Automation

I recently upgraded to SmartWings smart roller blinds and have been thoroughly impressed with their performance. These blinds come in a variety of styles and support multiple smart home protocols, including Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Matter. However, I encountered an interesting (and annoying) quirk when integrating them with Home Assistant via Zigbee2MQTT — the blinds reported as "closed" when they were actually open, and vice versa.

I use Frigate for real-time object detection with a Google Coral Edge TPU and as my Network Video Recorder (NVR) However, storing just a week's worth of footage from my cameras requires about 2TB of space of space on my NAS. While a NAS offers an economical storage option, accessing footage stored on HDDs over a network introduces latency. This lag noticeably impacts the performance of Frigate's UI, especially when playing back recent clips. The ideal setup would store recent footage on an SSD for quick access, while using a HDD NAS for older recordings. However, Frigate's limitation of supporting only a single mount point means this has to be solved outside of Frigate.

In addition to defining MQTT-based sensors to make them entities in Home Assistant, you can also group a bunch of sensors as a device.

In addition to defining MQTT-based sensors to make them entities in Home Assistant, you can also group a bunch of sensors as a device.

This page contains a list of various devices that make up my smart home

I have a Raspberry Pi Zero W that runs a docker image of rtl_433, a popular data receiver for decoding data from popular sensors broadcasting on frequencies such as 433.92 Mhz or 915 MHz. For reasons unknown to me, thing stop working. I haven't been able to find out what causes the issue, but I did find that restarting the docker container seems to get things back on track. Setting up an automation that automatically reboots the container is not very elegant, but it works and ended seemingly endless troubleshooting.

In some scenarios, it's desirable to have keep two entities in sync. In my case, the most common scenario is when I have a smart bulb on a circuit controlled by a smart switch. The smart switch is set in 'smart bulb' mode, which means it sends events for on and off and maintains state, but does not actually cut the power to the light bulb. This is important because while it's useful to have a physical switch for a smart bulb, smart bulbs are not designed to be unplugged. When a smart bulb is unplugged, it can have undesirable effects, such as impacting the Zigbee mesh if the bulb is Zigbee.

One of my favorite automations is an automated adjustments to my roller blinds. As my desk faces a south-facing window I am hit by a solar beam in the winter months when the sun doesn't rise very high in the sky. Initially, I setup an automation that adjusted my roller blind based on the angle and the height of the sun.

One of the sought-after inputs into a well-functioning smart home is presence detection of people (and pets). Presence or absence of occupants is an important input for triggering (or not trigger) an automation. These occupancy-triggered automations save energy when they turn off lights and keep HVAC idle while everyone is away. They also kick off things that are better done while no one is around such as robot vacuum runs.