I wonder how you guys have fully made use of your smart home system.

Do you program your smart home to do all the automation for you?

Can you share your most satisfying upgrade, and what is your next project or wish list?

I recently installed Home Assistant [HA] after coming across many reviews and recommendations from YouTube channels.

Yesterday, I managed to fix the issue of retrieving the required data from the Tuya Bidirectional meter that needed to appear in the Energy Dashboard.



Later I will share what I have improvised my autogate in the HA

I just want to share here my autogate in the dashboard with the HA owner, where my CCTV is running on the RTSP/ONVIF protocol and facing my autogate. The picture will refresh every 10 seconds, and when you click on it, it will load another window for the live stream. There are two auto-gate buttons below it. One comes with an alarm arm function, while the other has a disarm function. The icon within the button reflects the current gate status, such as gate open or closed and autogate motor running or stopped.

To open or close the autogate, users need to double-click instead of single-clicking these buttons to prevent any accidental opening or closing of the gate when scrolling the screen.

When the autogate is opened, it will trigger one of the hall lights to turn on until the autogate is closed. This is a great alert both day and night when all the curtains are closed and people inside the house can see who is returning home and offer a helping hand to carry shopping bags, etc. Also to alert people inside the house that the autogate was opened and not closed for prolonged time.

When the gate is opened at night, it will trigger all the car porch lights and fan to turn ON and remind ON until the motion sensor does not detect any movement in the car porch area.

When the autogate is opened at night for more than a preset time (e.g., 15 minutes), it will automatically close the gate, and a WhatsApp message will be sent to the owner.

The CCTV picture helps the owner see anyone in front of the autogate, like a food or parcel delivery rider, before opening the gate from a distance and allowing them to drive straight into the car porch without waiting for the slow-moving autogate to fully open after reaching the front gate.

All the programming is on Node-RED.

This post has been edited by eagle7: Jan 27 2024, 11:29 AM

To monitor the autogate's opening or closing status, I built a circuit and monitored the voltage sent to the motors.

The chip is then flashed using ESPhome to output gate status to HA so it can act accordingly.

I am using the Node-RED add-on from https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-whatsapp-cmb

Yearly subscription of USD4/year.

You mean you are using Nabu Casa services, but you cannot view your camera remotely? but locally is fine?

I just want to check how the other HA owner views or controls their HA remotely.

You seem to have very sophisticated remote NVR systems in place to protect your property.

Before this, I thought of using contact sensors, but the gap between the two gate tips after closing is quite wide (e.g., 5 to 10mm). This, coupled with outdoor heat and humidity, may cause the sensor to randomly send out a false signal or not send it when we expect it to do so.

I think your suggestion will work for an indoor door or gate, but not for an outdoor gate that is subject to strong wind, thunder, and shocking waves.

It tap directly into the Autogate's control panel board like in the picture.

On the power flow, it will be bidirectional, and the voltage can either be 12 to 24 volts or higher, depending on how the installer sets it up for you (e.g., slow or fast gate closing or opening).
You will need a resistor of about 1K ohm in series with a Ziner diode of 3.3V for each channel.
The D1 mini's GPIO can handle up to 5V without issue; just not exceeding 5V will do.
The D1 mini must be powered by a 5V power supply; anything higher will not be good.
I feel the older version of D1 Mini is more lasting than the newer version (e.g., the one without the metal shield).

You may consider install a mini solar panel like this one (link). I believe you will never running out of power.
It is not necessary for the solar panel to be facing up as there is not much surface area on the top part of your casing, but the side will do as your sensor consumes very little power, and a little top-up each day from the solar panel is good enough.

Correction: the panel needs to face directly to the sun; otherwise, it will not generate enough voltage to top up the battery.

Alternatively, a more complicated method involves two panels connected in series and a voltage regulator. 

On rebooting the WiFi router due to a router hang or service disruption by the service provider, I installed the add-on watchcat and configured my OpenWRT router to monitor any disconnection between the router, service provider, and connected device (e.g., CCTV, etc.). If there is any disconnection detected (no ping reply), it will then perform a self-reboot or restarting certain Access Point interfaces.

