Cheap car presence & position detection in Home Assistant with ESPHome

Wouldn’t it be nice to instantly see if you forgot your car outside when going to bed or check if there is space in the garage to fit your car? Well in my case having a garage where 2 cars go one behind another, brings an issue since I would like to know if there is room to fit the car of maybe I have to leave the car outside while arriving home for cheap? Well I have found a solution for under 10$

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The quest to the perfect doorbell

or how I ended up paying twice the price due to good advertisement Introduction In this article i will tell a really bad experience that cost me twice the price. This will be a story about bad support and false promises. From a renown company in the Smart Home business that sells a product that shouldn’t be sold. The conditions Let’s go back in time around 2014 when I bought this house I am now…

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Smarter Diaper trash bin

Introduction We have a baby diaper trash bin and we can’t see when it’s full. Based on that id’ like to get a notification to let me know before it’s full so I don’t have to stick up my head in it 💩 How to count First I had to identify how to count the baby diapers.I used an Aqara open/close sensor and stuck it to the axle, I had to find a spot where…

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Mailbox monitor with Zigbee

In this article, I will explain how I monitor my mailbox to get notified when the Postman has passed. I am using a ZigBee door/window sensor to monitor if the postbox slit has been opened. The challenge here is to have a stable ZigBee network up to the front roadside since only the devices connected to mains act as a router/repeater (battery-powered ones don’t). So in order to have a stable network across the house,

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Salt level sensor for water softener in Home Assistant with ESPHome

Introduction In this article I will explain how I quickly created a salt level sensor for my water softener using an HC-SR04 Ultrasonic Distance Sensor and a Wemos D1 mini . The inspiration was provided by DrZzs during one of his live streams. Since I wanted a smart device and upgrading mine would cost me around 150€ I decided I would try to do it myself. I will illustrate two examples on how to display the…

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