Running Home Assistant directly on a Raspberry Pi is the default, but what if you want KVM virtualization on the same Pi 5? Virtualizing HAOS gives you snapshots, easy backup, and the ability to run other services alongside it. This guide walks through the full setup — from installing libvirt and KVM on a Pi 5 to getting Home Assistant accessible on your LAN.
Enhancing your smart home with dynamic lighting has never been easier, thanks to the seamless integration of LED strips powered by WLED and Home Assistant.
WLED is an open-source firmware that transforms affordable microcontrollers into feature-rich LED controllers, perfect for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. By using LED strips with WLED, you gain precise control over your lighting, enabling stunning effects, animations, and automations tailored to your lifestyle.
Home Assistant is a popular home automation platform that effortlessly integrates with WLED, allowing you to manage your LED strips alongside other smart devices from a single interface. This powerful combination elevates your space’s ambiance and enhances smart home functionality. Whether you’re a DIY enthusiast or new to IoT, integrating LED strips with WLED and Home Assistant is an accessible way to bring your lighting ideas to life.
As a Home Assistant enthusiast, I wanted a dedicated, always-on display to monitor and control my smart home. Repurposing my old Nvidia Shield Tablet seemed like the perfect solution. However, the aging battery was generating unnecessary heat and wasn’t needed for a wall-mounted setup that’s constantly plugged in. In this guide, I’ll walk you through how I removed the battery from my Nvidia Shield Tablet and set it up as a sleek wall-mounted dashboard using the Fully Kiosk Browser app.
My next addition to previous projects Battery Powered Wifi IoT - Temperature, Humidity & Soil Moisture Sensors and Battery Powered ESP8266 IoT & Temperature Sensor is to make wifi configuration smooth and fast.
A Raspberry Pi WiFi Extender is a cheap and power efficient way of increasing the total range of your WiFi Network. In my case I needed to extend a WiFi coverage within the same LAN (bridge mode from Ethernet to WiFi).
I have found a working shortcut 😎 to create an access point following a GitHub project so I didn’t need to follow instructions from raspberrypi.org page – Using the Raspberry Pi as an access point to share an internet connection (bridge).
Idea for this project came with my new small fish tank. Since the fish tank is in a living room I did not want to have aquarium air pump on during the TV time due to its noise. Also the main light should be automatically turned off during the night. I wanted to add also night LED.
My new project consists of HW with cost under 20€. It is able to accurately measure electric power consumption and sends data via WiFi. Great source of knowledge is openenergymonitor.org which includes also Arduino library.
I have just made a prototype of ESP8266 (ESP-01) IoT temperature & humidity SI7021 sensor and also 2x three pin soil moisture sensors with only 0.006mA (6µA) current drain during the sleep.
I have several IoT sensors at home and now I came to the point that I would like to introduce some solid platform for storing sensor data and visualizing them. This post summarize all platforms that I tried, searched and evaluated.
I successfully run DHT22 battery ESP8266 temperature/humidity IoT sensor so my next project is a simple IoT Door Sensor. It is up and running and sending a simple event to my HTTP server via wifi chip ESP8266 (ESP-01 in my case). HTTP server is serving simple php script, that stores the data locally and also sending events to DWEET.IO and also sending email via Amazon SNS (AWS CLI api).