Weekend Roundup

This is just a quick roundup of what is happening in the area of homelabbing and home automation. But before going into that, I should mention that I think I'm more or less permanently done with 'social media'. So this will just me writing some posts and nowhere else to learn what is going on. Realistically this will be more of an archive for my own perusal, but you get to read it to if you should chose so.

Somewhere last year I ended up with Philips Hue failing at random times. This would lead to lights not being switched on or off when you expect it. All the tech is nice, but the most basic function should never fail. After checking the usual things like interference, software updates, etc, things just kept on failing. So I pulled the plug and shelved most of the Hue stuff, reverting to classic switches and lights.

The places where there were no switches to revert to, the Hue stuff remained in place and kept working pretty badly. At some point last month, things would not just blatently not work, but would work after various lengths of delay. This was the first time I figured than now interference is ruled out, so it must be the controller that is somehow faulty.

So as a test I ordered the new Pro version of the Hue controller and set it up. BOOM everything seems fine again. The old controller never gave any clear indication that it was overloaded, broken, or anything else. But now with the new Pro controller everything works snappy and there is a lot of room for expansion in terms of number of devices and lights.

I spent the weekend putting most of the shelved Hue stuff back where it once was and reconfiguring buttons, scenes etc. Also, the shelved home assistant setup was complete re-done. In doing so, I found a couple of more modules that now seem to exists and/or actually work. So we've got the best working home assistant setup in our home we ever had.

LG airco integration and Honeywell thermostats are now controllable from home assistant too. That is something we did not have in the previous setup.

So the unshelving is coming along nicely. Soon I will be at a point that I can start thinking about actual new stuff.

Until next time!