SmartHome on Dev notes

Your own Home Assistant add-on

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 23:00:00 +0100

In the previous post in the series I described the process of externalizing you HA (Home Assistant) using my custom addon. Make sure to check that out if you haven’t already. This time I’ll share the details of the add-on development process.

First steps

When building the add-on my first steps obviously went towards the existing online resources. The first thing I’ve found was the extensive tutorial on https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/add-ons/tutorial, but there seems to be an easier hands-on approach. Instead of following the tutorial we’ll use the official template from https://github.com/home-assistant/addons-example.

Externalize Home Assistant

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 10:30:00 +0100

This is a third post in the Smart Home series. See the previous post if you haven’t already: https://blog.michal.pawlik.dev/posts/smarthome/zigbee-setup/. Last time I wrote about Zigbee and shown how to control smart home devices. In this post I want to show you one of many ways you can use to expose your HA (Home Assistant) instance to the internet.

Why expose?

All of the examples in previous posts were referring to local instance of Home Assistant. To work with it you had to be with the same network. While it’s not a problem when you are at home, there are cases when you want to access HA from the external network. Those cases include controlling the heat, accessing monitoring, switching light etc. when you are not home.

Zigbee with Home Assistant - Smart Home

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 16:30:00 +0100

This is a second post in the Smart Home series. See the previous post if you haven’t already: https://blog.michal.pawlik.dev/posts/smarthome/smart-home-getting-started/. Last time we have set up the HA (Home Assistant), in this post we’ll learn about Zigbee and control some devices.

Zigbee

Zigbee is a specification for wireless communication protocols, very common solution for building home automation networks.

Explaining new terms is always easier when there’s something well known you can relate to, so before describing Zigbee let’s recall something familiar, the typical WiFi network.

Let's build a smart home

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 00:01:00 +0100

New year is always a good excuse to start something new. This post starts a series on building a smart home. It’s not going to be a tutorial written by an expert, quite the opposite, I want to share my thoughts and experiences while learning.

At this point I want to give credit to Kinga and Mikołaj - friends of my who inspired me with their smart home setup and guidance through first steps.