Category: computer stuff - Page 2

May 4, 2022July 18, 2023

Using Aqara Vibrarion Sensor as Garage Door sensor

I was looking for a tilt sensor to tell me if my garage door was open or closed. The sensor had to work with Home Assistant and the only one I could find that looked simple and cheap was the Aqara Vibration sensor that had a tilt/orientation feature.

Unfortunately the feature was not one of the attributes that Home Assistant showed with the device which sent me down the rabbit hole of googling. Eventually I got it figured out and this article is to share my experiences.

December 17, 2020July 18, 2023

Update: Creating home assistant interface to alexa playlists

I stumbled upon https://github.com/custom-components/alexa_media_player/wiki#what-this-is which gave me the information I needed to directly control my echo device, instead of having one echo command via voice another.

Read my post https://robertjwallace.com/creating-home-assistant-interface-to-alexa-playlists/ for background.

The difference between what I was doing in that post and what I am doing now is in the scripts.yaml file. The code to directly control my echo is:

December 16, 2020July 18, 2023

Creating home assistant interface to alexa playlists

Goal:

Use Home Assistant to use Amazon Echo to play Amazon Music playlists

Resources used:

Home Assistant Community Store – Alexa Media Player

December 12, 2020December 18, 2020

Controlling a tuya smart plug from the command line

Background

I have a hybrid home automation system that includes some old X10 devices, Philips hue devices, wemo devices, and tp-link devices. Part of the system is some software that emulates a Philips hue bridge (ha-bridge) that lets me control devices by running linux programs and scripts. This lets me use old X10 radio frequency controllers and motion detectors in my home automation. So far this has worked great.

November 27, 2020July 18, 2023

Adding links to web pages in Home Assistant

I have been playing around with Home Assistant for just a little while now, and while I am impressed with what it does, I find the documentation and the examples to be less than helpful. One thing I wanted to do was simply add a “card” of web links to the UI. Since the Home Assistant interface (Lovelace) is web based you would think that this would be easy.

November 15, 2020November 22, 2020

Home automation, part 2

This is an update to https://robertjwallace.com/home-automation-smart-home/.

I am finally beginning to move from the X10 system to a more modern system, despite the cost. My existing system is an hybrid of Philips Hue and X10. To integrate the X10 with Alexa I use the X10 CM19 transceiver with the mochad linux driver, and ha-bridge, a Philips Hue emulator. This allowed me to use Alexa to control the X10 system.

May 2, 2020June 30, 2020

Word games for Scrabble training

I enjoy word games like Scrabble and decided to write a couple of games that I could use both for the pleasure of playing, and also as training aids for playing Scrabble and other word games.

Anagram game

The first I wrote is an anagram finding game, simply called wordgame. It shows seven “tiles” any you try to find all of the anagrams.

Word finder game

The other game I wrote is a “word finder“. It can be played on mobile (phone) or desktop devices.

November 18, 2019November 18, 2019

Exporting a list of your Kindle e-books from amazon

Amazon does not make it easy to get a list of the e-books you own, especially if you want to put the list into a spreadsheet. This solution uses a javascript bookmarklet, a small piece of code that you drag and drop onto your bookmark tool bar in your browser.

August 1, 2019August 2, 2019

Remote Desktop in Linux (zorin/ubuntu)

I have a need to connect to my office using Sonicwall’s netExtender. Once connected I need to use RDP to open a remote desktop session to my work computer. But for some reason I ran into two issues on my AMD-based HP home desktop. First I was unable to get the netExtenderGui to run. It kept throwing errors. And second, I was using Remmina for the RDP client and discovered that it did not support dual monitor displays.

After some googling and yahooing, with a bing or two thrown in I had a solution.

July 8, 2019July 8, 2019

Monty Hall Paradox

The basic premise is that there are three doors, behind one is a prize. The contestant makes a guess as to which door has the prize. In this case the odds of winning are one in three. But after the guess is make the host of the game opens one of the two remaining doors, showing no prize behind it. The question is should the contestant change his guess from the original door to the remaining closed door.