Let’s say we have a power meter like the one that sense makes. Let’s also say that the API for this power meter is a little underwhelming. In this hypothetical situation, we can fetch the current home power usage so we could certainly wire up an observable stream to this API and (assuming we’re using…
Category Archives: Smart Home
Home Automation Dashboard
Hardware I recently put together this Home Automation Dashboard. The screen was pulled from an old laptop and the computer is an older SFF PC running linux. The application is a relatively simple Angular application that streams most of the data from a Home Assistant websocket. The PC sits in a box in the wall…
More LED Furniture
I built two pieces of furniture recently. AV Table First is a new AV cabinet for my home theater. First, I selected several species of wood and cut them down to the same size. Next came the puzzle of laying out the pieces. The ends of the slab were cut off at 45° to make…
Ambilight with WiFi on ESP8266
TL;DR I built an Ambilight clone that listens for MQTT messages over WiFi when it’s not receiving serial data. This allows it to be controlled by Home Assistant and vicariously the Google Assistant. The code lives at https://github.com/heathbar/tv-backlight. Board Swap My first Ambilight clone served me quite well. I started with a system like the one…
Vizio SmartCast Node.js API
I have begun work on a Node.js module to interact with Vizio’s SmartCast devices. Please report issues on the GitHub issues page. NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/vizio-smart-cast GitHub: https://github.com/heathbar/vizio-smart-cast Made possibly by the reference guide here: https://github.com/exiva/Vizio_SmartCast_API…
Making Amazon Echo Alexa Sing to openHAB2
Update OpenHAB2 has an official Alexa Skill. You should use that instead. https://community.openhab.org/t/official-alexa-smart-home-skill-for-openhab-2/23533 Preface The documentation on openHAB2 is somewhat lacking and scattered. But I was able to complete my journey so I thought I’d add another article to the noise. There are a number of approaches to integrating the Echo with openHAB. I have tried some…