Te latest articles placed on this site are shown below.
The Flower Care Plant Sensor from Xiaomi provides an easy way to integrate monitoring plants into your smart home to get notifications when they require water and monitor the growth conditions.
The plant sensor is installed in the ground next to the plant and measures soil moisture, soil fertility, air temperature and the light the plant gets during the day.
Integrating the Xiaomi Flower Care plant sensor with Home Assistant is easy with the Xiaomi BLE integration. The Xiaomi plant sensor (also referred to as ‘Flower Care plant sensor from HHCC’, ‘HHCCJCY01’, ‘MiFlora sensor’) will be discovered automatically by Home Assistant.
When the plant sensor has been integrated successfully you can create Home Assistant Lovelace dashboards with plant information cards showing moisture, temperature, conductivity, brightness and the battery level of the plant sensor.
A webcam, such as from Dahua, can easily be integrated into Home Assistant and opens the possibility to show life streams within Home Assistant.
If the camera is a so called PTZ camera (moving and zooming is possible) a dashboard card can be created which includes buttons to switch to predefined PTZ presets allowing to show specific views.
This article shows how to setup a dashboard card with the life stream and PTZ preset buttons.
Setup and configuring a Geekworm NASPi v2.0 case housing a Raspberry Pi 4 to be attached to a DIN-rail involves the following:
is explained in detail. This makes the Raspberry ready to be used as for example a web server.
Home Assistant can be used to inform you about the garbage pick up dates / waste collection schedule on your dashboard. Within the Netherlands a lot of municipalities are using the AfvalWijzer website to inform their citizens which waste container/bin to put alongside the street.
To receive notifications on your mobile phone the Pushover service can be used. It requires a Pushover account and the Pushover integration in Home Assistant. Some easy configuration is required before you can use Home Assistant Automations to sent automatically notifications.
Home Assistant can be used to inform you about the garbage pick up dates / waste collection schedule on your dashboard. Within the Netherlands a lot of municipalities are using the AfvalWijzer website to inform their citizens which waste container/bin to put alongside the street.
When accessing your Raspberry Pi 4 remotely via a VNC viewer or Teamviewer it is very likely the screen size shown has a very low resolution and hence is unusable. This can be corrected by modifying the Raspberry Pi configuration file.
To monitor the triggering of Home Assistant automations a card can be added to a dashboard showing an overview of triggered automations in the past 24 hours. On a similar way a Lovelace UI dashboard card can be created to show disabled Home Assistant automations.
Integrating the Shelly Flood sensor with Home Assistant is easy, but unfortunately only the temperature and battery sensors work as expected. The flood sensor itself does not work out of the box as it remains in the status “Dry”. This can be overcome by using the MQTT protocol as explained in this article.
Steps how to fix the Home Assistant Z-Wave connection issue with error “Failed to connect: Cannot connect to host” for an USB attached Z-Wave controller.
Raspberry Pi boards are hard to get currently in 2022 and a lot of stores state that new supply will arrive in 2023, unless you are willing to pay an excessive price (2 to 4 times the price a year ago).
We managed to get 2 Raspberry PI 4’s with 8Gb RAM within a few days within The Netherlands. In this article the cause for the supply shortage is explained and how we managed to get two Raspberry Pi 4 (8Gb) units.