I think, you are one level up compared to my solution.


Any HA users experiencing Tuya cloud disconnection, and how did you solve it? Does it work like a charm, or does it greatly reduce your headache? I am currently using Local Tuya with some twists on the router to make it more stable instead of being unavailable from time to time.

All of my SMATRUL Tuya Smart WIFI switch already flashed to Tasmota and I am very happy with their performance.

Similarly, for unbranded Smart Plug also flashed to Tasmota. Thumb up to the Tasmota developer.

However, I have this "branded" smart plug named CrabTek using different chip than ESP-02S (ESP8285) and their daughter board is totally different from ESP-02S and I cannot change the chip to ESP-02S. I have no choice but to stick on the Tuya ecosystem.



If you happened to come across this new Tuya thing other than Tuya Local or Local Tuya, do share with me the link, and I will then explore it.


For time being, I am satisfied with the Local Tuya with some twist on the router. These smart devices connected to the Local Tuya is stable and I am still monitoring its performance.

Cannot find much information about this controller board (TY_i06_V1.0) from the internet on how to flash them. Perhaps stick to my Local Tuya setup for time being. Compared to my other non-branded smart plug, this Crabtek smart plug is very easy to open with minimal damage to the casing.



Will wait and see any improvement then.

In my case, I can still ping all my Tuya devices, but the Tuya Integration service in the HA is interrupted and requires a restart. All my IOT devices are given a static IP address. You have more than 50+ devices? more extreme than me.

I don't have any hot air guns or similar tools, but using Stainless steel spudger pry blade opening tool Ultra-thin, and it is superior compared to test-pen or any tools to open any type of sealed casing, like a remote control, a power adapter, etc. Don't buy the wide body type, they are too soft for the jobs.

Here the looks after successfully opened the smart plug case.



I found the necessary information on how to flash the W302 chipset and am in the middle of compiling the firmware using ESPHome.

Tried many methods to trigger the board into download mode without success which include.
1. Momentary ground TX
2. Momentary ground CEN and TX
3. Having separate 3.3V regulator from USB-TTL programmer.
4. Tried two unit of smart plug

I can ready the smart plug logs but without success to trigger it into the download mode.

Each time clicking the start button from the itchiptool, it immediately returns message like: -

SerialException: Cannot configure port, something went wrong. Original message: OSError(22, 'The parameter is incorrect.', None, 87)

or maybe my USB-TTL (CP2102) programmer is incompatible. How did you program yours?

Here my latest wiring which included 5V to 3.3V switching regulator and CEN grounding switch.



Here the wiring diagram

No luck triggering the chip into the download mode. Prior to this, I tried on the 1st chip, which was off-board, then the 2nd chip was on-board, and then the same 2nd chip was off-board. 

BTW, the "SerialException: Cannot configure port, something went wrong. Original message: OSError(22, 'The parameter is incorrect.', None, 87)" was resolved after installing the driver for USB-TTL driver

Never used DIN Power meter but ct clamp energy monitor running on Tuya app. The one that I used need to use Local Tuya to expose all the reading such as show in the below picture.




To all the HA owner, I wonder did you notice your HA consume a lot of CPU resources? At first, I thought it was due to one of the integrations causing high CPU usage until I setup 2nd HA without any integration and the consumption remain high on this 2nd HA. After further check, it seems that the HA keep sending and receiving high volume of network traffic between the HA and 1.1.1.1 dns. Problem solved after I block the HA from reaching out to the 1.1.1.1 IP address.

Sure, there are unused or old laptops around you. Set up a home assistant for the job. The good thing about using a laptop is that the built-in battery can act as a UPS in case lightning trips your whole house's power. After restored the power trip from the DB box, your Home Assistant is ready to act instead of waiting to boot up, etc.

Most likely, this is due to one of the Capacitor bloated.  If you know how to handle soldering iron and electronic stuff, the capacitor costs less than a ringgit; otherwise, better buy a new replacement.


This video about Zigbee Router/End Point appeared on mine YouTube a few days ago, and I hope you may find it interesting too.