I love controlling stuff with Home Assistant, but having to open the app on my phone each time I want to switch on a light gets annoying really quickly. As I’m also not a big fan of yelling at personal assistants like Alexa or Siri, I wanted to control everything conveniently with physical buttons — and the Elgato Stream Decks are just great for that. So I wrote some software that runs on my Raspberry Pi and connects a Stream Deck with Home Assistant.  Read more

Today we’re going to finish the Arduino Power Strip – or at least bring it to a state where it’s usable for now and can be controlled using Home Assistant. There is also an issue we need to address.  Read more

I’m building a box to dampen the noise of the projector I bought (more on that in a later post) and to keep it cool I added two fans, one sucking cold air in and one pushing warm air out. To reduce the noise as much as possible I wanted to run the fans as slow as possible, but of course they should still run fast enough to properly cool the projector. So I built a little fan controller with an Arduino that uses temperature to determine the fan speed.  Read more

For my blog (the one that you’re currently reading) I wanted to implement an automatic conversion from metric to imperial for all measurements that I mention in my posts. This would help readers from the US to understand them more easily and (probably the more relevant reason) be a nice programming task for me. While I plan to publish the full implementation and write a post about it, this post focuses on a small part of the task: converting decimal values into nice fractions with a denominator that is a power of two.  Read more