XBMCNut

If you want to be able to exclusively use an external USB drive without a Micro SD  Card in a Pi3 for Hass.io , these are the steps you’ll need to make it happen. Installed Raspbian1 Lite (2017-04-10) on a MicroSD card and followed the instructions here3 to enable USB boot mode. Rebooted Pi then shut down a few minutes later. Burned hassio2 Pi3 image to a 16GB USB drive. Booted PC into Gparted1 to re-partition hassio image. Increased /dev/sdb4 from 1GB to around 4GB (must do first otherwise you can’t expand the resin-data partition). Increased /dev/sdb6 from 1GB to pretty much whatever was left. With the modified thumb drive back in my PC, I added the following located in the resin-boot drive and also in the resin-rootA partition inside the resin-boot folder : I changed the “root” option in cmdline.txt to: root=/dev/sda2 and I added the usb boot line below to config.txt , right at the end: program_usb_boot_mode=1 I then put the reworked thumb drive back in my ...

I made a few videos detailing my experience with Hass.io ; the all-in-one version of Home Assistant that makes it easier to update Home Assistant and install add-ons. Ben from BRUH Automation also added one today (26th July 2017) that goes into great detail and that’s at the bottom too. Enjoy.

For as long as I've been playing with home automation, I've wanted a straight forward low-cost solution for replacing standard light switches. Although I have several Z-wave dimmers and Aeon Labs touch panels, these work out to be $180 NZD each! At least in NZ, the common 2-way and 3-way light circuits have the mains coming in on one switch and the load connected to another. The two switches are connected together as shown below.

If you have an instance of ha-bridge (highly recommended) running on your network like I do, it enables you to create devices that can be ‘seen’ by Google Home and Alexa for remote control via voice. Recent versions of ha-bridge allow you to create custom commands, one of those being JSON commands so you can set up a device that sends something like the following to your Kodi instance to reboot it.

I have a DS713+ that supports Docker and needed a way to install an iPerf3 server for WLAN testing. Fortunately, that is pretty easy. Activate SSH on your Synology so you can remote in. Using PuTTY, login as an admin user and type the following: sudo docker pull networkstatic/iperf3 (then type your admin password again)

The Odroid devices make great iPerf servers for portable use as they can be powered by 5V micro USB and have a Gigabit Ethernet adapter on its own bus so they don’t have the limitations the Raspberry Pi’s do. OK, let’s get started. We are going to assume that you already have Ubuntu 16.04 up and running but if not, you can download official images here http://odroid.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=en:c1_release_linux_ubuntu . Extract the downloaded image and burn it to a SD Card using Win32 Disk Imager. I only used a 2GB card and it works fine. First boot might take a minute or two. After it’s booted, scan your network (Fing) to find your device IP. It should show up as a device by JF Light Industries with the MAC vendor as Wibrain.

This is huge! Thanks to aptalca for creating an arm based Docker container for the Raspberry Pi (and Odroid C2!) that allows ha-bridge to run inside the LibreELEC Docker add-on! First thing you need to do is ensure your Raspberry Pi LibreELEC has a static IP address so you always know how to get to the ha-bridge web interface. Kodi > Programs > LibreELEC configuration > Connections then select your active connection (LAN or Wi-Fi) and use the context menu to select ‘ Edit ’. Scroll to IPV4 and change your IP address settings so they are static by using the Manual settings. Of course, you could always create a DHCP lease in your router if you are savvy with that and that is the better way to go.