New Adventures in WiFi

I've recently been working on a smart, wifi-enabled irrigation or watering controller for my garden, and have finally got it up and running. I'll start with a picture of the finished product, so you know where this is heading. I had a few ideas for how to achieve this, and over the last few months I've been examining different options, and recently took the plunge and purchased some hardware. I've been doing a number of projects with ESP8266 based hardware, Tasmota firmware, and Home Assistant and so it was inevitable any solution I put in place would feature those elements.

A few months ago I purchased a Brilliant Smart Ceiling Fan Remote or Controller , with the intention of flashing Tasmota on it, and setting it up in Home Assistant . I needed to replace a ceiling fan in our lounge room, and so I also bought a Brilliant Tempest II ceiling fan , which I understood should be compatible with the fan controller. You can see a few photos below, but unfortunately I forgot to take any before I had disassembled the parts, so you'll need to check out the BrilliantSmart product page to see photos before disassembly. Here is the box... And the control panel with the cover removed... And the controller, also with the cover removed... Fortunately, thanks to some very   helpful   posts  and investigative work from sparkydave , thecubical and exxalmate  and posted on the  Australia - Electrically Certified Hardware thread  on the Home Assistant forums , I knew that this was a Tuya based device, with a secondary microco...

I've gradually been connecting as many devices as I can using Home Assistant. One of the things that has been on my list is our WiFi connected Samsung Air Conditioner. It is a Samsung model AR24FSSSBWKN sold in Australia in around 2015. We have made use of being able to control the air conditioner using the Samsung Smart Air Conditioner Android app , but it has always been problematic. It consistently requires a username and password to be entered when using it outside of the home, recently it has stopped working inside the home, and it also requests some (in my view) unnecessary permissions (such as telephone and contacts). So, the idea of being able to control it via Home Assistant is appealing. I'd considered trying to set something up with my Broadlink IR Pro  to control it via IR, but most of the possible solutions seemed a bit clumsy. I became aware of the climate_ip custom component for Home Assistant  created by SebuZet who is active on the Home As...

After  finally getting Tasmota flashed onto a smart plug  I was able to get started on one of the smart home projects I'd been pondering for a while... a smart phone charger that could stop the phone charging when it reached a certain battery charge level. My motivation was this... I had been the owner of a Google Pixel phone which I purchased in 2017. After 2 years of use I was becoming increasingly disappointed with the battery life of the device, which prompted me to install the AccuBattery app  to attempt to quantify how poor the remaining battery capacity was. I was alarmed to find that the battery capacity was less than 50% of the original capacity (and has now dropped to less than 40% at the time of writing) So after I got a new Android phone in around May 2019, I started reading about how I could improve this. The AccuBattery documentation has some very useful articles  describing how lithium ion (Li-ion) batteries degrade under different charging...

After getting  Tasmota flashed onto Sonoff S20 and S26 smart plugs  I then needed to get them configured and talking to Home Assistant . MQTT Given that Tasmota is designed to be used with MQTT , this seemed like a sensible place to start. I had Home Assistant running on my Raspberry Pi Zero W in a python virtual environment , so I set about installing the Mosquitto MQTT broker  on the same Raspberry Pi. As usual, the wealth of resources available on the internet made this a relatively easily process, and this article  was very helpful. The following commands updated the package list in Raspbian and installed Mosquitto. Mosquitto started automatically after the install. $ sudo apt update $ sudo apt install mosquitto mosquito-clients MQTT works with the concepts of topics and messages. Devices or software tools can listen (or subscribe) to messages on a given topic, and also publish messages to a given topic. Anything interested in a particular topic can ...

I found out about Home Assistant while searching for a solution that would let me control a Broadlink RM Pro  locally over the network. Already having access to a Raspberry Pi Zero W , meant that there was a reasonably low barrier to entry to get Home Assistant running. After a bit of reading , and given that I already had Rasbian Stretch installed on the Pi Zero W and am reasonably comfortable with Linux, I decided to install Home Assistant in a Python virtual environment (venv) . I also set up Home Assistant to autostart using systemd . The Pi Zero W is not really recommended for running Home Assistant, and I did run into some issues that may have been caused by low specs of the device. Specifically, I had installation of some pre-requisite packages fail, and some updates failed, which I suspect was due to some activities timing out. Also, the CPU usage would regularly sit on 100% for minutes at a time when trying to check the configuration or restart Home Assistant...