What started as a small project quickly snowballed; taking way more time than anticipated, going through multiple scrapped plans and hardware changes, my fingers still hurting from making cables and pushing pixels through corrugated plastic. But for all the overkill, it does look pretty. It started when I ordered two strands of Govee RGB patioContinue reading “Getting carried away with RGB holiday lights”
Category Archives: homeautomation
Trying to Keep my Garage Cool
We live in a moderate climate, and when we built our house my plans were for my home server rack to be installed in the garage and vented through the outside wall to the alley. Unfortunately plans changed, and the instant hot gas water heater had to be moved blocking rack access to outside ventilation.Continue reading “Trying to Keep my Garage Cool”
ESP32 Water and Gas Utility Meter
The recent release of Home Assistant’s energy dashboard inspired me to restore my gas and water utility meter monitors. I lost the measurements when I removed my Brultech GreenEye energy meters in favor of Sense energy monitors. To recap, my local city and utilities do not allow any connections in any form to their utilityContinue reading “ESP32 Water and Gas Utility Meter”
Using ESP to Debug an ESP
This post is about troubleshooting the sporadic ESP8266 hardware watchdog resets in my water recirculation pump controller project. The ESP8266 would randomly restart, which I can observe by monitoring the uptime reported by ESPHome to Home Assistant. It is difficult to debug because the Sonoff TH10 is in a waterproof case in my garage, makingContinue reading “Using ESP to Debug an ESP”
Hot Water Recirculation Pump Controller
Our house uses a Noritz natural gas instant hot water heater, with a dedicated hot water recirculation line. Problem is the heater is installed in the garage, and in the summer the the garage gets so hot that the aquastat that controls the recirculation pump never turns on. This leaves us with cold water inContinue reading “Hot Water Recirculation Pump Controller”
Tuya to Tasmota to ESPHome
This is a summary of my experience, and the exact steps I followed, to convert cheap Tuya based WiFi smart plugs to ESPHome for Home Assistant integration. I am a novice when it comes to ESPHome, and I pieced information together from various great sources: Tuya Convert project. ESPHome Tuya Convert guide. ESPHome migrating fromContinue reading “Tuya to Tasmota to ESPHome”
Pieter Viljoen's Blog 