After a machine dedicated to Home Assistant starts to break down, I look for a new home for my Home Assistant system. As I have a Ubuntu server running various service, I decide to host Home Assistant in a virtual machine running on top of the Ubuntu server. After a few hours of error and […]
Home Media Center There are multiple devices (e.g., laptop, tablet, smart TV, projects) in a home network, and we want to play local media (music, videos, photos, etc) from any of these devices. In this case, we may want to build a media center that enables media sharing and streaming across multiple devices. A completely […]
When hosting a website in a private network (e.g., a home network), to make it publicly accessible, a common method is to expose the port 80 or 443 of the router. This will make the private network vulnerable. A more secure approach is to utilize the Cloudflare tunnel. Suppose the hostname of the website to […]
Zigbee Coordinator For Zigbee devices to communicate with Home Assistant, we need a Zigbee coordinator. The one I used is GoControl CECOMINOD016164 HUSBZB-1 USB Hub. Also, to control the devices, we can use the Zigbee Home Automation integration. First, connect it to the Raspberry Pi device where the Home Assistant instance runs, and configure it […]
Turn Light When Motion Detected My walk-in closet is a little bit dark even in the daytime. To automatically become bright when I walk in, I use a Philips Hue Go and a motion sensor, and create an automation in Home Assistant with In the above automation, I (optionally) set a time condition so that […]
After a voice command is recognized and its intent is identified, for example, by Rhasspy, the intent needs to be handled, for example, by Home Assistant. Below we illustrate how to do this by using Rhasspy and Home Assistant. Event Driven When we configure Rhasspy to use Home Assistant for intent handling, there two options: […]
If you have some appliances that are not smart, i.e., without network capacity, but controllable by a IR/RF remote, then they can controlled from Home Assistant via a universal remote and some add-on or integration in Home Assistant. One universal remote I found to work well is Broadlink universal remote (the model I have is […]
Nowadays, cloud file storage and sharing services are common. However, almost all cloud service providersstore your data in their file servers which are outside your private home network. To obey our principle that data generated in the smart home system are accessible to only smart home system users, by using Nextcloud we can build a […]
According to the Rasa website, it is a conversational AI platform. In our smart home project, we will use it for intent recognition and entity extraction. Although the current version of Rasa is 2.7.x, unfortunately, it is rather challenging to install Rasa 2.x to a Raspberry Pi device, see the discussions in Rasa community and […]
Installation for Debian or Raspberry Pi OS The installation process is detailed in the official homepage of Rhasspy; see here. Below I provide the process specific to Raspberry Pi. First, use the command dpkg-architecture | grep DEB_BUILD_ARCH= to check the architecture. For Raspberry 4 with a 32bit system, it is armhf. Then download and install […]