Being able to use NFC (Near Field Communication) tags in home automation systems like Home Assistant has been around for a while, but until recently I didn’t see the benefit of sticking NFC stickers or using NFC cards. Until it occurred to me that it could help me make my home smarter without having a lot of technology in sight. After all, those NFC stickers fit right behind the buttons on my switches.

I had an eInk screen for a while with the intention of turning it into a birthday calendar. Now there are projects that can take a list of birthdays from Google Calendar and display them on an eInk screen, but I decided to do something different. The advantage of an eInk screen is that it only consumes power when the image changes. Because a birthday calendar only needs to be adjusted once a day, the screen does not need to be powered all day.

I have been thinking about 3D printing for a long time. A few years ago I supported a project on Kickstarter, but unfortunately that project has ended. On Tweakers.net I saw that the Creality Ender 3 v2 is often recommended to people who want to start with 3D printing, mainly because there is a large community behind it. And this 2nd version has a number of optimizations compared to the Ender 3.

One of the things I wanted to do to switch from Domoticz to Home Assistant was to put new temperature sensors in all areas of our house. In Domoticz I used various Oregon Scientific sensors, which I then read with RFXCom. Because I didn’t want to invest in more RFXcom sensors and I didn’t have sensors for all rooms, I decided to use another option. Nabu Casa, the company behind Home Assistant, acquired ESPHome earlier this year.

To transfer the information from my smart meter from Domoticz to Home Assistant I use an extra application dsmr-reader, which reads the smart meter, stores the data in a local PostgreSQL database and shares it with Home Assistant, MQTT and InfluxDB, among others. Every night dsmr-reader uploads the information about the gas consumption to Mindergas.nl. For this installation I installed dsmr-reader on a Raspbery Pi and then connected the USB cable.

Lately I’ve been having more and more problems with my Domoticz installation. Attempts to set up a new server failed because I couldn’t transfer the backup of my current server. In the end I set up Monit to at least make sure that Domoticz continues to run, but of course it’s not ideal for a home-automation server. On the other hand, I heard the increasingly positive voices about Home Assisant (HA).

In the latest issue of HackSpace magazine I read an article about how to set up your smarthome using the TICK stack. The TICK Stack includes InfluxDB (a time series database), Kapacitor (a complex data processing engine), Chronograf (a graphical user interface to both Kapacitor and InfluxDB) and Telegraf (the link between the machine it’s installed on and InfluxDB). Since I had a Raspberry Pi without a cause laying around and was thinking how to move my somewhat buggy Domoticz envorinment to a more stable one, without losing historrical data I decide to give TICK a try.

He had been looking at me for a while, but since yesterday I made the decision. I am going to convert the PowerMac G5 into a Hackintosh. Or so I thought … The reason I started thinking about building a Hackingtosh again is this video from Linus Tech Tips where they use a Linux distro as a kind of KVM to virtualize macOS. This way it is less important which hardware you use, but you can still offer that hardware to MacOS without much delay.

During the renovation of our living room, one of the things I found important was hanging the TV, without cables and cupboards. I also wanted the soundbar under the TV to hang tight against the TV. To determine the height of the TV, I used the seating position on the sofa and measured how high my eyes are then. I then divided the height of the TV into three pieces and made sure that my eyes are at 1/3 of the top of the TV.

Today I read a short blog post from Home Assistant about the use of cloud services for Home Automation: Your hub should be local and open And although I don’t use Home Assistant as my primary home automation controller, I do agree with this view. Besides dependence on an internet connection, I also find dependence on a company a great risk. Home Automation startups come and go, and the last thing you want is for your house to stop working because your software supplier is bankrupt.