Integrating Daikin Madoka into Home Assistant: the definitive ESPHome solution!

The enchantment of a smart home with Home Assistant

Home Assistant is a true magician when it comes to transforming your home into an intelligent and responsive environment. By connecting all your devices, infinite doors open to automations you could only dream of before! While many appliances integrate with a simple “plug-and-play,” others, like Daikin Madoka systems, present a more intriguing challenge due to their exclusive Bluetooth connectivity.

Previous challenges: a winding road

In my quest for the perfect integration for Madoka devices, I explored several avenues. Online, you can find solutions ranging from custom HACS integrations to proposals based on specific hardware. Although I haven’t tested the hardware solutions, the HACS integration, while promising, often proved unstable, forcing me into frustrating reboots and reconnections.

Improve your office (or home) air with a DIY sensor and Home Assistant

The air we breathe at home or in the office is crucial for our well-being and productivity. Often, however, indoor air quality can be affected by factors such as excess carbon dioxide (CO2), which leads to drowsiness and difficulty concentrating. For a while, I looked for a solution to monitor the air in my home office, but commercial options were often expensive and not flexible enough to integrate with my Home Assistant setup.

How to use Tailscale certificates with Traefik

The new release of Traefik with major release 3, introduced some new features. Among them is the integration with Tailscale certificates. This new feature makes it easy to have certificates for https.

Of course, there are some limitations and they must be considered (installation on docker):

1. Tailscale must be running on the machine on which docker is running
2. currently (see #9772) may only apply for the certificate of the local machine (hostname defined on Tailscale admin panel)

Tailscale configuration

Several guides can be found on how to create Tailscale networks, so it will not be part of this guide. To make the next step work, the following points must be configured (administration console, in the DNS tab):

Recover photos from corrupted micro SD

My daughter received as a gift a children’s camera (ITSHINY or other similar manufacturers) with which she tries her hand at many artistic shots (50 author blurbs). I do not want to do a review of the device, but I do want to tell you about the situation I found myself in when I wanted to download the last photographs I took. In fact, I connected the machine via USB cable to my computer and strangely no disk appeared to download the photos. Panic, I lost all the photos (it wasn’t a problem but some were even nice).

Install Guacamole on Docker with Traefik, Postgres and 2FA

Remotely accessing an SSH terminal or graphics session with VNC/RDP can be very useful. Particularly if you have a lot of devices and if you regularly change your workstation. Guacamole is one of the open source solutions on the market. Unfortunately there is not a single docker container to install and it’s not easy to find a complete guide for installation from start to finish.

Below I’ve created a small guide to install Guacamole with a postgres database for user management and integration with Traefik to have an https connection.

Wake-on-LAN from Guacamole in docker

The Guacamole service allows a “Wake on LAN” (WOL) packet to be launched before connecting to the machine with VNC or RDP. Unfortunately, by Docker’s default setting, networks configured as bridge do not allow broadcast packets (even if directed to a specific subnet) to be sent out. This prevents the use of WOL and Guacamole. There remains the option of configuring the guacd container on the host network, but this solution has security issues.

Install Guacamole on Docker with Traefik and 2FA