Creating simple sensors to determine if we are "at work". Includes setting up a work_days sensor, time of day sensor, and a template sensor to tie everything togather.
As well, includes steps for handling vacation / OoO days, and holidays.
As apart of the Home Solar Project, I purchased and assembled an EG4 battery rack.
This post outlines the process of assembly, issues I encountered, and my final opinions.
For the second part of my Home Solar Project, I researched possible solutions and ordered batteries.
This post, describes some of the decision making process I went through.
One of my projects I have been working on over the last two years, is adding solar panels to my house to offset some/most of my electrical usage.
Here are the goals I wish to accomplish, and how I plan on accomplishing them:
Using a Tp-link kasa HS300 as a low-cost switchable PDU. This product has features for per-outlet power monitoring as well.
On this blog / my house, I try to use 100% local control products whenever possible. Many people don’t understand the reasoning behind this…. So, I am dedicating this page to reasons as to why you should ONLY buy products which are 100% local control only, with no cloud dependency, and no proprietary hub.
A quick post going over the best options for taking advantage of home assistant's energy monitoring features.
To note- you don't have to use home assistant with these products. But, these products were specifically chosen due to some level of integration with home assistant.
Why am I moving away from wordpress?
Over the last few months, I decided to learn kubernetes.
A quick guide on re-enabling the apt-get functionality.
How to address Virtual Machines and/or containers not being able to access the TrueNAS Scale server hosting them.
This post details how to extract useful information from the SCCM Schedules format.
Every now and then, I have a use case where decorating an Enum’s values with Attributes comes in handy. Things such as… Adding Display Names, Descriptions, etc.
Well, every time I have this use-case, I have to go google how I did it the previous time… and in most cases, StackOverflow is less then helpful. Then, I remember a few personal projects where I previously did this, and I find the code and reuse it.
I publish nuget packages. Alot of nuget packages.
I don’t have time to maintain nuget package versioning, so, I automatically generate versions based on the date and build number, like so: 2022.07.14.1
As well, I need support for alpha/beta/etc.
So, 2022.07.14.1-alpha.
Here is my method of doing it-
While migrating from TrueNAS Scale to Core, I ran into an issue when remounting my existing iSCSI shares.
After getting everything configured, windows showed the status of, “Healthy (GPT Protective partition)”
The default directions for installing doors sensors, involves using the included double-sized tape directly stick the sensor to doors and windows.
I personally, wanted these sensors to be out of sight, and out of mind. So, I decided to recess them into the doors themselves.
So, you want to have an alarm for your house. But, you don’t want to give your money to ADT/Ring/SimpliSafe/etc… and you want to build it yourself, with components you can easily service and replace, right? If so, this is the article for you.
I have a few Reolink cameras. Recently, I noticed the time of many of the cameras was not set correctly.
Since, I keep all of my IOT and Security devices isolated from the internet, they are not able to communicate with the pre-defined external NTP server. However, I do have a NTP server running on my opnsense firewall which they do have access to.
But, it appears the ability to set a custom NTP server no longer exists in the reolink’s configuration page.
This is a simple review, with a few steps for the First Alert Z-Wave CO/Smoke detectors.
A while back, after converting my primary thermostat over to z-wave, I found a creative way of managing my thermostat’s schedules using the scheduler-card.
Well, I recently installed a new mini-split for my bedroom/office, and needed to integrate and maintain my schedules via home assistant. So, I decided to redo my schedules a bit.
I found the scheduler-card has a “make-scheme” button, which is far more intuitive for creating schedules then what I put together in PART 1. In hindsight, this feature existed then as well…