Blog

  1. Comparing evcc and the go-e Controller for solar charging

    November 6, 2023
    This year we replaced both our cars with electric vehicles, an Volkswagen ID.Buzz and an ID.4.  As everyone is probably aware, costs of electricity have been rising steeply recently, and are much higher than what is paid for the surplus of our photovoltaic (PV) system. Therefore, we wanted to optimize…

  2. Controlling our car gates with Apple HomeKit and CarPlay

    November 5, 2023
    A previous post already describes how I have integrated our Ditec VIVAH car gates with a Shelly Plus 1 and openHAB. This enabled the control of the car gates from our Bticino home automation system and also from our mobile phones via the Shelly app. While the access via the…

  3. Making our Doorbell Smart

    February 1, 2023
    After smartening up our entrance gates, the next thing on my to-do list was our doorbell. The conventional doorbell was barely audible on the first floor of the house, and not at all in the garden. So, my goal for this project was to integrate the doorbell with openHAB, and…

  4. Ditec VIVAH car gates, the Shelly Plus 1 and openHAB

    January 23, 2023
    And here comes my next home automation project: integrating our entrance gates, controlled by a Ditec VIVAH unit, to be able to operate them from our BTicino wall switches and mobile phones. To achieve that, we’ll use a Shelly Plus 1 to integrate the gates into our openHAB home automation…

  5. Integrating a Weather Station with BTicino shutters

    January 14, 2023
    In this post I’ll describe my latest home automation project: installing an Ecowitt weather sensor array and using our new openHAB home automation server to integrate it with our BTicino system to bring up the window shutters when the wind gets too strong Our window shutters are quite fragile and…