Home Automation… On the hand it feels like overkill, on the other hand, it is so much fun. But even though we are just getting started, we already have a few standards in our house (Hue and Tuya) and that will probably just grow. And I never seem to be able to do what I want to do (turn on the lights based on the sunset time?). Enter Home Assistant an open source, free, extensible solution, perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi, with privacy and local control.

Because I run my Raspberry Pi’s headless (see my earlier post on how I set that up) I spend most of my time in the terminal. The default terminal works pretty well, but it can work better. I always install Oh My Zsh, a framework to manage Zsh (Z shell is the shell used) configuration. Oh My Zsh can help you install plugins (for autocomplete or history for example), but also help with theming your terminal.

I run all my Raspberry Pi’s headless, connected to my Wi-Fi. This means I need that Wi-Fi connection to be able to do anything with that Raspberry Pi. I noticed that every once in a while, my Raspberry Pi would lose its Wi-Fi connection. I could try to find out why that is, but as a quick fix, it is easier to just have the Raspberry Pi restart if the Wi-Fi connection is lost, as a restart usually fixes the problem.