Categories
Smart Home

My Experiment: Building an EV Wallbox Smart Home Integration with AI Coding Agents

Having an NRGkick mobile wallbox from the Austrian company DiniTech, I decided to integrate it into a new project. The wallbox has a local API (so controlling it does not need the internet) and exposes over 80 sensors / data points. This includes basics like charging current and total energy, and even the individual temperatures of the charging phase connectors. This is a perfect playground for smart home integration.

My main goal was not just to visualize this data in Home Assistant. I wanted to control the rest of the home based on the wallbox’s charging status. This is useful for a home with a photovoltaic (PV) system that is not big enough to support full car charging and other large appliances (like heating) at the same time. Controlling the wallbox itself (setting current, pausing) was also an important benefit, especially if you don’t have the PV-led charging add-on for the wallbox.

Home Assistant integration for NRGkick
Over 80 sensors and data points are exposed from the NRGkick wallbox and integrated into Home Assistant through the new custom integration.

This project was also an experiment to test the current state of AI coding agents. I wanted to see if they could build a full, high-quality Home Assistant integration from scratch. I used GitHub Copilot inside Visual Studio Code and tested several different models.

You can download and try the full integration from GitHub, and it’s also available for direct installation into your Home Assistant setup through the Home Assistant Community Store (HACS) – search for “NRGkick”; the actual configuration then works through auto-discovery in your local network. Also visit the Home Assistant Community forum discussion if you have feedback or comments!

Categories
App Development Smart Home Windows

Installing Windows 10 IoT Core on a Raspberry Pi

Setting up a Raspberry Pi with Windows 10 IoT Core turned out to be more difficult than expected. In the end, there was a successful workaround – here’s how to get it running (even on non-supported SD cards).

Categories
Smart Home

Improving User Experience for Public Transport Departure Monitor

The public transport departure monitor has been incredibly helpful – it dramatically cut down the waiting times at the bus stop, as it allows to leave the apartment exactly on time to reach the bus.

The setup is based on a Raspberry Pi with a simple LCD display. I’ve combined this with a motion detecting power plug, so that the Raspberry is only active when I’m in the entrance area of the apartment. As such, the energy consumption is minimal.

Categories
App Development Smart Home

Using Netgear Arlo Security-Cameras for Periodic Recording

The Arlo security camera by Netgear is one of the few cameras that doesn’t need a power supply, so is easier to use outdoors. The cameras have motion-sensing integrated and upload a short video sequence around the motion event to the Netgear backend. Great about the Arlo ecosystem is that this is possible with the free plan as well; you can access the recordings of the last 7 days already with the free basic plan.

For my use case, I wanted to also take periodic pictures / recordings. These can then later be stitched together for a time-lapse.