Running your home network off of a UPS may seem like overkill, but if you're planning to get into home automation, it's an investment that I've found to be really useful. I meant to write this blog post in December 2021 when I first set this up, but I just| James Ridgway
Last year I bought an Eaton 5SC 1000i UPS to provide my home office with backup power [https://www.jamesridgway.co.uk/home-office-upgrade-adding-a-ups/] in the event of a short term power cut. The UPS will provide power to my desktop, HP ProLiant G7 MicroServer and a number of networking devices.| James Ridgway
Since March 2015, I've used a ThinkPad T450s as my personal laptop, and I'm both amazed and pleased that I've managed to get 7 (nearly 8) years out of it! Recently though, I've found the smaller 14-inch 1600x900 resolution screen a bit limiting, and the CPU performance could be better| James Ridgway
I've recently upgraded my home office setup to include a UPS. Some people might think this is overkill for a home office, but as its the room responsible for a large portion of the home network, being able to survive a short-term loss of power saves me having to turn| James Ridgway
Adopting Ubiquiti for the home network and configuring isolated WiFi and VLAN access for Guests.| James Ridgway
During the COVID pandemic, I invested in improving my working-from-home setup with a better webcam and an Elgato Key Light. I usually control the Key Light using my Stream Deck (which was another lockdown purchase and project). Over the last few weeks, I've been working from home a| James Ridgway
This week, I discovered that an automatic upgrade to v0.15 of AppDaemon did not go as planned. When I went to bed on Wednesday, I found the screen on the Sonoff NSPanel in our bedroom was still on and was reporting a time of ~16:00. There were a| James Ridgway
Whilst breaking a large codebase into a series of smaller services seems logical, the reality is far from simple. You have to ask yourself if the overhead and complexity of moving to microservices is worth your team's time or if you could extract more value from your existing| James Ridgway
I have been growing my home automation setup over the past two and a half years, and the setup has evolved to the point where I can keep an eye on the house using Home Assistant even when I'm away – provided that there isn't a power cut! We went away| James Ridgway
A few months ago I started on a home automation journey to make the house smart with helpful and practical home automation improvements. The next step in this journey is to make the traditional light switches in the house smart.| James Ridgway
Home Assistant has been around for years, but I've never given it a try until now. With smart devices becoming more prevalent and affordable I wanted a better way to control all the smart devices I have as well as putting in some cost effective smart sensors. Smart devices often| James Ridgway
This year, I was fortunate enough to attend The Things Conference in Amsterdam – a conference dedicated to the development and application of the Internet of Things (IoT) and LoRaWAN technology. The conference follows a two-day, single-track format of keynotes, workshops, podcast recordings and round table discussions. The conference focuses on| James Ridgway
Using precise methods for counting the frequency of events in a data stream becomes infeasible with large volumes. Precise counting methods at scale often require a significant amount of memory to maintain exact counts over a large data set. In contrast, Count-Min Sketch (CMS) offers a probabilistic solution that provides| James Ridgway
Throughout the house, nearly every single light is controlled by a Shelly. Last year, we installed a UniFi G4 Video Doorbell, and whilst we were having this fitted, it made sense to replace some of the outside light fittings and install some Shelly Duo GU10 RGBW bulbs. Out of the| James Ridgway
Querying large datasets can often be challenging, especially when performance is a key concern. Achieving performance at scale often comes with an element of trade-off in how a system is designed to achieve the desired functionality and performance at scale. A bloom filter is one example of a probabilistic data| James Ridgway
I have a handful of helpers in my Home Assistant setup that track the basic state of a few things. For example, we have a simple "guest mode" boolean that will turn on or off certain automatons when we have guests, and for my bin reminder automation, I use a| James Ridgway
When I first got my UniFi G4 Doorbell, I originally set up Home Assistant to announce, "There is someone at the door," using Amazon Alexa. More recently, I have transitioned to playing a chime sound on Alexa when someone rings the doorbell. In this blog post, I outline how Home| James Ridgway
Putting in place a successful monitoring solution goes far beyond just picking an appropriate tool (such as Icinga, Nagios, Zabbix, etc). The success and effectiveness of monitoring systems rely on how the tools are used and the culture and behaviour of the team that is responsible for monitoring a given| James Ridgway
We have a wall-mounted dashboard for Home Assistant in our Kitchen, which displays what bin day it is via a coloured Mushroom UI icon. Where we live, like most other places in the UK, there are different coloured bins for different types of waste, and each week the rubbish from| James Ridgway
I have several home automations that run based on the day of the week. For example, there is no point opening the curtains or turning on the heating in my home office if I'm not going to be in there. As a result, most of these day-specific automations either run| James Ridgway
Losing data sucks. If you've ever accidentally deleted something or had a hard disk fail, you'll know what I mean. This week, one of the disks in my HP Microserver failed. Fortunately, I haven't lost any data because I run the disk cluster in a ZFS Pool. Back in 2015,| James Ridgway
In the winter months, I get spammed with false CCTV motion alerts. With the winter months being darker, headlights from passing traffic often cast shadows and silhouettes that cause the motion zones to trigger when nothing is really happening. I run a Ubiquiti home network with G3 cameras – if we| James Ridgway
This week the Raspberry Pi that I have been running Home Assistant on for the last two and a half years died! However, I've successfully managed to migrate my Home Assistant setup from my Raspberry Pi to a small NUC computer without having to rebuild my entire Home Assistant setup.| James Ridgway
I've wanted to upgrade our basic plug-in doorbell to a smart video doorbell ever since I started playing with home automation. Finally, I've gotten around to replacing the doorbell with a UniFi G4 Video Doorbell! So, it's out with the old: And in with the new: New smart home tech| James Ridgway
From time to time, I'll scroll through the internet looking for home automation ideals that others have implemented and that I might be able to take some inspiration from. About 8 or 9 months ago I saw a post on Twitter where someone had integrated an API with Home Assistant| James Ridgway
