Home assistant

Welcome to the Home Assistant Hub on PHP Systems Blog. Here you’ll find guides, projects, and tips from my own home automation experiments - ranging from simple light controls to advanced multi-system integrations. Whether you’re new to automation or building your dream smart home, these articles will help you set up, customize, and troubleshoot with confidence.

Firefly iii to Paperless NGX

Automate your finances and document management by linking Firefly III to Paperless NGX with Node-RED in Home Assistant. This flow uses webhooks and APIs to pull receipts from Firefly III and upload them to Paperless NGX automatically, keeping your records synced without manual effort.

Fallout Sign - With added Home Assistant.

I made a fallout sign on my 3d printer following a diy video, but changed the led strip and microcontroller to avoid soldering. Added bonuses: home assistant control and wifi!

🐦Home Assistant - It's for the birds! [Part 2]

Automate music for your feathered friends with this smart Home Assistant setup! Our BirdMusic automation plays soothing tunes at 9 AM and stops at 8:30 PM—but only when the birds are home and people aren’t. Learn how to set it up using Music Assistant and a simple YAML script.

🎵 How to Install Music Assistant for Home Assistant: Your Ultimate Guide

Bring multi-room audio to your smart home with Music Assistant for Home Assistant! This guide walks you through installing and configuring Music Assistant to stream music, manage sources like Spotify, and control playback across devices. Perfect for audiophiles and automation fans!

Home Assistant - It's for the birds! [Part 1]

If you are looking for a post that is bashing home assistant, you have probably come to the wrong place. Recently I was asked to look after a flock of birds. The only trouble here was that I was away for some of the time. This time I set up cameras to monitor the birds.

Automating Air filters

Recently I was watching a Thomas Sanladerer (Making with Layers) video on youtube about the emission of gases from 3D prints. Like Thomas, I am concerned about the fumes that come from my 3D printers and I'm interested in ways to reduce them, especially around my young son.

Kestra webhooks and Home assistant

Welcome back to another blog post on Kestra. Starting from where I left off last time, I'm going to try to fix a few little niggles I had with the time based triggers.

Living without Wifi

Recently, while my son was on half term my unifi Power Over Ethernet (POE) switch decided to give up the ghost. It may even have let out the magic smoke. This switch was an 8 port 150W POE device. Not the biggest device I have for networking, but it was the one that did POE.

Beagle Cam v2 and home assistant.

I have octoprint set up with home assistant for monitoring my prints. Some times, it is easier to get notifications that way. For the resin printer I use a beagle cam v2. I don't have any integrations or plugins for this printer.

Wireless doorbell hacking

I bought a wireless doorbell from B&M and the doorbell works great. I have always been interested in decoding radio, so this gave me a chance to try this out. My end goal here is to be able to press the doorbell and have home assistant act on the button press.

About the author

Tim Wilkes is a UK-based security architect with over 15 years of experience in electronics, Linux, and Unix systems administration. Since 2021, he's been designing secure systems for a telecom company while indulging his passions for programming, automation, and 3D printing. Tim shares his projects, tinkering adventures, and tech insights here - partly as a personal log, and partly in the hopes that others will find them useful.

Want to connect or follow along?

LinkedIn: [phpsytems]
Twitter / X: [@timmehwimmy]
Mastodon: [@timmehwimmy@infosec.exchange]

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