If you are using Home Assistant and want to determine if the Apple Sleep focus mode is on or off so you can use it in automations, this post is for you. While on the surface this may seem like a trivial task, due to Apple's limited Focus APIs and...
If you are running Home Assistant and wish to increase its security by using a FREE trusted SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt, then you are in luck! This post will walk you through the entire process. The process is quick and easy, assuming you already have a public domain via...
Hot off the press is Proxmox VE 8.0, which GA'd on June 22, 2023. It is based on Debian Bookworm, and has a number of new features like defaulting to Linux Kernel 6.2. This post is a completely refreshed version of my popular Home Assistant: Proxmox VE 7.4 Quick Start...
One the most important aspects of maintaining Home Assistant is regular backups. Implementing the 3-2-1 backup rule with Home Assistant is now easier than ever, with the 2023.6 release. The 3-2-1 rule states you should have (at least) 3 copies of your data (production + 2 backups), on two different...
A very popular NVR solution that integrates well with Home Assistant is Frigate. It provides fantastic object and person detection from your camera streams. The Frigate project is a Docker container, so it's easy to deploy. You can run Frigate within Home Assistant, but I prefer to run it in...
Matter, the promised home automation wiz kid, is here and some devices are now shipping with native Matter support. But what if you want Home Assistant and Apple Homekit to control the same matter device? What if you don't have a Thread radio on your Home Assistant server? No problem! This...
Brand new to the market is the Aqara FP2 WiFi human presence sensor. It is one of the most exciting smart home products to hit the market in quite a while. It is the successor to the Aqara FP1 which was only officially available in China. This post guides you through...
If you want visually appealing dashboards for your long term Home Assistant data stored in InfluxDB, look no further than Grafana. Grafana allows you to query, visualize, alert on and understand metrics captured by Home Assistant (and MANY other platforms). You can create some really stunning dashboards. Sample Grafana Dashboard...
If you are a Home Assistant enthusiast and are interested in long term storage of sensor and other data, you will be using InfluxDB. InfluxDB is a time-series database, different from SQLite and MariaDB. Over time your InfluxDB database can grow and grow...becoming unwieldy and possibly slow. Fortunately there are...
By default Home Assistant will store approximately 10 days worth of entity data that allows you to do cool charts, graphs and dashboards. This is called recorder data. Recorder data is stored in a SQL (relational) database, which by default is SQLite. However, if you want long term storage of your...
If you are using InfluxDB 1.x and want to do automated application consistent backup, this post is for you. What is InfluxDB? It's a time-series database designed to hold long term time-series data, like sensor readings from Home Assistant. It is optimized for time-series data, and is NOT a traditional...
If you are running Home Assistant OS (HAOS) as a VM on Promox, you may want to display the hardware sensor data (CPU load, CPU temp, disk utilization, etc.) of your Promox host inside Home Assistant. To do this we will install the Glances server on the Proxmox host, then...