Floor in the office and HA glow

Meanwhile my future office needed to get a floor. Marc and Rika would be coming over and if I wanted to work from home it would be more convenient if I had my own space to sit. With a few square meters of floor it was already turning into a real room. Before I could put in the rest of the floor I had to replace part of a beam, which I had prepared already a few months ago.
It was a fun project and with the help of the high lift jack, I moved the beam back into the right position before I glued the new part in. Another very rewarding project.

The next weekend a part came in that I needed for my Home Assistant Glow project to be able to read the LED-pulses. Putting the right software on an ESP board went pretty straight forward and quick enough I had my first measurements coming in. The next day I adjusted the pot-meter and then precise measurements flowed into Home Assistant. Very nice to see different heavy users like the kettle, hub and oven show their own specific graphs.

Connecting the inverter and repairing the sauna

My goal was to get the solar panels connected to the grid before the end of the year. So still some work to do. Once the new cable to the electricity meter was connected, a project in which the meter was also finally moved to the final position in the meter closet, I could start connecting the inverter also. Fronius has great instruction videos online on how to do it, even though it pretty straight forward to begin with.

Once the inverter was online I set it up, enabled the API and connected it to Home Assistant. The next day it started spitting data which I then displayed as nice graphs.

With that done, I decided it was time to do a bit of service and repair work in the sauna. After three year a few of the stones started to come loose, so I got a different glue. When I started to take of the loose stones from the top, I soon found out it would be a bit more work then the few I thought where loose, around 80% of the stones came loose without any effort, so I took them out and after that glued them back in place. I now also could finally glue the stones in front of the chimney and on the other side of the chimney put the last wood.

In the kitchen I placed the chimney of the extractor hood, I put insulation material in it but it was still much noisier then we had hoped. Let’s see if at some point I can come up with an idea to improve that, as now it is not a nice hood to use.

Start on the hallway and some Zigbee

November passed by quickly towards the end of the month I got back to renovating. It was time for the hallway. I pulled some last pipes to the studio where I can later on put data cable through and then we started by putting the ceiling plates in. Since the hallway only needs 3 of those large plates I didn’t rent the lift, but without it, it sure was more effort. Good thing Hendrik showed up at the right time to lend a helping hand.

The next days I finished the walls, what a different view!

In between I also received a CC2531 Zigbee USB Dongle. Since Ikea uses Zigbee for it’s home automation hardware, this would be a better solution to connect the Ikea stuff to my home assistant. The setup was pretty straight forward. Ik updated the firmware of the stick, installed zigbee2mqtt in my home assistant and started discovering the lamps, switches and other tradfri items. I soon got a nice graphical overview of the mesh network formed by the zigbee units. I created an automation for the lamp in the living room to turn on before sunset and turn off at 23:00. Getting the dimming function working will take some more effort, but that will come later. It is nice to see how home assistant lets an Ikea tradfri switch turn on the WLED installation in the bathroom.

Ceiling and lights

Once all the metal studs where put in, I could put in the vertical parts to create a light cove. When this was done, I could put in the LED strips and connect the power supply and QuinLED. After a quick test run it was time to put in the ceiling plates.

With the help of Mo and Mattias we put in the 4 plates, which went pretty smooth. On to the plastering and painting.

Tiling the bathroom

Sometimes there are weeks where a lot of visible things happen and then there are weeks like these. Little to report. Some parts for the livingroom lights came in quicker then expected. I had ordered a QuinLED controller as I had heard good things about it and also ordered a powersupply and RGBWW LED strips that besides colour also can emit warm white light. I tested the combination and then put them aside until I will get to the living room.

Beside I finally had some time to figure out what was wrong with the cable to the last LED strip in the bedroom. After some measuring I concluded the cable was broken. With a bit of effort I was able to use the old cable to pull a new cable behind the ceiling. Some more effort consisting of cutting, stripping, and soldering and the third LED strip also lid up.

And than it was weekend and finally I could start tiling the bathroom. The first part took a lot of time as I first had to work my way down to make sure the tiles would line up with the window. From there on al the other tiles will be aligned. But a great start!

LED strips for the bedroom

With the new year, the winter also started. In the past weeks there was regular snow and wintery temperatures up or better down to -10.
Nice weather to work inside. Just over a year ago I already made a test setup, so I guess it as about time to actually put this stuff together. After some first trying it was not working stable, but with the help of some forums and my uncle I got the controller stable by adding a so called level shifter. Unfortunately the manual where somewhat unclear on how to connect them, but once I got it connected, the software was running stable and all effects instantly where picked up by the LED strip.

Time to cut the LED strips to length and install them on the beams in the bedroom. The first strip went pretty smooth and also the second strip was connected quick enough, but for some reason the third strip did not work. I need to really look into what is going wrong here some other time.

During the weekend we had a sauna, since the wooden floor parts are almost gone I changed to different wood, which seemed to burn hotter then the floor parts, with the result we had an unplanned new record high in the sauna. Good thing the garden is full of snow, so we could cool down making snow angels.

The workshop

Secretly I had already started to use the work bench, which also stimulated to create a bit more order in the tools. I had seen a nice design of so called french cleat storage wall and wanted to try this. So I made a few small tool organizers. Because of the system you can easily move a set of tools do a different part of the workshop. After building this test setup I am convinced I will use this system to store the rest of my tools later on.

A few days later a new toy arrived, an Odroid N2+ with ‘gorgeous’ aluminum case, shortly the Home Assistant Blue, as an upgrade for my Raspberry Pi 3 to run home assistant for the upcoming years. So the darkest time of year I had something to keep me busy. Of course the first thing I did was open the case to check the content (and to turn it around to the connector where on a more logical side.)

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