Posts in Home Assistant
How to Access Home Assistant From Any Where For Free
Posted on 6th Oct 2020 17:36:43 in DIY, Home Assistant, Tutorial
Home Assistant is a popular DIY platform for building a smart home. It allows the use of almost any smart device in the world via the integrations that are either part of the core software or released by the community. Unlike many of the other smart home controllers, there is no cloud-based solution allowing remote access provided out of the box. That's why we are going to be walking through the process of setting up remote access in Home Assistant, step by step.
How to Easily Use a Raspberry Pi as a Homekit Hub
Posted on 4th Oct 2020 17:05:47 in DIY, Home Assistant, Tutorial
HomeKit is great. It allows anyone to effortlessly set up a smart home entirely offline without the usual hassle of finding a hub that uses an offline protocol and operates without connecting to the cloud. These benefits are typically reserved for those with a HomeKit hub such as a HomePod or an Apple TV. However, there is a way to use a Raspberry Pi as a hub allowing the use of compatible devices without needing an official HomeKit hub.
How to Build a Real Smart Button for Under 10$
Posted on 22nd Sep 2020 18:30:42 in DIY, Home Assistant, IoT, Tutorial
The idea behind smart buttons is pretty cool, you have a button that you can place anywhere, and pushing it will communicate with a controller that can make anything happen within your home. The problem is that many of these smart buttons also cost an absolute fortune. So today we're going to build a smart internet button ourselves that will cost less than 10$ to build per unit, and possibly even less if you buy all the required materials in bulk to build a few of them!
How to Make Mycroft run Offline to Have Real Privacy
Posted on 19th Sep 2020 00:11:56 in DIY, Home Assistant, Tutorial
In a previous post, we demonstrated building a voice assistant out of open source components. One of the issues that we didn't address at the time is that there are still dependencies on the cloud for some of the critical functions, such as the Speech to Text engine. Here we will see how we can modify that system to operate (almost) completely offline.
How to Build a Cheap Thermometer and IR Blaster For Home Assistant
Posted on 14th Sep 2020 18:41:50 in DIY, Home Assistant, Tutorial
The situation seems so familiar: you have an air conditioner unit that uses an IR remote, but you want to control it via your own thermostat. At least then you could manage it remotely or start cooling the air before you get home from work. This was the situation I was in, and to solve it, I built a temperature sensor with an onboard IR blaster, allowing it to also send commands to my portable air conditioner. All of this can be done for under 20$ as a relatively simple DIY project.
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