Thomas shares makes

Rainwatertank Usage meter

Home assistant graph of water usage, the lightest shade is rain water measured by DIY solution, the darkest shade reported by the tap water utility meter over P1 connection.

I integrated a 7€ YF-B7 water flow sensor into my home assistant setup using an off the shelve 35€ modbus based pulse counter.

Rollershutters

Shutter control panel

When we renovated our living room, we upgraded the window roller shutters with electric motors. While we usually only open and close all of them together, we still want to be able to set them to individual positions. I decided to make a central control panel with 6 physical buttons and implement some logic in the Siemens Logo controller to control the motors.

Virtual Solar/Grid power meters

I want to keep counters for how much solar panel energy and grid energy my car uses. I have power meters for the Solar, Grid and the car. The power the rest of the house uses is however unknown, and measured by the grid meter. Determining the car's part of grid and solar power requires some calculations.

I created home assistant template sensors to come up with these power numbers, and added integrators to obtain energy meters. The energy flow plus card can show these in real time on the Home assistant dashboard.

Solar Matched Electric Heating

A heater power-controlled to consume all excess solar production!

I built a prototype test setup that makes sure every Watt produced by our solar panels is used by an electric heater. It uses an industrial power controller and some code to match the heater's power usage to whatever power is not used by the house.

This would make it possible to maximize our solar self consumption, which is required to get a decent return on your solar investment.

For us, injecting to the electricity grid is giving away power, we have to pay about 15x as much compared to what the utility pays us for returning energy to the grid.

Home Assistant Multi room audio setup

I was able to cook up a fun audio setup controlled and automated with Home Assistant! It features

• Multiple room synchronised audio speakers (fixed/analog, portable Bluetooth devices and via app on phone or tablet)
• Playback of internet radio, Spotify streaming and local audio files.
• Sound notifications for Doorbell, garden gate and other sensors and home alarm events.

In my setup, a docker container running on the Home Assistant machine takes care of retrieving audio from Spotify, internet radio streams and local storage.

Physical devices like raspberry pi's or an Android phone/tablet use a snapcast client to use drive speakers.

openHASP touch display build

openHASP running in a 3D printed case

I discovered openHASP while I was searching for projects integrating touch interfaces with Home Assistant.

It's easy to wire up a cheap ESP microcontroller board and TFT display module, and by loading this opensource firmware you can turn it into a network connected touch control panel and control devices and display things.

When I bumped into a nice 2.8" TFT Desktop stand enclosure on thingiverse, I remembered I had an unused 2.8" ILI9341 display with resistive touch layer from a previous project.

Connecting the dots... I had all the necessary parts in my workshop, this would make a nice project to make over a weekend evening.

lighting scene / mood control proof of concept

Lilygo twatch 2020 running simple lighting scene (mood) control proof of concept

I discovered a lovely smart watch development platform; the Lilygo t-watch 2020. It's an ESP32 based hackable watch, with a small capacitive touch display.

I had already played with the idea of building a small home automation control and status display that fits into the existing switch cover plate, so clicked the order button and leveraged the open source watch firmware to quickly hack together a proof of concept.

Home assistant based automatic alarm

image: cover from https://mzl.la/ihr-nov-2019

At one point I wanted a basic home security system (burglar alarm) to offer me some peace of mind at night.

My Home Assistant instance has enough sensors to figure out what we are up to, so it was possible to create an alarm system that works autonomously. The system automatically arms and disarms while we sleep during the night and when we leave and return to the house during the day.

Reviving my Standing stats project

I have used an Ergotron standing desk for 5 years, then it broke, right out of warranty. Several years ago I started building a sensor device to track how much time I spend standing up versus sitting down in my chair. The hardware prototype finished, it got shelved since I found other fun things to do with my limited hobby-time.

Later I noticed that I was sitting down 99% of the time when working from home. To revive my healthy habit of working upright part of the time, I decided to pick up my parked project by re-printing the enclosure I made on my own printer and leveraging the power of esphome on and home assistant to finish the project after all.

Home Assistant Zigbee Media Remote

When I started working in my home office full-time during COVID-19 lock down, I wanted a remote control to easily pause my music whenever a Teams call or meeting started.

I had an IKEA 'hockeypuck' ZigBee control laying around that could easily be commissioned onto my home assistant setup, which …

Mutually Exclusive Media Players in Home Assistant

I have Raspberry Pi's in different rooms, and one thing I use them for is to play music to speakers.

Each of them has two music player services on it (MPD, Spotify), and it's a bit annoying that I have to stop a player when I want to listen to the other one.

Since I'm running home assistant as an automation hub, I wrote two short automations that stop the already playing service when the second one kicks in.

Home Assistant Touch Screen

My 2017 Christmas present was a voucher for the local electronics shop. I spent it on an 'official 7" raspberry pi touch screen display', which is a nice capacitive touchscreen that you can hook up to a raspberry pi.

I 3d-printed an enclosure from Thingiverse for it, and fitted an RGB LED string around the edges as an extra.

Initially I created an AppDaemon HAdashboard configuration to control my Home Assistant instance with it.