Smart Home

For years I’ve used a smart plug with my old, dumb printer. I used an Alexa or Siri voice command to turn on my the smart plug, and another automation at 11pm to turn off the plug. This worked great with no complaints from my family. Of course, I wasn’t satisfied with this solution, and wanted to automate the voice command part out.

My wife and and I both work from home. We enjoy it, but it’s not without it’s issues. Using Home Assistant, I’m trying to create automations that make our work day smoother. The first automation turns on a light to notify us if we have an upcoming meeting.

I recently added an Apple TV to my bedroom TV. The Apple TV interface is so much better than the ten year old LG Smart TV software. The one issue I have is using the sleep timer. When the TV’s sleep timer turns off the TV, it doesn’t always stop the Apple TV. This led me to look into Apple TV sleep timer options.

I have a perfectly good printer. It’s cheap to own and meets all my printing needs. The one thing I wish it had was AirPrint. After a lot of effort, I was able to setup my Raspberry Pi as an AirPrint server so I can easily print from my iPhone.

I’ve owned a Flic smart buttons since they were an Indiegogo project back in 2015. I use them as a light switch for my smartlights, but I wished I could use them to control more of my Homekit devices. Luckily there’s a Homebridge plugin that adds Homekit support.

Other than running Homebridge, my Raspberry Pi has been mostly untouched since I setup my Sonos Volume Automation. I’ve been seeing what I can do to make my devices smarter using my Raspberry Pi as a bridge. I’m starting with AirPlay for my older Sonos system.

I have a Sonos Playbar connected to my TV. The living room TV is right under my daughter’s bedroom. If I forget to turn down the volume, the Playbar can be loud enough to wake her up when I turn on the TV. Using Homebridge and some iOS Home app automations, I was able to prevent this.