The SwitchBot Bot: Create your own Streamlight

The Switchbot Bot: Create your own Streamlight

SwitchBot were kind enough to send me a pack of SwitchBot Bots and their SwitchBot hub mini for me to have a play with and to see if I could do something cool with them. I’ve included some links to various products in the blog. …

Read More

Control your Smarthome using Keyboard shortcuts with Home-Assistant & Node-red

Control your Smarthome using Keyboard and Mouse shortcuts with Home-Assistant and Node-red.

Now I’m always interested in increasing the ways that I can interact with my smarthome. If we’re speaking about Home-Assistant (and Nodered), I think I can classify my current ways of controlling elements of the home as follows: Online i.e. web browser / official HA …

Read More

Monitoring your Youtube Channel with Home-Assistant & Node-Red

Monitoring your Youtube Channel with Home-Assistant & Node-Red

For those of you with Youtube channels it’s natural to want to know how you’re getting on to be able to check up on statistics like subscribers and total numbers of viewers etc. In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how you can scrape …

Read More

Creating Custom Google Home entities for integration with Home-Assistant & Node-red

Creating Custom Google Home entities for integration with Home-Assistant & Node-red

This post has been a long time coming. I’ve been looking at an easy way to create and control custom entities with Google assistant much like the way I can do with Alexa. We have both voice assistants in our household and well it was …

Read More

IOTlink: Full control and monitoring of your Windows 10 machine using MQTT

IOTlink: Full control and monitoring of your Windows 10 machine using MQTT

I recently decided to try an add-on called IOTlink. I was looking for a way to remotely monitor and control my main workstation pc. IOTlink seemed to be just the answer. In layman’s terms, it appears to install an MQTT client in Windows which continually …

Read More

Using Node-red and Home-Assistant to send notificiations to your LG TV

LG_webOS thumb

So I wanted to cover today a topic that I’ve briefly touched on in previous articles and that is notifications through LG’s WebOS. Home-Assistant has an integration that allows us to communicate directly with LG TVs (at least the most recent ones anyway) and it’s …

Read More

It’s Game time! How to receive notifications when the crew are online via Home-Assistant and Node-red.

Gaming Automation

Ok, so I am a Gamer. Big time. I love to game and always have done. From the early days of cabbage patch kids, rock ‘n’ roll racer, to James Pond on the Mega drive, and Goldeneye on the N64. You name the console, i’ve …

Read More

Automating and integrating a Xiaomi Mi Robot Vacuum into Home-Assistant (part 1)

Xiaomi Mi Robot Vacuum

Recently we borrowed a Xiaomi Robot Vacuum as the owner was returning to his home country for a month or so due to Covid-19. We brought it into our home and began to set it up. It worked surprisingly well. I was sceptical to begin …

Read More