I’m excited – as you’ll see below I have left my new SMLight SLZB-06 ETHERNET Zigbee coordinator in the UK – working well (but not at all stressed) and I have one coming to Spain this coming week. That leaves the question – what to do with my Sonoff-P and…
Category: General
Inexpensive Occasional Smartsocket + Low-Bandwidth 4G
I’ve recently hit on a problem in which we have an issue with our oil heating back in the UK while we’re spending by far the bulk of our time in Spain. Despite everything being turned off (hot water off, heating set to OFF – i.e. standby) we discovered thanks…
AWS Polly Speech on RPi4 and RPi5 using Node-Red
AWS Polly is great for adding speech to Raspberry Pi and similar, especially with the “neural” enhancement. Regular readers will know that for years I was a great fan of using Ivona speech on my Raspberry Pi. In Node-Red I used the free Ivona service to provide high quality speech in Node-Red at the heart of…
Water Leak Week – Switchbot, Sonoff and more…
Not sure why two companies I know, decided to introduce water leak sensors in the middle of summer – but I’m happy to do a quick write-up – as it happens I’ve just recently refitted a hot water tank complete with rather large calcium filter and I’m not 100% sure…
And Now – HA TV Lighting Automation
Just a quick one – Having set up all the lighting in Home Assistant including the living room with the TV – my wife had the great idea of moving everything around and I find our chandelier and cupboard lighting totally destroys my TV viewing at night – SO the…
ESPresense and Home Assistant – The Adventure Continues
To avoid repeating myself, look at other articles in here where I realised that Home Assistant was for me to be the successor to my long-cherished Node-Red-based home automation system (especially as they’ve now formally discontinued support for my beloved NR-UI v 1). Little did I realise just how much…
Reolink Argus 4 Battery + Solar 180 degree Camera
I LOVE getting new stuff from Reolink – their WiFi, powered video doorbell takes centre stage on my front door here in Spain and as I’ve recently discovered, integrates into Home Assistant via the Reolink plug-in no problem. It also works on their Android APP, their PC APP and a…
mm Wave vs IR vs ESPresense – Big Decision?
As some of you know, I have a number of radar detectors including those shown here in the form of the Sonoff SNZB-06P, Aqara FP2 and many others. I also have endless simple IR detectors from AliExpress and elsewhere. One of the latter sits next to Alexa in our living…
More Aliexpress Zigbee lights
This week I received a package from AliExpress – some dirt cheap Zigbee E27 lights I ordered on impulse. I instinctively order 12w as minimum as anything lower than that is going to have vrey dim colour LEDs. Ok, you take a chance with AliExpress offers and you have to…
Sonoff SNZB-02D Zigbee LCD Update
Update June 2024: The article below about the SNZB-02D LCD Smart Temperature and Humidity Sensor was originally written in March 2023 – It’s now over 15 months later and the sensor has been sitting on my shelf along with many others on test. A lot has changed recently including my…
The New GL-iNET MARBLE WiFi 6 Router (updated)
I LOVE getting new stuff from Gl-iNet – I’ve been writing about them since the original OpenWrt-based MANGO GL-MT300 router (which recently gave up on me after being dragged from house to house, country to country over the years). For years I was a Draytek fan but once Gl-iNet started…
MORE Home Assistant Learning – Restart Mode
For one of my first automations in Home Assistant (starting to replace my Node-Red home control code) I picked a new Aqara no-neutral switch I’ve just fitted to our just-redesigned bathroom wall – to turn the bathroom light on and off – manually or remotely. I wanted a 20 minute…
Home Assistant June 2024 – Alexa, Google Home and more
I wrote earlier this week about Home Assistant – sorry this isn’t going to be a linear set of articles as I’m not learning linearly – and of course the HA product is changing by the month. Last week I had a pretty boring set of dashboards – still LOTS…
Quicky – iHORN Window/Door Sensor HO-031ZB
Back in 2022 I wrote about a bunch of iHorn products then took it no further as I didn’t get very far integrating them into Zigbee2MQTT and hence my Node-Red-based home control. Well, today I noticed in a spare moment, the iHorn HO-031ZB sensor pair in a box – wasting…
Remember “The Last One”? Now we have ChatGPT !
I remember “The Last One” well (with a little DATE help from Wikipedia)… the 1981 program which would render all programmers redundant? The Last One was released over 40 years ago by the British company D.J. ‘AI’ Systems and took input from a user to generate an executable program in the…
The Aqara E1 Camera and New H1EU No-Neutral Wall Switch
Evey now and then I get the urge to update blog entries as I find out something you might find useful. My latest piece of info is about the H2EU switch below – original article March 3 2024… Firstly the Aqara E1 Camera Claimed features – Accurate person tracking, multi-platform…
Shelly H&T Generation 3 and Much More
I’ve had lots of Shelly products in my time – I recall trying out MQTT on them and even got some partially integrated into Node-Red (I hate using lots of APPs) but now as I begin to feel my way around Home Assistant – I have my first couple of…
More AliExpress cheapness – T34 Smart Plug+
As you do, I was looking around AliExpress having just parted with a couple of smartplugs to help out a friend in a hurry, when I discovered some specials – generic Smartlife plugs – 16A and 20A, with power monitoring. I think Ali had a limit of 3 devices so…
Ugreen Nexode GaN Fast Charger
A couple of weeks ago I received an email in German (no, I don’t speak German) from Ugreen who offered to send me a charger to look at. I’ve had stuff from Ugreen before and no problem so – why not! So yesterday I received the new U green Charger…
The Move to RPi5 – Upgrading the RPi4
Elsewhere I’ve written about moving from Raspberry Pi 4 and legacy 32-bit Bullseye (Pi OS) to Raspberry Pi 5 and 64-bit Bookworm (Pi OS). So I thought, having backed up my RPi4 and 5, I’d take the RPi4 and do a from-scratch installation of Bullseye on the latter. Armed with…