Secondary home management experience with Home Assistant

TL;DR Taking advantage of the unofficial integration I connect two instances of Home Assistant to each other. Thanks to the Wireguard addons I am able to avoid the fact that the 4G modem does not have a public IP address. Intro Due to the 2G shutdown in Switzerland, I had to change the heating management system of the second house in the mountains. After some attempts for more than a year a working and resilient solution has been in operation. Continue reading

Free domain for home projects

Warning There are problems with the Freenom registry, which no longer has the concession for .ga domains and may lose others as well. See also article Imagine when you type your domain name into the browser and your smart home system (Home Assistant) appears, or your site hosted on your Raspberry Pi at home. But how cool is that? Often, however, one has to make do with somewhat alternative solutions because one’s home IP address is not fixed. Continue reading

Sweeping effectiveness measurement

TL;DR Project to transform a curling broom into a measurement tool to evaluate effectiveness during sweeping in curling. An ESP32 measures the pressure exerted on two cells and an accelerometer measures the frequency of movement. The data is transmitted via BLE to a Bluetooth Web-enabled computer or smartphone. Intro Have you ever wondered how effective your sweeping is during a curling match? I have occasionally wondered that myself, particularly compared to the movement made by other players in the club. Continue reading

Uptime Kuma e ping su traefik

Intro Quando la propria rete casalinga inizia a crescere è comodo controllare i vari servizi/test attivi sulla rete. Uptime Kuma permette di avere un container Docker all-inclusive che permette di sorvegliare con vari metodi (ping, http(s), DNS) un sistema e di inviare notifiche in caso di problemi. Scopo installare Uptime Kuma in docker aggiungere la configurazione di traefik verificare che traefik funzioni correttamente Requisiti I passaggi seguenti richiedono il funzionamento su un host di docker, docker-compose e trafik con https. Continue reading

Watch camera from secondary home in Home Assistant

I wrote a post not long time ago about managing my secondary home with Home Assistant. Thanks to component the magic is possible, but an HA update has complicated things a bit. A few days ago there was the problem that the component could no longer connect with remote instances and since always (for me) it is not possible to view remote rooms. Remote instances connection problem The first case can be solved by updating the component to the latest version (> 3. Continue reading

Automatically update site created with Hugo

CMS’s like WordPress or Joomla are convenient, but they need constant updates, as regularly there are quite urgent security updates. That’s also why a year ago I went back to a static site, to be precise using Hugo. So I worry about creating the content and when I load new pages I don’t have to think what’s on the server anymore. The disadvantage of this system is the need to have a computer to generate the site again and then upload everything on the server. Continue reading

Child control for Sonos speakers

TL;DR Using an ESP32 and Home Assistant with ESPhome you can control Sonos speakers (or other media players) without smartphone application. This is my project to allow my daughter to manage the music in our home (whenever we want). Intro We are in the process of fixing up a house and it’s time to do some major cleaning among all the stuff we’ve accumulated. In a cleaning raid an old baby cassette recorder was discovered, unfortunately it is no longer working (I will get it working eventually). Continue reading