Home-Assistant

I’m on a mission to automate my life, and I over-engineer it along the way. Lately I’ve also been Claude maxxing, which is why there are so many posts. The first post ended with the fan’s remote decoded and a plan to put the fan on Home Assistant. The fan has a perfectly good remote, so none of this needs to exist. I wanted it anyway. I used to leave the fan running all day. What I wanted was every button in Home Assistant, a few automations so it runs only when it should, and one cable for data and power. ...

In the first post the server was running and the display was still in the mail. It showed up in July and did nothing. The screen sat on a static “install dock and USB-C” image, it didn’t react to power, and no TRMNL Wi-Fi network appeared. I tried the dock in different positions, a few USB-C cables, a wall adapter and a laptop port, then wrote to TRMNL support asking for a replacement. ...

I needed AA and AAA batteries and grabbed an IKEA TIMMERFLOTTE while I was at it. Zigbee temperature and humidity sensor, $8. I put it in my living room: middle of the apartment, between all the windows, so a reasonable representative reading. No real plan. Ten days of data later, I have a clear picture of how this apartment moves heat — and it is not great. Setup The TIMMERFLOTTE logs over Zigbee to Home Assistant. It reports on state change rather than on a fixed interval, so the data is dense: I get a reading whenever temp shifts by about 0.1°F. For outdoor data I’m using Pirate Weather, a privacy-respecting API that pulls from NOAA, exposed as a template sensor in HA: ...

I wanted a passive ambient display that tells me something useful without picking up my phone — weather at a glance during the day, a wind-down mode at night, green at 6:30am if it’s worth cycling to work. The IKEA Varmblixt is $30, Zigbee-native, and pairs directly to ZHA without an IKEA hub. Pairing Not obvious. There’s no reset button. To enter pairing mode, power-cycle the lamp 12 times in rapid succession — plug, unplug, plug, unplug… It flashes white 3–4 times when it’s ready. A smart plug makes this way easier than fumbling with the physical outlet. Source ...