Posts on karl

Two quick tricks for better HomeAssistant automations

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It’s hard to believe, but the venerable Home Assistant project has just celebrated it’s 7th birthday with release .115! While HA does get better with each new release, it is by no means perfect :D. This post came about because of a new feature in release .115 and the subsequent limitations of that feature!

In the course of trying to integrate Home Assistant with all the things, everybody eventually hits some major limitation or bug and is forced to find some sort of workaround. Below are a few techniques that I’ve collected over the years to simplify some of my Home Assistant configuration and work around some of the platforms various limitations.

PoE at a distance caused terrible cat5 speeds

Wed, 01 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is a quick post for made in the hopes that some poor soul in the future will find it and save themselves some time.

Background

I’ve been experimenting with a few different ways to surface various home automation controls in the appropriate place and at a good time. One prototype host is deployed behind a small LCD under some cabinets in a high traffic area. This host is a raspberry pi 4 with a PoE hat. It boots a very stripped down version of Raspberry Pi OS into a web browser running in Kiosk mode.

Hello World

Sat, 27 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Blowing the dust off the domain, trying Hugo out.

tap tap Is this thing on?