I’ve seen a few people struggle with the deprecation of _click and _action entities for Home Assistant. These have been replaced with new (for Zigbee2MQTT) event entities, which behave differently enough to be confusing at first. Summary event entities have a state that is the time they last fired, so... Wed, 08 Jan 2025 10:27:00 +0000 /2025/01/zigbee2mqtt-2.0.html /2025/01/zigbee2mqtt-2.0.html I ordered a Voice PE unit from EverythingSmart when they announced the release and got it set up over the holidays. I didn’t get an early access unit, and I wasn’t part of the pre-release testing, so this is all based on the released hardware and firmware. I’m going to... Mon, 06 Jan 2025 10:07:00 +0000 /2025/01/ha-voice-pe.html /2025/01/ha-voice-pe.html Update 2024-03-11: Well, I bought another one and the LaMetric is now in the drawer. The only thing missing was a native weather app, so I wrote an automation. Yes, I know I haven’t written in a long time. My muse was banished by a rather hectic and chaotic couple... Fri, 02 Feb 2024 20:07:00 +0000 /2024/02/ulanzi-tc001.html /2024/02/ulanzi-tc001.html I mentioned before that I was using Traefik, what I didn’t say is that I was also using Authentik for authentication. Sometimes as forward auth (providing authentication for services that don’t support it, like Frigate), other times as a provider for apps that support it. I’d also been messing about... Fri, 28 Apr 2023 08:00:00 +0100 /2023/04/cloudflare-tunnels-with-auth.html /2023/04/cloudflare-tunnels-with-auth.html I mentioned on the Home Assistant forum about allowing access to only the bits you need, and that I do this for the mobile app. I didn’t mention what that means in practice, or how I worked it out. The answer To skip ahead to the answer, you need to... Sat, 18 Mar 2023 19:41:00 +0000 /2023/03/limited-remote-access.html /2023/03/limited-remote-access.html Something that makes for a great home/away tracker is the Android and iOS app’s connected WiFi sensor, or at least it would if it was a device tracker. Well, you can turn it into one, and I mentioned it before, but it’s lost in the depths of that post so... Fri, 27 Jan 2023 13:42:00 +0000 /2023/01/wifi-sensor-to-device-tracker.html /2023/01/wifi-sensor-to-device-tracker.html NB: I’ve added this here as the knowledge has been removed from the official documentation. For some integrations every entity needs its own entry in the configuration.yaml file. There are two styles for multiple entity entries, and these apply regardless of the domain (sensor, binary_sensor, switch, etc) - that my... Mon, 23 Jan 2023 13:00:00 +0000 /2023/01/yaml-sections.html /2023/01/yaml-sections.html There’s a number of things that come up regularly that folks new to Zigbee may not know, so here’s a handy set of notes and links. TL/DR USB extension cable Avoid WiFi channels (which are numbered differently) Use enough (Zigbee) routers Replace batteries in end devices Pair in place  Signal... Sat, 31 Dec 2022 14:00:00 +0000 /2022/12/zigbee-tips.html /2022/12/zigbee-tips.html We often talk about the smart home and home automation as if those terms are interchangeable, but they’re (mostly) not. Smart Home This is a house that contains devices that you can interact with, and potentially can interact with each other. These are things like the Hue lights, a Nest... Sat, 31 Dec 2022 10:26:00 +0000 /2022/12/smart-home-or-home-automation.html /2022/12/smart-home-or-home-automation.html The music won’t be as good, but here we go again. I’ve made a number of updates to this logic since I last wrote about it. Oh, you may want to grab a cuppa before you dive in, this is a long one as I wanted to cover everything relevant in... Thu, 29 Dec 2022 20:20:00 +0000 /2022/12/presence-detection-here-we-go-again.html /2022/12/presence-detection-here-we-go-again.html If you’re reading this you’re looking at the new home of my blog. I’m moving off of Blogger and over to Jekyll, possibly