Tech@Home

This section isn’t related to Kubernetes, but it’s a tech project I’ve been exploring recently. The Home Assistant community is huge, and I’d like to share how I’ve built my setup.

Over the past months, I’ve been gradually improving my smart-home setup. It started with a simple collection of Aqara sensors and controllers connected through the Aqara Hub M3.

Aqara

Following a friend’s advice, I installed Home Assistant in one of my Raspberry Pi 4, and switched to a fully local setup using a SMLIGHT SLZB-06M Zigbee coordinator together with zigbee2mqtt. All my existing Aqara sensors paired well and worked without any issues, this migration was the right move :)

HA

With this new setup in place, I began expanding the system by adding a few extra devices (switches, multi-switch buttons, and other Zigbee components) and started building more advanced automations on top of them. To make the setup more reliable, I bought a mini-PC (Beelink SER5 Max), installed Proxmox VE inside, and migrated Home Assistant from my Raspberry PI to a virtual machine.

Proxmox

Most recently, I added a ZLinky TIC to my electricity meter. This small module exposes real-time consumption data to Home Assistant, making it much easier to monitor usage and build energy-related dashboards and automations.

Zlinky

This section will grow over time as I document different parts of this setup, share experiments, and highlight what I learn along the way.