I have been using Home Assistant for about a week and already there is a new version of the software available. From what I can make out the project is extremely active with a fortnightly release c...

In this post I will cover some simple steps on how to get Home Assistant as a service on windows. I will be making use of a nifty utility called nssm (the Non-Sucking Service Manager) which lives u...

I have been watching a lot of videos about home automation lately and found that Home Assistant (HASS) seems to be the most popular choice when it comes to consolidating all of your IoT enabled dev...

About 2 months ago I finally received one of my biggest packages from China to date, that was an Anet A8 3D printer from BangGood for around $239.99including shipping. I had a small issue with cust...

Below you will find a list of all the MQTT events published by the MQTT OctoPrint plugin. I made use of my MQTT-Dumper application I created in my previous post to do this, and have taken the time ...

MQTT Dumper is a simple utility (well, console application at the moment) that I put together in about an hour to help me spy on the communication of all my IoT devices at home. Currently the utili...

About a year ago I discovered Sonoff WiFi switches on AliExpress and was able to pick up a couple of them for $10. These devices are basically IoT connected smart switches that you can control via ...

In this post I am going to cover installing, configuring and running Node-REDas a Windows service. Node-RED is a programming tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services in n...

In my last post I ran over the required steps to get mosquitto up and running on a Windows environment. Now somewhere during my initial install I managed to break the Mosquitto Broker service that ...

After discovering the joys and simplicity of using MQTT on IoT enabled devices such as an NodeMCU ESP8266 I decided I wanted to host my own local (and with the right configuration public) instance ...