After letting our blog gather dust since 2015, I'm excited to announce a fresh start. 😉 We’ve been busy with other projects, but now we’ve exported all our content from Tumblr and transitioned to a Hugo static site.

This is my first time working with Hugo, and I must say, it’s quite impressive. I'm using the seamless integration with Cloudflare Pages, allowing for automatic deployment from a git push. Makes it super easy. Having it all in git also allows Nik to post something without having to worry about deploying.

I recently got a WP6003 Air Box (Aliexpress). The official product page seems to be offline but can be accessed through Archive.org.

It's quite straightforward to integrate in a Bluetooth Proxy and Home Assistant thanks to Omar's work.

The major problem I have with it, is that the Bluetooth (4.0) range is terrible. Neither my Mac Mini nor my Bluetooth Proxy could connect with it if I moved it from the office to the kitchen (had it on top of the fridge, so some metal there) that's roughly 10ish meters away.

In my Home Assistant quest and simplifying (not sure if that's actually happening) and getting more control (aka less reliant on the cloud and 3rd parties) I've been playing with Zigbee.

Zigbee is quite cool because it's a mesh network. As I used it before with my Philips Hue bulbs, I was eager to expand and play with Zigbee.

First thing first. Not all routers are equal. I've got these two smart power plugs as an example (Grey and Blue colour, v2 with HomeKit support) and they act weirdly. They don't seem to route sensors properly, and randomly turn off whatever is plugged in.

In my Home Assistant quest and simplifying (not sure if that's actually happening) and getting more control (aka less reliant on the cloud and 3rd parties) I've been playing with Zigbee.

Zigbee is quite cool because it's a mesh network. As I used it before with my Philips Hue bulbs, I was eager to expand and play with Zigbee.

I have several bulbs, including: Hue Iris, Hue Go, some random bulb, a reading spot, and Hue Play (3x).

I've finally started working with Home Assistant and while the learning curve has been steep, it's been fun.

I'm going to post some random notes (mostly for myself) on things I discovered, and I need to keep in mind.

For example, I have set up an ESP32-c3 Bluetooth Proxy for a Mi ble thermometer.

I've assigned the ESP device to an area: IT cabinet. However, the BLE sensors are scattered across the house (in different areas). Took me a while to figure it out, but you can assign entities to specific areas.

I have set up an ESP32-c3 Bluetooth Proxy for a Mi ble thermometer (and I have a few other BLE sensors that I haven't managed to set up yet).

The proxy config can be found here.

Be sure to modify the variables to match whatever you want to do. I'm using static IPs because auto discovery is unreliable (hostname.iot.internal).

You'll also need to add the !secret variables into the secrets.yaml file.