So recently I started thinking about my HA system when I have guests. I have a small house (not a tiny house) just a small house. When my parents visit they setup camp in the living room. Working on getting PIR motion sensors to turn things on and off. But with guests, I need a guest mode to disable the motion sensor…....

Ok, we have all done it. Where the hell is my phone? Where’s the ipad? Home alone trying to find it and you have no way of calling it because, well, no land line. A week or so ago I finally replaced my Jurassic period thermostat with something a little newer. I know, weird right. I do all this stuff and I had a...

So a while back (let’s not talk about how long ago) I found the site of HazyMat Multi-zone audio: a discussion of the options He seemed to have found a great solution for doing some work on whole home audio. This is something I have been trying to find a good solution for myself. I decided to test this out myself using...

So my Super Villain lair is super secretly located in my converted garage… shhhh. So we found out that Florida is a rough place to be a super villain. It’s hot here. So I needed a way to help keep my lair cool. So many full moons ago my minions held a Staples store for ransom till they gave me an AC unit. This thing is...

So in the last 2 weeks I have been put to the test of patience and road rage. Last week there was a guy that decided to take his dog for a walk on the over pass and decided to stop and contemplate jumping. This closed down a 3 lane highway and the 2 joining lanes completely in morning rush hour. Diverted traffic was...

So, my openhab system periodically decides to leave the building. Appears there is a problem from time to time when the z-wave binding loses communication to the z-wave stick it gets upset and tells openhab to take a hike. This is bad. Once because it exposed something I missed in my fault tolerance. I had compensated...

Since I made the home automation system failover its been great!…. except I kind of would like to know which box its running on it. So I made a quick change. A new Item on my dash board 1String Server "Server [%s]" {exec="<[/bin/cat@@/etc/hostname:60000:]"} I have that in my items file. Then in my sitemap I added...

So, with a friday and a saturday worth of work on my home automation move here is what is complete. install server os on vm install openhab and all bindings currently in use move openhab configs over to new vm shutdown old openhab-pi configure raspberry pi with virtualhere server to share usb configure new vm server to...

I have been running openhab for over a year now on a raspberry pi. I also run mosquitto mqtt broker with a great piece of software called mqttwarn. On my phone I run owntracks. So lets do a brief summary of what these pieces of software do for me and what I currently have configured. **Openhab – “**a vendor and...