Guides - Everything Smart Home

Easy & Free Remote Access For Home Assistant!

I have covered quite a few different remote access solutions for Home Assistant, either through port forwarding or setting up a VPN. But recently, it has emerged there is another way to do it...via a Cloudflare tunnel! It's easy to get started and best of all? It's free!

Home Assistant

Automate Reminders For Your Bin Collection with Home Assistant

Get automated notifications reminding you to put the bins out so you never miss another collection again!

Home Assistant

Save Power By Sleeping Your PC With Presence

Save on your energy bills by intelligently sleeping your computer with Home Assistant

Home Assistant

Create Visual Smart Light Alerts with Home Assistant

Create smart lighting alerts that notify you visually with Home Assistant!

Home Assistant

Creating A Window/Door Notification in Home Assistant

Create automated reminders that alert you if you've left a door or window open when you go out for the day!

Home Assistant

Daily Morning Announcements With Home Assistant

Create morning announcements that play on your speakers to give you a heads-up on what's happening that day using Home Assistant!

Home Assistant

Creating Wake Up Sunrise Lights with Home Assistant

Start your day right with sunrise wake up lights using Home Assistant!

Home Assistant

Automate Shopping Lists with Home Assistant

Automate notifications for your shopping list, so you never forget to pick up an essential item ever again!

Home Assistant

Automating Washing Machine Reminders with Home Assistant

Automate reminders so you never forget to empty the washing machine again!

Guides

Flashing Sonoff SwitchMan M5 with ESPHome

Sonoff has recently released some brand new affordable smart wall switches called the Sonoff SwitchMan M5, featuring an ESP32 inside – and you know what that means right!? ESPHome time! Let’s go through and show you step by step how to flash a custom firmware on the Sonoff SwitchMan, such

Guides

Face Recognition Just Got Easier - Home Assistant Double Take Guide

A few months ago I covered the ultimate NVR install [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bMQg20Iy4k&t=436s] (sorry no article on that, I got a bit…behind on posting!) which covered combining the object detection and recording capabilities of Frigate, with the face recognition of DeepStack to give

Guides

Automate your Internet Usage with Home Assistant and Unifi

There are many reasons you may want to be able to automatically control devices on your network; maybe you want to disable your kids devices at a certain time so they can’t be up all night playing those pesky computer games or maybe you have indoor cameras that you

Guides

Monitor Your Smart Homes Energy Usage with Home Assistant!

Home Assistant [https://www.home-assistant.io/] just dropped a big new feature that is going to massively improve the way you monitor your smart homes energy usage, with a powerful new way to track how much energy you are consuming, producing and even sending back to the grid, and today

Guides

Building a Raspberry Pi Thermal Imaging Camera - MLX90640 guide

In today’s current global situation, thermometers and thermal cameras are more in demands probably than ever before. Here in the UK, many of the shops and restaurants have started taking the temperatures of customers at the door before allowing customers to enter the premises. This got me thinking, is

Guides

Adding an SSD1306 OLED display to any project

Having everything connected over WiFi is great, all the information directly on your phone, tablet or laptop is incredibly powerful but sometimes you just want some information at a glance without having to pull out your phone to check. Enter these mini OLED displays which feature an SSD1306 driver and

Guides

DIY Motorised Smart Blinds

Building your own motorised smart blinds is a really attractive idea and something I’ve been meaning to get to for quite some time – after all, some of the off the shelf solutions are very nice yet for some reason command an extremely premium price for what they are. Don’

Guides

Using ESPHome on Sonoff RF Bridge

In a previous article [https://everythingsmarthome.co.uk/howto/how-to-make-your-own-dual-purpose-wireless-alarm-system-with-home-assistant-part-1/] , I showed you how to flash Tasmota to a Sonoff RF Bridge, which allows you to receive and transmit 433MHz RF signals like the ones used in TV remotes or many home security/alarm devices and sensors. This time we

Guides

Converting the 28BYJ-48 stepper motor for more torque!

A couple of days ago I decided to strip apart my blinds and figure out how to automate them, its something I wanted to do for a while but never really got round to it. Just a couple of hours later, I had something functional and working as you can

Guides

Flashing any Smart bulb, plug or switch with Tuya-Convert

I wrote last year about over the air flashing of smart bulbs using the Tuya-convert procedure. However, back then there was no current way to bypass a firmware that Tuya started loading onto newer devices to block this flashing. Why would you want to do this in the first place?

Guides

Setup a PIA VPN with pfSense 2.4.5

Many of us use a VPN in one way or another these days, they have seen a surge in popularity over the last decade or so with many people seeking to use them as means of bypassing content restrictions with Netflix or other streaming services, as a way of connecting

Guides

How to build a WiFi connected Fingerprint Sensor with Home Assistant

When I posted some update videos on Reddit [https://www.reddit.com/r/homeautomation/comments/gquzmc/quick_update_on_the_fingerprint_sensor_remotely/] and Twitter [https://twitter.com/EverySmartHome] (make sure to follow me there for more updates!) earlier this week about the Fingerprint Sensor update, the reaction was so

Guides

Installing ESP8266 into Arduino IDE

This is a quick (and I mean quick!) and easy guide on installing ESP8266 boards into Arduino IDE which allows you to program all of your ESP8266 and ESP32 boards within Arduino IDE – a really powerful function. First, open up the Arduino IDE and head to File > Preferences and click

Guides

Fingerprint Sensor Module with Arduino

Adding a Fingerprint sensor to an Arduino/Raspberry Pi/ESP8266 has always been an interesting way, in my opinion, of adding security to a project, given how simple it is and your fingers are something you always have with you…hopefully! One issue I always found with the fingerprint sensor

Guides

Building a temperature sensors for Home Assistant - Wemos D1 Mini with DS18B20 build guide

The world has changed a little bit in the past couple of weeks/months depending on where you live with a global pandemic currently on-going, meaning more and more of us are currently spending a lot more time indoors that we would either like or are used to thanks to

Guides

How to install an MQTT Broker - Mosquitto Install/Config on Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/Fedora/Raspbian

If you’ve worked with any IoT (Raspberry Pi, Arduino, ESP, Zigbee, Z-wave etc) devices, or any popular home automation software (Home Assistant, OpenHAB, Domoticz) chances are you have heard of MQTT as a means of communicating between devices. Today we are going to install and configure an MQTT broker