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Posts tagged with Home-Automation

  1. Smart home control from Garmin devices

    2024-04-29 08:34:00 UTC

    After smartening our car gates and enabling our phones and cars to control them, I wanted to add another access option: our Garmin watches and cycling computers. When going on a walk or bike ride, the phone is often already tucked away in some pocket or backpack, and the Garmin…

  2. Running evcc in our second home with Fronius

    2023-11-21 08:39:00 UTC

    After setting up evcc in our primary home, we wanted to do the same in our holiday home. The photovoltaic (PV) system there was installed by the home’s previous owner, and includes a Fronius Symo GEN24 inverter, a Fronius Smart Meter and a BYD battery. The other components are the…

  3. Running evcc on Synology with Huawei, go-e and VW

    2023-11-10 20:27:00 UTC

    Today we’ll continue with the topic of solar charging, or in other words how we optimized our photovoltaic (PV) system and electric car charging station (wallbox) to make best use of our solar power.  A previous post already outlines why we choose the open-source software evcc for this optimization, now…

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

    2023-11-06 13:58:00 UTC

    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…

  5. Controlling our car gates with Apple HomeKit and CarPlay

    2023-11-05 11:05:00 UTC

    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…

  6. Making our Doorbell Smart

    2023-02-01 17:09:00 UTC

    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…

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

    2023-01-23 20:50:00 UTC

    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…

  8. Integrating a Weather Station with BTicino shutters

    2023-01-14 09:57:00 UTC

    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…

  9. Adding Alexa to our BTicino system

    2023-01-01 06:45:21 UTC

    As mentioned in my previous posts on home automation, adding voice assistant capability to our BTicino MyHome automation system was one of my goals for its modernization. We already have been using Amazon’s Alexa for some time to control the Sonos sound systems we have in most of our rooms…

  10. Expanding our BTicino system with openHAB and Shelly

    2022-12-29 16:47:00 UTC

    I am still continuing my efforts to understand and expand our BTicino MyHome automation system. So far I’ve been able to move the system to software-based configuration and replaced our broken F420 scenario module with the more advanced MH202 scenario programmer, now I am looking at expanding the system and…

  11. Replacing our BTicino F420 with an MH202

    2022-12-22 17:37:18 UTC

    Today’s post continues with the home automation topic, as I am still busy mastering our BTicino system from 2008. One of the issues we had with the system is that our F420 scenario module did not work properly anymore and since I stumbled over a good second-hand offer for an…

  12. Software configuration of our 2008 BTicino system

    2022-12-10 19:45:00 UTC

    This post diverts a bit from my usual photography topics. I recently moved into a house that is equipped with a BTicino MY HOME automation system, which was installed in 2008 and is used for controlling devices such as lights, window shutters and some power outlets. The backbone of the…
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