Ran into an issue when trying to reuse a Sonoff ZBDongle-E Zigbee dongle as a repeater ("router" in Zigbee terms) and am sharing my findings here. Context This dongle was previously used as the actual
Following up on my post about controlling ceiling fans, let’s address some of the shortcomings, which are: ESPHome 2025.2 removed support for dbuezas’ CC1101 custom component. We need a way forward. IoT controls generally assume you can specificall...
There’s a problem with temperature-controlled space heaters — they’re all terrible at temperature control. Hear me out It’s physically impossible for any (self-contained) space heater to maintain a target temperature with any respectable precision. A...
My ceiling fans are not smart, but let's try to control them using Home Assistant to make them smart! The key is that they have remote controls, so it should be possible to make something that can act like those remotes. Signal Gathering These are my...
I got the Emporia Vue Utility Connect with the intent of using jrouvier's port to ESPHome, but it turns out my model doesn't communicate the same way as the version jrouvier had. Specifically, upon fl
I've been getting sensors like this that can measure temperature and relative humidity. Coupled with microcontroller boards like the Raspberry Pi Pico W running ESPHome, I'm able to create small USB-powered wireless thermometer/hygrometer units that ...
Let's make a dumb garage door smart! The usual consumer solution is the myQ controller, but I generally dislike being dependent on some company's cloud service staying online. Instead, I will DIY a solution using ESPHome and Home Assistant. Requireme...
Dashcams save their footage in multiple progressive files, but there's a common flaw that goes largely unnoticed: there can be a gap in footage between each file. This lost footage can be a few seconds long, and you never know when some emergency eve...
We should all have some sort of off-site backup of our data. My approach to achieving this involved writing a script which I will talk about in this article. Perhaps others will find it useful! Background I run a Network-Attached Storage (NAS) comput...