In this guide, I’m going to show you how to create your own chore or task tracker within Home Assistant, using only default Home Assistant features – no third-party products or additional addons/integrations are needed. You can optionally assign a point value to each chore, allowing your kids to earn “points” for completing their tasks….
By far one of my most-used Docker images is Mealie, a self-hosted recipe manager and meal planner. Adding new recipes to Mealie is as easy as pasting a URL into the app. Mealie will automatically pull in the ingredients, cooking steps, and images. It’s truly awesome, and I use every single day. One of the…
In this guide, I will show you how to integrate your Google Calendar into Home Assistant in 2021. Once this integration is all setup, you will be able to create some really cool automations and Lovelace cards. A few example automations might be “Turn on light 5 minutes before a meeting starts”, or, you could…
Have you ever thought how cool it would be to if your desktop PC wallpaper automatically changed based on the weather outside? For example, if it was raining, the wallpaper would change to a live “rainy” wallpaper, or if it was sunny, it might show a beach with moving waves. In combination with Home Assistant,…
In this guide, I will show you how to run your Vmware Workstation VM in the background and automatically after reboot, using either a batch file in the Startup folder or Windows Task Scheduler. This means that after your host computer or server restarts, your VM will automatically startup without you needing to launch the…
After spending a few hours migrating Home Assistant from a raspberry pi to VMware Workstation, and passing the my Nortek GoControl USB dongle successfully from my Windows 10 PC to the VM, I quickly realized that if I close the VM Player window or my Windows PC reboots – it doesn’t automatically reconnect the USB…
In this guide, I will show you how to migrate Home Assistant from a raspberry pi to VMWare Workstation 16 Player. Or, if you don’t have Home Assistant installed yet, you can still follow this guide exactly as is. You just won’t have a snapshot to import; you’ll be starting with a fresh HA instance….
In this guide, I’m going to show you how to install Keymaster, which is an addon for Home Assistant that lets you add new door programming codes to your z-wave locks. Whenever you purchase a z-wave enabled lock, typically they come with default pins to unlock the door from the outside. To reset or change…
In this guide, I will show you how to add an Ikea TRADFRI Wireless Motion sensor to Home Assistant in 2021. This device uses the Zigbee prototcol, not zwave, so you will pair it using the ZHA integration within Home Assistant. For reference, here is what it looks like: Unbox Device The first step is…
In this guide, I’m going to show you how to install HASS Workstation Service in Home Assistant. HASS Workstation Service is an application that lets you use use Home Assistant to control your computer, such as locking your PC, rebooting it, or detecting when your webcam is in use. It also provides useful sensors within…