Digging a pointless birthday trench

Digging a pointless birthday trench
Today is my birthday and I'm spending it knocking out a task that has been nagging me for months. I had originally tucked an outdoor ethernet cable between the house and shop. I wasn't able to get 10Gbps speeds to link between the two due to what I thought was distance, so I ran a fiber cable and combined them in a cable conduit that had been sitting on the grass for months. The reason…

Outdoor Temperature Sensors for Home Assistant

Outdoor Temperature Sensors for Home Assistant
Recently, I have had a few things I want to monitor temperature of with Home Assistant. The chicken coop needs one for Kim's peace of mind. She likes to know when it's cold so she can turn the heater on. There is also a absolute floor where we would bring them into the garage or something. Now that the pond has fish, I'd like to monitor that as well. I have tried a few coop…

Python Nerdery: Data Scraping for Home Assistant

Python Nerdery: Data Scraping for Home Assistant
One thing I want to monitor in Home Assistant isn't supported in any traditional way. I want to know how much propane our generator has, and I only have a local provider website to work with. Enter Python to load a browser, log me in, grab the data and send it to home assistant. Add the script to cron and you are done. import logging from selenium import webdriver from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options…

Can I use AI as my Frigate False Positive Checker?

Can I use AI as my Frigate False Positive Checker?
The good thing about Coral TPUs are they are really fast. The bad thing about Coral TPUs are the models they use are really small so they aren't very accurate. Luckily Frigate has a really advanced system for configuring object detection filters by size, ratio, etc. As well as a deep mechanic for zones to manage object and motion detection. That being said, I have 15 cameras and it's going to take some time to…

USB Power from a Switch?

USB Power from a Switch?
Ever need to power or charge a USB device from somewhere that has no outlet, but does have a light? I had that issue recently. We have a shelf in the living room that has switches for the overhead fans and lights. I wanted to wire in a 3-gang box to add an outlet, but the existing box is in a brick fireplace structure that I did not want to modify. I was stuck until…

Kasa Smart Devices and Home Assistant

Kasa Smart Devices and Home Assistant
When I moved into the new house, I decided I wanted to leave Philips Hue behind. The lights were too expensive and I wanted to incorporate more kinds of devices like switches into the system. At the same time, I wanted to reduce the number of Home Assistant integrations as much as possible. I chose Kasa because I saw a lot of people having success Kasa and Home Assistant. I have been here over 3…

Google Coral TPU Card

Google Coral TPU Card
Today I added some AI processing horsepower to my Frigate server. This little chip can handle object detection on 15 cameras without breaking a sweat. I am using the m.2 variety, but you can get a few variants from Google. I originally experimented with the USB version before adding the PCI one.The PCI-card adapter is the Ableconn PEXM2150E PCI Express x1 Adapter Card with M.2 Key E Socket available from Amazon.

Home Automation Server – Tower 1

Home Automation Server – Tower 1
With the Frigate server complete, Tower 1 is officially out of space. Top to Bottom Home Assistant & Frigate Docker Server Ryzen 9 5900X, 64GB RAM, 8TB SSDs (2x2TB nvme, 2x2TB SATA), 16TB HDD RAID, Coral m.2 dual TPU Home Assistant Frigate Netdata Dozzle UPS Power Supply Cisco 24-Port Switch with PoE and 10GB SFP (10Gbps between house and shop, main PC and main NAS) Go bag HD for critical files Punchdown Patch Panel Keystone…

Pond BI

Pond BI
It started with "I should know the temperature of the pond I guess."