Category: Household

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Lights, Camera, Action

Have been busy with the house and adding additional garden/external lighting and then automating with Tapo S210 light switches so they can all be turned on remotely, or in case of the Garage light, as soon as the door opens.

It was mostly easy to swap over the original light switches, but the depth of the control unit on the switch, as it needs to accommodate two AA batteries meant with the curl of electrical cables coming into the pattress box it was all a bit tight. A quick check of Amazon and some 10mm spacers allowed the cables and cover to be fitted snuggly and now they are set up for both Tapo, Alexa and Apple HomeKit to control. The S210 need a Tapo hub, which is also the Matter bridge into HomeKit to function but now means the entire family can control them too.

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Busy Busy – but not here

I have not had much time recently to mess around with the server, but it’s been happily humming away and serving up content as required. Biggest challenge is the near constant IP address changes and I still have not fixed up a Dynamic DNS service to update my home IP every time it changes. Its not a real hardship as takes minutes to fix, but annoying all the same.

The Smarter internet enabled Kettle is still offline, it has been since about October and their tech support keep advising an App update is imminent to fix the issue, but being to ring hollow and I wonder if they can’t afford the cloud backend anymore to keep working. Updates to follow.

Other Tech success this month has been the redeployment of Derek, our Mowbot. I’ve relaid the control cables since we had the back garden landscaped and flattened the steep slope that would have caused him issues. Also with the few spring days we have had, I have successfully lowered its cutting height so the lawn is looking spic and span.