Category: Home automation

Amazon Alexa devices cannot be pinged, here is an alternative

February 22, 2025

I want my Home Automation to check if my Amazon Alexa devices are present on the network or not. However, Amazon Alexa devices cannot be pinged.

NMAP comes to your help (If you do not have NMAP installed, apt install nmap should solve the issue).

The following code will give you a 1, if an Amazon Alexa device is present at the given IP address. It gives you a 0 if not. 

nmap -T4 -F 192.168.178.120 | grep "host up)" | wc -l

Visual Sudio Code, the YAML extension and Home Assistant’s “!secret” option

February 19, 2025

I use Visual Studio Code to edit the YAML files of my Home Assistant installation. Works great. However, there is one annoying thing: The YAML extension treats the “!secret” option of Home Assistant as “Syntax error” and underlines it in red.

To solve this problem, open your settings.json at 

C:\Users\<yourusername>\AppData\Roaming\Code\User\settings.json

On my installation it looks like this:

After I added the code… 

,
    "yaml.customTags": [
        "!secret scalar"
     ]

… it looked like this…

… and the problem is gone: