Follow me while I learn and explore the world of Internet of Things while I share and document my steps in creating an SmartHome, Home Assistant and other IoT projects.

  • 12 October, 2021: Smart lights
    Add features but don´t take away basic opperation Using connected smart bulbs means the old and simple switch on the wall is useless. With smart bulbs you need an constant power for it to function corectly. Turning on and off a light using a wall switch is so common that it is hard to unlearn. You could use a sticky note over the switch offcourse to prevent people from using the switch. Another way is to hardwire the bulb(s) so that no matter the state of the switch the bulb(s) are connected. This leaves you with an useless switch on the wall but at least your automated lights will keep on working. You can remove the switch entirely if you like but that can be more work than it’s worth. And it can be usefull to be able to use a fysical switch in case of an automation not working for what ever reason.
  • 10 February, 2021: Wallpanel
    Improve the Family Accaptance Factor For a while I use the webinterface of to interact with Home-Assistant via a webbrowser on my PC and the Home-Assistant app on my phone. This works great but using a PC to view the current temperature in my livingroom is not the most convenient way. Now days most houses in the Netherlands have a thermostat in the livingroom to view the temperature. The apartment I rent doesn’t have a wallmounted thermostat control panel. Because I did have an temperature sensor connected to an Wemos d1 with ESPHome connected Home-Assistant could measure and show the temperature on it’s dashboard. I had an old 7inch tablet lying arround wich was way to slow to be usable for anything else than showing a webpage.
  • 24 May, 2018: First light
    Start cheap build from there After my first steps in Home Automation I soon got a couple of cheap lightbulbs from Milight that where controllable by Home Assistant. At that time I didn’t know about a serious drawback, which is the reason I do not recommend them. There is no feedback from the bulbs to the controller. Which means that the controller has no idea about the real state of the bulbs. For instance they are controllable with an remote when you use the remote to turn a bulb on Home Assistance still think that bulb is off.