General

Cheap DIY Smart Blinds with Shelly1 and Home Assistant!

tl;dr: Take a cheap ~$150 set of motorized blinds, and make them smart(er), with a native HA integration and integrated WiFi Some time back, I decided to bite the bullet and try Home Depot's low-cost cellular shades. The reason I went for these is that they offer an optional motorization kit that comes with a… Continue reading Cheap DIY Smart Blinds with Shelly1 and Home Assistant!

General, Home Assistant, IoT, MQTT, Node-Red, Tools, Wireshark

Meraki MT, MQTT, Node-Red & Home Assistant Auto Discovery

NOTE (6-7-22): Please download the flows.json file again if you did prior to 10AM June 7th. The original one was not correct and will possibly break your node-red install. Thanks to Rohan Karamandi for catching it for me. NOTE (6-9-22): Thanks to the help of Rohan Karamandi, the flows have been updated to now create… Continue reading Meraki MT, MQTT, Node-Red & Home Assistant Auto Discovery

General

Whoa.. where has the time gone?

It has been a while since I have added much to my blog. I would like to happily blame my role within Cisco Systems for this. I moved into product management about 2 years ago and have found it difficult to write on my own AND for Cisco at the same time. While I have… Continue reading Whoa.. where has the time gone?

General, Mac, Tools, Wifi, Windows

Wifi and Meraki Widgets for Mac and Windows

I recently decided to try to learn how to write python a little bit. I'm still not very good at it, however I did create something recently that I feel should be shared! Meraki local status pages can provide some very useful information for troubleshooting, however having to browse to ap.meraki.com/switch.meraki.com/wired.meraki.com is not always desirable,… Continue reading Wifi and Meraki Widgets for Mac and Windows