Alexa Guard with Home Assistant

With one of the latest releases of the Alexa Media Player custom component for Home assistant, there is a way to Arm and Disarm the Alexa Guard feature. Alexa Guard is a feature of Alexa that offers 3 features via your Echo units:It sends a notification to the Alexa app if one of the first 2…

Harmony Hub – where are my activities?

I have a Logitech Harmony Hub to control my entertainment devices and it works well, I never have to touch my original remotes, ‘One remote to rule them all’! I have been starting to incorporate all my devices into Home Assistant and started to redo some of the Devices and Activities I have in the…

Installing a Yamaha RX-V683BL

Since I have been revisiting vinyl and bought a Turntable, I decided to look at a new receiver with a Phono input. I searched around and found that the Yamaha RX-V683BL had a high rating and everything I needed. The US price for this is 329.00 on Amazon.com, so I checked Amazon.ca and it is…

The adventure of moving HASSIO from PI to VirtualBox

  I basically followed Dr. Zzz and The Hook Up, but I upgraded to VirtualBox 6.014 with matching extras on CentOS 7. Finally found why my USB devices were missing in the VM settings. This had me stumped for the evening, but I knew it must be related to permissions. Then I found this. Thanks…

Hassio and Z-Wave

So my Monoprice / Zooz 4 in 1 sensor was stuck reading the same temperature. I tried rebooting, complete shutdowns etc with no change. I had the idea to try and remove the node, but could not successfully remove the node by using the tools in the Z-Wave manager in Hassio. I decided to do…

Home Assistant Down!!!!

I did an update to the latest version of Home Assistant, and boom it did not boot. I am running Hassio on a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and did not have a permanent monitor hooked up to it, and has to scramble to find a monitor with HDMI. In the end I did not need…

Home Automation – Temperature Trigger

Now I have my Home Automation server working and 95% of my devices moved over, it was time to setup some of the automatons I wanted. Turn on and off Fans when the temperature hits a certain temperature Lock / Unlock the door via presence detection – working on Monitor the power of my Washing…

Garage door automation with Sonoff and Hassio

I finally have my garage door automation working with Home Assistant, a Sonoff SV, iOS notifications, actions and Google Assistant. It has been a challenge with changes in syntax between HA versions and getting the right format in yaml files. It is nice to finally get it figured out. I followed Dr. Z’s videos for…