The dawn of Home Automation: An Epic Journey through its Platforms
Dive into the fascinating world of home automation as we explore the stories, features, and evolutions of major platforms like Google Home, Alexa, Home Assis...
Posts by Year
2024
Discover Home Automation: Zigbee, Thread, WiFi and More
We will explore the fundamentals of network protocols used in home automation and the crucial role Hubs play in creating and managing these networks.
2022
Integrating a UPS in our server
Our server is still an electronic device, and although we have protected your information by software through backup copies, it is appropriate to also protec...
Webmin: Managing a server from the browser
I don’t know much about Unix systems. While I can type some commands and move around its directories, it’s not something I’m used to or like to deal with. Bu...
Your files from Windows, installing a Samba Server on Debian
Despite having different ways of accessing files on your server, perhaps all of them become somewhat tedious if we are used to browsing through Windows folde...
From Debian 10 to Debian 11
Debian 11 (bullseye) has been available for use on the stable channel for several months now. This release contains a total of 59,551 packages of which more ...
2021
Backups towards Docker
Now that we handle Docker more or less adequately, and that we have instantiated a few services on our server with it, the system begins to fill up with data...
Non-Invasive Energy Monitor with PZEM and ESPHome
With the price of electricity at historical highs, and the forecast of its continuous increase, we believe that it is necessary to have a way of measuring el...
Calibrate Sensors in ESPHome
Whether you have changed the firmware of a Wi-Fi device with an ESP8266/ESP32 type chip, or if you have created your own device with different sensors, you w...
2020
Online file browser for your server
When installing an operating system without a desktop, one of the things that is most missed is having a file explorer with which to perform basic tasks. Fil...
Automatically update containers
As we expand our collection of containers Docker, it becomes tedious to keep an eye on possible updates of the applications we use and even to completely for...
System monitoring with Glances
Once you are familiar with Docker and have created several containers, it is the best time to monitor the server. You will monitor the resources and see if a...
Update the Portainer container
In the previous article it was seen how to install Docker and Portainer. A fantastic option to manage Docker containers visually.
Docker and Portainer in Debian
As our colleague Joaquín García explained in an extensive article in No Country for Geeks, Docker is a platform for running applications in containers. These...
Static IP in Debian
By default, the Debian 10 installer configures the network via DHCP. This causes the server’s IP to change with each reboot unless its IP is reserved in the ...
Installing Debian 11 from scratch
After trying Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 2 for several months, it became necessary to buy a Mini-PC in order to expand the services and devices in my ho...
No more advertising on your network with Pi-hole
Many of us have some kind of advertising blocker in our web browsers (Adblock, uBlock…). One of the biggest problems that this solution poses is the difficul...
PVPC tariff prices in Home Assistant
As of the date of publication of this article, just one month ago I changed my electricity rate to Hourly Pricing of Electricity (PVPC), which is the spanish...
Installing Lovelace Plugins
This is a good time to learn how to further expand the Home Assistant ecosystem by using Lovelace Plugins. These Plugins extend our Dashboards with custom ca...
YAML files by package in Home Assistant
As time goes by and more integrations are added to a Home Assistant server, you can see how the configuration files become more complicated and big, and even...
Track devices in Home Assistant
Home Assistant has a type of integrations called Device Tracker, these integrations are intended to control the location of the different devices that we lin...
Images for people in Home Assistant
In the previous article, a distinction was made between user and person. By default, one person is usually created for each user. And it is used to track the...
Home Assistant configuration in YAML
Although many integrations can be added without editing files, sometimes a bit of code is necessary.
2019
Improve the look and feel of Home Assistant
Home Assistant has a Web interface based on Google Material Design. While it is quite nice to look at, for those who want to change the look a little, Home A...
Make your own smart devices with ESPHome
ESPHome is a framework (software module) to control ESP8266/ESP32 modules in a very simple but powerful way and create smart devices. In the same way, it all...
Security camera with Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi (in all its versions) is one of the most powerful and versatile microcomputers of the moment. Thanks to the community you can get almost anythin...
The meta-component Default Config
Reviewing and cleaning the configuration.yaml file that we have had to edit on other occasions. I’ve noticed the default_config component. A component that c...
Home Assistant notifications on Telegram
Once we have configured several devices and entities in Home Assistant, it’s time to receive notifications if they have problems, or if we simply want to kno...
Control smart devices with Tuya Smart Life
Tuya is a company dedicated to the Internet of Things (IoT). It has a multitude of products, applications, services… creating its own complete ecosystem.
SSH & Web Terminal in Hass.io
Sometimes you have to execute commands on your Home Assistant server. For this, as in many other devices, there is the option of remote access by SSH (Secure...
Custom secure domains with GitHub Pages
GitHub Pages is the possibility to create a static website from a repository offered by GitHub. This is useful when you have a personal page, a project with ...
Monitoring a Home Assistant server
As our intelligent home grows in number of devices and complexity, but also in usefulness, we must protect the Home Assistant server in order to avoid future...
Protect your private info with secrets.yaml
When we work with Home Assistant files, we tend to introduce private keys and data that in the wrong hands can become a very dangerous and serious problem.
Caring your plants with Mi Flora and Home Assistant
I’m not a plant person. Most of the ones I’ve had fall into disgrace and end up in the plants heaven. It’s not because I don’t take the time to care for them...
Control your home from anywhere with DuckDNS
We have already created our Home Assistant server, and know a little more about how it works. But making a smart house doesn’t make much sense if we can only...
Configure Home Assistant editing its files
Although many integrations can be added without editing files, sometimes a bit of code is necessary.
Meeting Home Assistant
Once Home Assistant is installed, let’s go through the initial steps and configurations we need to perform to get a general idea of the platform and how to i...
Domotizing our house with Home Assistant
We take a leap in home automation and explore Home Assistant, an open-source platform focused on privacy, that takes your smart home to the next level. We ta...
2018
The Good IT guy
You get to the office. Like every day, you turn on your computer, check the emails, the Pull Request on your team, and finally, what task you have to do toda...
Tips to improve SQL Server Databases
A few days ago I learned a valuable lesson about what to do and not in databases. A few small tips that will help us to optimize our SQL Server databases and...
2017
Visual Studio Team Services from Console
Computer scientists are vague by nature, in fact, the computer was born with the purpose of sorting information and automate the tasks of sorting and process...
Migrating our projects from TFVC to Git
With the decline of code version control systems such as Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) and the rise of others such as Git, we are facing a common an...
[Micro-Post] Organizing the references in C#
There are many ways to improve our code, some people advocate for having a code with solid and reliable functionality, others for a clean code, and why not, ...
Meet ESP8266 / NodeMCU, the WIFI module for IoT
Fortunately or unfortunately, the world of IOT is becoming a tangle of devices, services, software and operating systems. This doesn’t have to be bad, in fac...
Constructor Overloading in C#
We all know the advantages of method overloading in our code.
2016
Solve unexplained problems in Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova
Sometimes when you work with Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova, you can find some unexplained problems. These problems may arise at compilation time, wh...