have several devices configured, and the UI is starting to get cluttered. Home Assistant lets you organize the UI using groups and views, so I decided to take advantage of that. I want to have a few tabs (a.k.a. “views”) with my devices grouped within the…
As my smart home continues to grow in complexity–and as my household becomes more used to its advantages–I’ll want to make sure I’m aware of any problems as soon as possible. One way to help with this is to monitor the performance of the Raspberry Pi itself. Home Assistant has several system-monitor components that can…
One of my first smart devices was a TP-Link Wi-fi Smart Plug (model HS100). I used it to control the lights in our Christmas tree by voice control using an Amazon Echo. It worked great then, and after Christmas I moved it to our family room to control a floor lamp that we usually turn…
Now that I have several Z-Wave light switches set up in Home Assistant, I wanted to be able to control them with my Alexa devices. Fortunately Home Assistant has an Emulated Hue Bridge component that mimics an actual Philips Hue Bridge. With this enabled and configured, I can “trick” my Alexa devices into recognizing Home…
One of the keys to enabling a smart home is to track who is home and when they come and go, also known as presence detection. Home Assistant has a few built-in methods for doing this. For now, I’m not looking for fine-grained tracking i.e. detecting the exact moment someone enters or leaves the house.…
After setting up a few Z-Wave switches from GE, I noticed that my kitchen light switch wasn’t updating in the Home Assistant web UI. It usually showed as “on” even hours after it had been turned off. This was the only place where I used the GE 12722 Z-Wave switch with the GE 12723 add-on…
One of my goals for creating a smart home is to keep things as “guest friendly” as possible. With that in mind I decided to go with Z-Wave switches to control the lights and fans in our common areas (kitchen, family room, etc.). These switches work just like a regular switch–perfect for guests–and they can…