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...
Sometimes you have the need to build a new Home Assistant installation and restore your old configuration. Maybe your SD card died, or you want to migrate Home Assistant to a more powerful server.  In fact, you can even do cross-platform migrations (e.g. from a Raspberry Pi 4 to a Proxmox...
If you are curious about how to run Home Assistant OS (HAOS) on Proxmox (a free/open source virtualization platform), you've come to the right place. This post is a detailed guide on how to get Home Assistant OS (HAOS) as a virtual machine (VM) up and running quickly on Proxmox VE...
This blog post details my lessons learned doing a fresh Home Assistant installation in early 2023. Here, I provide guidance pulled from many sources, and my own experience using Home Assistant. I've been big into the smart home for a few years using various platforms such as SmartThings, Hubitat, Apple HomeKit,...
