Homeassistant on The Comfy Seat

Automated Plant Watering

Wed, 01 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

Every spring, my wife and I get really excited about all the pretty plants and flowers that we can decorate our yard with. We also generally grow some vegetables and/or herbs. The problem with this is that we live in Georgia in the US and it gets freaking hot and humid here during the summer. The oppressive heat makes us not want to go outside to water the plants. Combine this with a little bit of traveling and you have a recipe for mostly dead plants during the latter part of the growing season. Well, this year we decided to not only acknowledge this reality, but to do something about it. You see, I’m a bit of a home automation nut and my wife knows it. She was shopping on Amazon and came across an inexpensive drip irrigation kit for gardens and decided to buy it for a raised flower bed we were already planning to setup this year. When it came in, she showed it to me and said “now I just need you to make it come on automatically.” As you might be able to guess, I was more than happy to take up that challenge. I spent a couple of days doing research to find a solution that fit within these self-imposed parameters:

Custom Weather Entity

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 15:00:00 -0400

In Home Assistant 2024.4, this note was in the “Backward-incompatible changes” section of the release announcement

The previously deprecated forecast attribute of weather entities, has now been removed. Use the weather.get_forecasts service to get the forecast data instead.

(@gjohansson-ST - #110761) (documentation)

I had a heck of a time finding docs on this, so I have compiled what I did here.

Base weather integration

I am using the Tomorrow.io integration to get forecasts, but what I have done should work with any weather provider.

Crash Boom Bang: PoE & Lightning Strikes

Sat, 09 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400

A couple of days ago there was a severe storm that rolled through my area. Lots of thunder that literally rattled the walls of my house, lightning strikes near by, and high winds. At one point the power blinked out too. No big deal… or at least it wasn’t after I realized what was going on. The mystery I am referring to is that when the storm finished I realized my PoE Zigbee Coordinator wasn’t back up and running.