The popular smart voice automation devices like Amazon Echos and Google Home devices are very common in our households now. They are certainly useful and once you have them, you kind of can’t live without them The one major complain I have for them is: they are not very...
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Let’s make our old garage door smarter!
As part of our home automation project, we would like to get a smart garage door opener, one that can give us remote access and also alerts when we are away from home. Have you ever have that question in your mind after you left your home and while...
Let’s automate with Alexa Routines
Smart voice assistance devices are wonderful, and definitely add values around our household. One of the advance feature available is to create a voice command that will do multiple things for you. I’ve already did a quick write-up on Routines in Google Assistant, so now, I’m going to do...
OK Google, let’s be brief!
I’ve been using both Google Assistant and Amazon Echo devices at home, they are very handy devices that will listen to your voice commands and execute them, specially when your hands are tight up like cooking, holding a baby, or taking a shower. I will write a few reviews...
Alexa in your car?
Voice assistance devices are quite handy and can provide a pleasant hand-free experience in places where your hands are occupied. So I was quite interested when I heard Amazon announcing the new Echo Auto, basically promise to bring Alexa into your car 🚗. Here is a link to the...
Need to turn lights on earlier if it is cloudy.
After implementing the turn lights on 20 minutes before sunset automation in hass.io, I was quite happy to see our evening lights come on and off automatically each night. But we encountered a few cloudy days in the past week, and it troubles me that the house gets too...
Turn Lights On 20 Minutes Before Sunset!
Our home automation project is going along very nicely. We have a few TP-Link smart plugs installed around the house, and have been using their Kasa app for a while. One thing we really like is being able to set automation to turn light on and off. You can...
Z-Wave vs Zigbee
Home automation is quite popular now in most household and it is common to see retailers dedicate quite a lot of display space to them. I was in a local Best Buy store recently, and was delighted to find a few aisles of home automation products on display and...
Secure Remote Admin Access with Duck DNS
Now that you have Hass.io running happily on your Raspberry Pi, the next thing in your mind is probably how to access the admin console remotely from the internet, so that you can control your smart home even when you are away from home. One elegant and free solution...
Access Configuration Files with Samba
Hass.io is the latest all-in-one installation for Home Assistant. It is the simplest way to set up Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi. You can now manage your Hass.io with a web console. Once you have Hass.io setup and running on the Pi, you will find that one of...