Klaas Schoute, auteur op Student Techlife

easyEnergy market prices with new integration in Home Assistant

Last month I wrote a blog about the EnergyZero integration, but this month we are going to talk about a new integration for easyEnergy! In this blog more information about the new integration, which will be available from the Home Assistant 2023.3 (March) release. easyEnergy is a company with dynamic energy contracts where you can buy/sell electricity/gas according to day-ahead market prices, since 2018 the company has been taken over by energy supplier NieuweStroom. Why then does the integration still carry the name easyEnergy?Currently, both companies display energy prices on their websites that come from the easyEnergy API. Should this…

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EnergyZero market prices with new integration in Home Assistant

Recently we made the switch from a variable energy contract to a dynamic energy contract (ANWB Energie) with a different energy price every hour. In this blog, we’re going to talk about a new integration I’ve been working on for the past month that will be available with the Home Assistant 2023.2 release. That new integration is EnergyZero, a company where other parties can purchase their electricity/gas according to day-ahead market prices. Well-known partners who work with EnergyZero are, for example: All the companies mentioned above are also available as a virtual integration in Home Assistant. The idea of dynamic…

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Let’s contribute! Hacktoberfest 2022

It’s October and so Hacktoberfest has started again, a month in which everyone is encouraged to contribute to an open source project on GitHub. Repository owners/maintainers let you know if they’re participating, what you can work on during this month and after 4 approved contributions, you can get a sponsored t-shirt from the event or plant a tree. Of course I will participate again this year, but you can also help with one of my projects! For this year I’ve an even bigger list of projects that people can contribute to and you don’t need any programming experience to make…

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🅿️ NIPKaart project update

My summer vacation is almost over but for those who follow me a bit on GitHub or PyPi, can see that I haven’t really been sitting still. Today an update on the progress of this project. Going International Until now I’ve always kept the focus on the Netherlands, because I live there ☺️ But since we go on holiday abroad by car again, I would like to have a map so I know where we can park. After I started adding some open data from Hamburg, I made the decision to also push the boundaries for nipkaart.nl to collect data…

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It’s a long time ago

Oh mean… what did I do!? It’s been a year since my last post and too much has happened in that time, sorry for that! But let’s do a quick recap of the highlights. Workplace upgrade Exactly one year ago we were in a time when “education from distance” was the norm and I also started an internship what happened from home, so I decided to invest in my workplace at home. My workplace consisted of a small desk with a shelving unit on both sides and I thought that could be better. It seemed very cool to me, but…

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Home Assistant

First integration in Home Assistant!

Something that was always on my todo / wish list was making my own integration, but it never happened until now! My knowledge of python is still quite basic, but I still wanted to give it a try. To start off simply, I decided to build an integration that shows the occupancy of a large number of parking garages in Amsterdam (The Netherlands). You are probably wondering when can I use this integration? It’s available from version 2021.06! Sensors When you add a garage via the UI, you get 4 sensors in your overview: Free space long Free space short…

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Blitzwolf LT11 with ESPHome

I’ve had the Blitzwolf LT11 LED strips at home for a while and they hang in my shelving units, but the problem with these LED strips is that they have standard firmware from Tuya. Which means that communication goes through the cloud and I really wanted to get rid of that and control it local, but I didn’t know how. Until today! What do you need Tuya-convert Raspberry Pi (or anything else that runs on linux and can set up its own WiFi Access Point) Mobile phone Home Assitant that runs the ESPHome add-on Create an ESPHome node To keep…

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How I save water while showering🚿

Hey hello, there I’m again with an update! In this blog I will come up with a number of updates that I’ve made in Home Assistant / my house, such as new hardware and I will show you a great idea how you could possibly save water while showering. But first, Blueprints! 📘 Blueprints Recently it’s now possible to make blueprints in Home Assistant, with this you can create a pre-made automation that contains all the logic and others can easily import and use them as a basis for their automation. For the above devices I made a blueprint, the…

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Is this going to be the future?

I have a new laptop! 💻 It has been a while, but I gave myself a new laptop. I noticed that my old laptop (Acer V Nitro …) was no longer good enough for all my work and study assignments, mainly because we were working on Android app development at the time during my studies and especially the emulator demands a lot from your laptop . In the end I bought the Asus Zenbook 15, a 14 inch model laptop with a 15″ 4K screen and an extra screen in the touchpad! Later on the details, but first a nice…

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Back to school! 🎓

Holy moly It has been a while since I posted a blog on my website! It has been quite a busy six months since the world was turned upside down by the corona virus (and still is). For us as students, quite a bit changed: no more physical lessons were given, tests of subjects were changed or adjusted and from now on home was not only “home” but also the place where you started working / studying 24/7. So it was quite a challenge in the beginning to ensure that you could find a good balance between studying and relaxing…