Martin's corner on the web

New car—why not take it apart? 🙂 Installing Enhance’s commander and stalks.

This is confusing. What’s wrong, @Apple?

Picked up a paint thickness meter just because. Tried it on one of our cars – turns out it had a full repaint job, plus a little filler surprise on the rear door. Oh, well

I mow the leafs into compact mulch for compost, rather than using a leaf blower.. anyone else doing this 🙂

Fronius smart meter died at 4am today, leaving the solar system inoperable. No obvious signs of damage. Luckily I had a spare and replaced it, but wondering what happened..

At Prohodna cave, amazing place

New in Home Assistant 2025.8: AI Tasks. My outdoor cameras now scan the lawn for obstacles before activating irrigation sprinklers. See how they spotted a beanbag left on the lawn and skipped the irrigation cycle. Pretty neat

Replaced 5 of my old mechanical irrigation timers with Sonoff zigbee ones. Should have done that much earlier. Integration in home assistant was painless.

Agent "Hultch" will scan JIRA defects' comments for discussion closure and mention you with TODOs. Names are fictional. Any similarity is a definite coincidence. #AIAgent

Testing n8n AI agents: subscribing to YouTube channels, transcribing videos, analyzing sentiment, and emailing summaries. Easier setup than Node-RED so far.. The AI agent now monitors 89 relevant YouTube channels. It collects the transcripts in a spreadsheets and sends me a summary email at the end of the day.

Added a water reservoir level meter to my home automation system. Works as expected, and is supported by Z2M https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/devices/ME201WZ.html#tuya-me201wz

How does one admit they need help to stop adding Zigbee devices to their network? Asking for a friend..

Our brand-new #novoferm door comes with abstract art paint splashes on half the panels. Replacement in four weeks. “Made in Germany” isn’t what it used to be.

Interesting new Zigbee soil moisture sensor by Third Realty. Looks well built, capacitive sensing, single AA battery powered. Also measures temperature, integrates in Home Assistant through Z2M

My diary entry about the #Chernobyl accident from 39 years ago..

Got some Third Reality ZigBee T&H sensors to sprinkle around the house. Home Assistant integration through z2m is straight forward, looking good so far. Quite big, but run on couple AAAs

Updated our Ecodan FTC6 firmware from 18.01 to 20.01, using these instructions https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/18RT9mcwQj4Ro-d09x-T1mGcMWAl2tR2e Can’t notice significant difference so far.

Quite interesting: Dream 7B, the most powerful open diffusion large language model https://hkunlp.github.io/blog/2025/dream/

View on X →

No sun, no left battery charge for emergency power? No problem! Generator AC -> 400V DC -> String 1 plus some diodes to prevent power to PV and problem solved Why not use the generator, you may ask? Because it only pumps 1.6kW, using the PV system and battery provides a buffer for peak loads.…

Wanted to discuss something with our dog, but he is not convinced

IKEA’s INSPELNING is finally available here, grabbed three to test. Integrated in home assistant, and now monitoring a dishwasher, dryer and a washing machine. Great product

Created a Home-assistant automation to pause the solar battery charging at ~80% and only charge it to 100% at the last possible moment. This is to minimize time spent at full charge, which apparently is bad for the battery. It considers the estimated remaining PV production.

Data collected over nearly two years shows our BYD 7.68kWh LiFePO4 solar battery operates at an average of 94% efficiency (charged vs discharged). Capacity degradation is at 2%

TIL that Frigate can analyze the audio stream of RTSP cameras for certain sound types and expose these as Home Assistant sensors. Configured mine to detect barking, yelling, alarms, etc and will create automations based on these https://docs.frigate.video/configuration/audio_detectors/