home assistant Archives - The Budget Smart Home

Cheap Wifi MQTT Controlled LED strip using Tasmota and Home Assistant

Daniel MasonDec 6, 2022March 30, 20230

When it comes to LED strips the market is flooded with expensive premium brands such as LIFX. This post offers a cheap alternative that is not only affordable but also works offline and integrates well

How to use Tuya Convert to flash Tasmota to off-the-shelf smart home devices

Daniel MasonNov 28, 2021March 5, 20230

Flashing Tasmota used to involve the arduous process of soldering fine wires to microscopic contact pads and using a USB to serial programmer board. With the advent of a growing home automation community and the

How to create binary sensors for RF and BLE sensors and Open MQTT Gateway in Home Assistant

Daniel MasonJan 10, 2021March 5, 20230

This article shows how to integrate Open MQTT Gateway to Home Assistant using custom binary sensors that respond to MQTT payloads.

RF 433 MHz and BLE with OpenMQTTGateway and ESP8266 – Cheap Home Automation on a budget

Daniel MasonDec 18, 2020March 30, 20230

Adding an RF gateway to your Home Assistant setup makes your setup incredibly versatile because it opens up a multitude of low-cost automation opportunities. This project enables you to interface your Home Assistant setup with

Animated LED Coffee Table with ESP8266

Daniel MasonMay 30, 2020March 28, 20230

LED strips are cool. And addressable ones are even cooler. They look great as a lighting feature and we can actually integrate them into our home automation system as well! We can use LED strip

Flash Tasmota firmware to Brilliant Smart bulbs with Tuya Convert

Daniel MasonJan 18, 2020March 5, 20230

This post shows how to flash a cheap Smart bulb from Officeworks from start to finish using Tuya Convert and Raspberry Pi.

Guide: How to set up cheap and effective motion sensors for Home Assistant

Daniel MasonDec 24, 2019March 5, 20230

I have written in the past about my RF-based sensor setup, the gateway services, and custom HA components that support them. This post consolodates all these resources and fills in the gaps for an end

Home Assistant Custom Component Upgrade Guide for v0.93

Daniel MasonMay 21, 2019June 5, 20200

Home Assistant introduced major breaking changes in release 0.93, with the addition of manifest files and a restructured folder layout. This caused some of my components to break very badly and I spent too much

How to calibrate Home Assistant Sensors

Daniel MasonJan 10, 2019March 5, 20230

To calibrate my temperature and humidity sensors, I placed them inside a glass jar and calibrated each one to match their collective average value.

Resolving Home Assistant upgrade errors in custom Python Components

Daniel MasonJun 5, 2018December 13, 20200

Upgrading to Home Assistant v0.69.0 broke some of my custom components that use the MQTT Python module. The reason for this is a small change in the module API. This post explains how to fix