Recent Posts

Asking my home to play music

Asking my home to play music

Don't you love open source and the capabilities it provides? My constant tinkering of my home automation has no end! The latest improvement is asking the system to play my favorite music. And I remembered that the advanced capabilities of using Rhasspy with Home Assistant with as little code as possible is not clear to everybody. So here is an explanation of how this works, and how I leveraged these capabilities to satisfy my music needs.

NUC and Zigbee and USB

NUC and Zigbee and USB

My Home Assistant was misbehaving lately and I could not figure out why. It did take me time, effort, a lot of cursing, troubleshooting and head scratching, and eventually it was solved by the typical "this can NOT be the problem, but there is nothing else to try!" approach!

A trip to "Hrad Kost"

A trip to "Hrad Kost"

Hrad Kost is the local (Czech) name of the Kost Castle, one of the best preserved medieval castles and one of the major tourist attractions in Czechia. As the rest of the world, Czechia is in lockdown at the moment, so the castle is not open for visits.