Make your home smarter
I’m Alan, the Home Automation Guy and I’m trying to help people automate their smart home with home automations.
This website is dedicated to helping normal people get the most out of Home Assistant, an open-source and privacy-focused home automation platform.
Smart home videos and automations
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Tweaking Frigate to get the best results
Frigate uses AI to detect people and other objects in your IP camera streams without sending any of your data or video footage to the cloud. In this video I show you…
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Installing Zigbee2MQTT with Home Assistant
This post captures all the links and commands that I show you in my Installing Zigbee2MQTT with Home Assistant video. Recommended Zigbee USB Adaptors Related YouTube Videos: What is Zigbee? What is…
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Configuring the Mosquitto MQTT Docker container for use with Home Assistant
You may have heard the term MQTT come up when people start talking about their Home Automation setups. Usually you hear it alongside things like Zigbee or Z-Wave, and Home Assistant. In…
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Keeping your Home Assistant Container up to date
One of the things people miss most about the Home Assistant Operating System supervisor is how easily it keeps everything up to date. The Supervisor takes care of updating your Home Assistant…
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Living without Add-Ons on Home Assistant Container
In this YouTube Video, part of my Home Assistant on Docker series, I take a look at how I live without Add-Ons when running Home Assistant Container. I go through the top…
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Accessing USB Devices from Docker Containers
One of the common problems people have when they use Home Assistant Container is getting Home Assistant to recognise USB devices that you have plugged into the host computer, usually things like…
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Using Visual Studio to edit your Home Assistant configuration.yaml file over SSH
Visual Studio Code is a powerful, but free, text editor provided by Microsoft. I find it to be the perfect solution for editing the various configuration files that you will come across…
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Installing Docker, Home Assistant and Portainer on Ubuntu Linux
I run my smart home on an Intel NUC computer, running Ubuntu Linux and Docker. This allows me to run many different smart home services as containers, including Home Assistant. This blog…
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Building a rock solid Zigbee network
In this YouTube video I show you how I improved my Zigbee network reliability and stability by doing three things Firstly, I upgraded my old CC2531 based Zigbee USB Coordinator with a…