In this guide, I’m going to show you how to create status notifications to let you know when your garage door is opening, opened, closing, or closed. For reference, I am using a MyQ Chamberlain wifi device that paired with my “dumb” garage door opener. Here’s what it looks like: It’s super cheap and has…
In this guide, I’m going to show you how to add some of your internal-facing servers as sidebar items in Home Assistant. This will allow you to manage and use these websites the exact same way as if you were to go to the IP and port directly. For example, you could add Sonarr, Radarr,…
If you use Home Assistant, then chances are that you are familiar with MDI, or materialdesignicons.com. I’ve always had a lot of issues with the MDI website. Speed being the #1 issue for me. On average, it takes 8+ seconds for the searched term to appear. I stumbled across a really neat website that makes…
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 add restrictions to Lovelace Cards to Home Assistant. This will prevent unauthorized Home Assistant users from accessing or changing some of your devices. This Restriction Card is pretty customizable and can be applied to any card of entity. Once setup, a user without access will…
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’m going to show you how to create a simple battery level and battery state card in Home Assistant in 2021. To do this, we are using a popular HACS integration called Battery State Card. This card is very customizable. You can change the color of each icon depending on the state…
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 setup a Telegram notification bot. Telegram is a fantastic open-source cloud-hosted instant messaging software. It’s used by tens of millions of people all over the world and has integrations for many popular sites and services. I primarily use Telegram for notifications. To monitor my self-hosted…
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…