I’ve had an Aqara FP1E movement/presense sensor for some time and for some reason, only checked movement sensing. Today I plugged the unit in and Home Assistant remembered it perfectly from my last tests back in August 2024. This time I went to my Zigbee2MQTT panel which I get to…
Month: March 2025
Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition vs Google
Home Assistant Voice – Preview Edition is a small USB-powered unit made by the Open Home Foundation and supplied to me by SEEED. It is common knowledge that I hate to read instructions, so I took the unit out of the very nice box and plugged it into a handy…
Home Assistant to NAS to Mini PC – The Sequel
Mid last week, I wrote about the latest updates in my quest for an ideal Home Assistant (HAOS) setup -and I’d reached the point of using my Synology NAS (DS720+) for HAOS – this is the sequel featuring the Turewell HSI-N95 mini-PC. Firstly, no doubt about it the Synology is…
M5Stack Goodness
It’s quite a while since I heard anything from M5Stack but today I have some new goodies from them. First off – this handy little ESP32-based mini-camera: CamS3 5MP Camera. The device came complete with lead and USB-C adaptor. It costs something like $17 US dollars from their site –…
Apollo Temp-1 Sensor Unit – Apollo Automation
I’ve written elsewhere about Apollo Sensors but this weekend they sent me a set of updated Temp-1 and Temp-1B sensors so I thought I’d give them a quick entry. I’ll leave the Temp-1B to the end as it is similar but primarily battery driven and NOT a cheap battery at…
Home Assistant – Synology DS720+ The Story So Far
More reviews and gadgets coming up soon including the new SEEED Human Breathing + Heartbeat sensor (I can’t wait) and the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition – and look out for the upcoming sequel to this post – meanwhile… Regular readers will know that I’ve been a fan of Raspberry…
The Ridiculous Windows 11 “Show More Options” and How To Bypass
I’m taking no credit for this one which I originally published on December 3, 2023. EVERY time I go to right-click a Windows Explorer window on a new PC, from as simple as DESKTOP to my SCREENSHOTS folder – I invariably want to COPY something… is it there? NOPE. I…