In this guide, I’m going to show you how to backup Home Assistant to a file share or mapped network drive using the Samba Backup addon. Specifically, I’m going to show you to backup your HA instance to a Windows Server 2019 file share. This will get installed via the Supervisor addon store. Once installed,…
In this guide, I’m going to show you how to update the Peanut Plug firmware over the air (OTA) directly through Home Assistant. Without this upgrade, you won’t be able to use any of the energy-monitoring capabilities this smart plug offers. Instead, it will just show 0.0 W. The biggest motivation for me to get…
In this guide, I’ll show you how to setup a garbage, trash, or recycling reminder in Home Assistant. To do this, we are installing a HACS integration called Garbage Collection. Once this is installed, you’ll be able to receive notifications on garbage day as well as see when the next collection day is schedule in…
In this guide, I’m going to show you how to integrate your Blue Iris + Deepstack local NVR security camera software into Home Assistant. Once integrated, you’ll have the ability to view your camera streams in Home Assistant, along with a bunch of other cool entities to play around with. Let’s get started! Prerequisites Before…
In this guide, I’m going to show you how to add another camera to Blue Iris. Rather than manually configuring each security camera, Blue Iris has a handy “Copy from another camera” feature, which will copy the existing settings of one camera and apply it to a 2nd one. This is a super easy to…
In this guide, I’m going to show you how to install Home Assistant in Hyper-V on a Windows Server 2019 host. The Home Assistant team has already provided a pre-configured image for us to use, so creating this is really simple to get up and running. You can probably have this created from start to…
In this guide, I’m going to show you how to pair and configure an Ikea Tradfri 5 button remote control with Home Assistant. You may see on the Amazon listing that this button requires the Ikea hub, but that’s not true. As long as you have a zigbee dongle (like the Nortek GoControl I’m using),…
In this guide, I’m going to show you how to setup and install AdGuard Home in Home Assistant. This will allow you to use your Home Assistant instance as your AdGuard server. It’s important to point out that you don’t need to use the AdGuard Addon in Home Assistant to pull your AdGuard Home stats…
In this guide, I’m going to show you how to setup, configure, and install Wireguard VPN in Home Assistant using a custom domain name. This will allow you to not only access Home Assistant remotely, but also all of your other internal sites and services. Things like security cameras, dashboards, or services like Sonarr and…
In this guide, I’m going to show you how to add a “child lock” into the Keymaster integration. Keymaster is a HACS integration that lets you create and manage door access pin codes from within Home Assistant. A “child” lock is basically a lock that uses the exact same pin codes as the your “parent”…