It’s been an interesting couple of weeks
Home Assistant Rocks!!!… Just not on my phone
You may have noticed that I’ve not posted anything over the last couple of week. It’s been a bit busy what with work and the surprising amount of DIY that Abi has found for me to do now that I’m back at work. 😂
We’ve recently wallpapered my old office that has now become the spare room. It looks great already and over the next couple of months we’ll be removing all of the old furniture and putting in more bedroomy type things. I’m going to miss having a dedicated space that I can get work done and chill out it but as we now have Abi’s little brother over every other weekend we can’t really have him sleeping on the sofa all the time.
My other major project is been getting Home Assistant up and running. For those of you who have never heard of home assistant, it a piece of software that can run in docker (on on a raspberry Pi) that you can use to control all of your smart home devices in one place, rather than using a multitude of apps from different manufactures.
Originally when I started our smart home it was all going to based on Apple’s HomeKit but I found these little smart plugs that can run the Tasmota firmware allowing me to control them via MQTT. The only Issue I’m having with the smart plugs is the one connected to the Fishtank doesn’t turn the florescent lights the first time the plug turns on. We are planning to install some LED lights in the tank though so this should hopefully fix that problem.
The only other issue I have come across has happened in the last few days. The iOS apps (or the web interface when accessed from our phones) for home assistant don’t seem to want to work. when you try to login it refreshes and asks you to log in again or in the case of the one device that was still logged in, you click a button and the page would refresh and nothing would change.
The issue isn’t carried across to any other platform though so it has completely baffled me. I’m hoping a future update will fix it. At the moment I’m putting selected devices into Apple’s HomeKit but this really isn’t a long term solution as you can only have so many devices connected to one home kit hub at a time.
Other than that the new job is going well. I’d love to tell you about it but unfortunately I can get told off and not have a job so it’s best I leave it at that. Though if you are in Bridlington feel free to pop into Vodafone and we’ll see if we can get you an amazing deal put together on your next handset, Broadband or Smart Home stuff.
Have you had issues with your smart home? Have you been decorating lately? Do you need a new phone? 😂 Let me know in the comments below.
