We recently got balanced ventilation installed, and I have interfaced it with Home Assistant. However — the ventilation unit have three “special modes” that can not be enabled through the Modbus interface; fireplace, kitchen, and override. These can only be set on the touch panel, mobile app, or through inputs terminals on the controller.

So I repurposed an old project and made a three-relay Wi-Fi controlled module, using MQTT to send commands and receive statuses.

Then used Home Assistant to automate it 🙂

As the weather is warming up here in Norway — my kids have gotten their bikes out. To make it more fun, both for them and me, I figured I’d build a series of traffic signals that they could play with.

I first started with a traffic light, simple — red, yellow and green. To control it I am using a Raspberry Pi Zero W, this will allow me to make it communicate on Wi-Fi and MQTT later.

My kids wanted traffic lights for their LEGO city, so first I had to build a traffic lights controller.

My twins and I both like LEGO, and LEDs. I figured I’d make some simple LED street lights that we could use to build a LEGO scenery.

I’m using Prometheus to monitor my home office and homelab, I figured it would be cool to have a stack light show the active warnings and alerts from Alertmanager. So I made a HAT (Hardware Attached on Top) for the Raspberry Pi to drive a five-colored stack light.