Exposing Xiaomi Aqara Sensors to Google Home & Alexa

Exposing Xiaomi Aqara Sensors to Google Home & Alexa

In this tutorial, I thought I’d show you how simple it is to utilise the Aqara sensors and link them directly to Google Home and Alexa. I will be building on top of some tutorials I’ve already published, so I’ll skip through some of the …

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Basics: Connecting Home-Assistant to Node-red

Connecting Home-Assistant to Node-red

Quick and easy one today. There are several different ways of installing and running both Home-Assistant and Node-red. I have one instance of Home-Assistant Supervised (formerly Hassio) on an Intel Nuc. As it’s supervised, it has all the add-ons baked into it, and launching Node-red …

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Integrating the 4 channel Sonoff R3 Pro into Home-Assistant and Node-red

Integrating the 4 channel Sonoff R3 Pro into Home-Assistant and Node-red

One of the things I’ve been meaning to get for a while now was a Sonoff R3 Pro. Now for those of you not familiar with this device, it’s essentially a 4 channel smart switch. There’s a non-pro version and the pro version. I opted …

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The Beginner’s Guide to Node-red with Home-Assistant (Part 3: Timers)

The Beginner's Guide to Node-red with Home-Assistant (Part 3: Timers)

If you’ve read part 1 and part 2, then you’ll already know how to work with MQTT (both receiving and sending commands), how to take sensor information from home-assistant as well as control entities directly in home-assistant, and most importantly, how to work with the …

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The Beginner’s Guide to Node-red with Home-Assistant (Part 2: Switch Node)

The Beginner's Guide to Node-red with Home-Assistant (Part 2: Switch Node)

In part 1 of this series we discussed simple configuration of the MQTT in and out nodes, how to send a payload of On or Off and how to monitor incoming information in the debug window. In this post we’re going to expand on this …

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The Beginner’s Guide to Node-red with Home-Assistant (Part 1: MQTT)

The Beginner's Guide to Node-red with Home-Assistant (Part 1: MQTT)

I’ve been helping a fair few people online recently with some introductory operations in node-red. I thought I would write a kind of primer to help the beginner get up to speed with some functional flows. I see a lot of information online about how …

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Using Node-red and Home-Assistant to check Unauthorised Computer Usage

Using Node-red and Home-Assistant to check Unauthorised Computer Usage

So continuing with my Node-red tutorials, I thought I’d take a look at some workstation security related notifications. In this tutorial, I am going to select a couple of scenarios where you might want to be alerted to activity on your windows computer. First, I …

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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 …

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Setting up a Night Light Motion Sensor in Home-Assistant and Node-red

Motion Detected Night Light

Today I am going to give you a quick run through on how to set up a night light that’s fully automated and only comes on after dark. The idea is that if either my girlfriend or I need to get up in the night …

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