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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Respeaker 2-Mics Pi HAT + Raspberry Pi Zero W It is constantly reported that Respeaker Pi HAT does not work well with the new Raspbian OS. For example, when I tried to install the driver even with the –compat-kernel option, the system either cannot detect the sound card or has no sound from the Respeaker […]
Nowadays most people use mobile phones and might not have a landline at home. However, sometimes it is convenient to call a home landline, e.g., to call domestic helper who does not have a mobile phone plan. An option is to purchase a landline from a provider and get a proper local landline phone number. […]