on GitHub pages possibly on Cloudflare pages. As part of the migration I’m going through and fixing broken links in old posts and adding notes where information... Thu, 22 Dec 2022 09:00:00 +0000 /blog/2022/12/blog-migration.html /blog/2022/12/blog-migration.html I’ve been playing with Traefik lately, for remote access for various things in my Docker stack, and I decided to see if it was possible to also use it for Home Assistant, despite that being on a remote host. The answer is (otherwise I wouldn’t have written this) yes -... Tue, 25 Oct 2022 21:17:00 +0100 /2022/10/traefik-and-remote-home-assistant.html /2022/10/traefik-and-remote-home-assistant.html As you may remember, I use MotionEye and Doods, along withsome crazy scripting, to do motion and object detection at the front of the house. Well, used would be more accurate. Recently I tried out Frigate, initially without a Coral stick/board. The following day I turned off MotionEye and Doods. With... Tue, 20 Sep 2022 21:02:00 +0100 /2022/09/frigate-motioneyedoods.html /2022/09/frigate-motioneyedoods.html  I see a lot of people confused by the four install options for Home Assistant. The first, and most important, thing to realise is that Home Assistant is the same no matter how you install it. The only thing that changes is how you install other software, and how you... Thu, 23 Dec 2021 16:24:00 +0000 /2021/12/how-should-i-install-home-assistant.html /2021/12/how-should-i-install-home-assistant.html What follows is no longer needed since HA now has a new feature of the state trigger: trigger: - platform: state entity_id: sensor.your_sensor to: ~ I will leave this for posterity though. A common question on the HA Discord is how to have an automation run any time a sensor... Thu, 05 Aug 2021 21:33:00 +0100 /2021/08/running-automation-every-time-sensor.html /2021/08/running-automation-every-time-sensor.html It’s a common post on the HA Discord where people are confused as to why their automation isn’t running, they’ve got a trigger, and a few conditions, and … nothing happens. trigger: - platform: numeric_state above: '22' entity_id: sensor.temperature condition: - condition: time after: '22:00:00' before: '08:00:00' - condition: state... Sun, 18 Jul 2021 22:07:00 +0100 /2021/07/why-didnt-my-automation-run.html /2021/07/why-didnt-my-automation-run.html  A long time ago I started using Zigbee2MQTT - somewhere around 1.2 or 1.3. Back then I thought that it was easiest to run Zigbee2MQTT with a manual install, which was (and still is) the default instructions you’ll find. Since then I’ve seen the light. Docker makes upgrades, and downgrades,... Sun, 02 May 2021 03:30:00 +0100 /2021/05/zigbee2mqtt-native-to-docker-migration.html /2021/05/zigbee2mqtt-native-to-docker-migration.html Yes, another update. Until I start using Blueprints I think this’ll be the last one for a while. Probably. Oh, you may want to grab a cuppa before you dive in, this is a long one as I wanted to cover everything relevant in one article. Goal The goal here is... Sun, 03 Jan 2021 01:00:00 +0000 /2021/01/presence-detection-resurrection.html /2021/01/presence-detection-resurrection.html Another year, another Python deprecation, another flood of posts asking how to upgrade a Python venv.  While you can certainly do that, another option would be to move to Docker (at least assuming you’re running on Linux). Then you don’t have to do this next year. Moving to Docker is... Sat, 10 Oct 2020 09:05:00 +0100 /2020/10/ha-venv-to-docker.html /2020/10/ha-venv-to-docker.html A common problem that comes up with people using one of the Supervisor based install methods, or Docker, is that when they try to use ssh it fails, yet when testing it works. What. The. Heck? Well, you’ve hit two problems because of Docker - all your testing was done... Fri, 29 May 2020 21:20:00 +0100 /2020/05/home-assistant-docker-and-using-ssh.html /2020/05/home-assistant-docker-and-using-ssh.html