Voice control: Turn on/off lights (12) Turn on/off groups of lights (3) Control my pool pump and heater Turn on/off a sump pump Turn on/off an exhaust fan Turn on/off a TV (2) Turn on/off Apple TV (by changing the inputs on the TV and receiver) Turn on Sonos and tell it what to play Turn on a TV channel by name Change the channel … Continue reading Features of the system

I have finally overcome one of the more challenging (at least to me) aspects of my Home Assistant UI.  Dynamic icons has been something I’ve wanted to do so that the visual feel would be simpler and more robust. The penultimate accomplishment to date has been with battery data.  Getting the icon to represent the percentage remaining. Image and code are below. Sensor Display Code … Continue reading Dynamic icons in Home Assistant

Well, almost.  The actual command is “Alexa, ask the house to close garage door 1”. In a past post, I spoke about the hardware and software to do parts of the automation of my garage door.  The next part was to integrate it with the voice commands available with the Amazon Alexa.  This involved creating a custom Alexa Skill that calls a web service I wrote in PHP … Continue reading Alexa: Close the garage door

This project has one purpose.  To be able to get to the freezer on the other size of the garage.  The parking sensor helps the driver (whoever that might be) approach the wall and leave the right amount of distance to get around the front of the car. By setting a couple of values in the code below, you can set the optimal distance and the … Continue reading The parking sensor

I finally got it working.  I can now control my old garage door from my home automation system.  Yes, a lot of the newer model garage door openers come with this functionality, but why spend a couple hundred dollars when I can build a gadget for much less? Now I have automations that close my garage door if it is open at 10pm and I … Continue reading Garage Automation