When faced with certain objects twining round an ultra high voltage (UHV) power line, workers no longer need to climb a high ladder to remove it any longer, drones can now be used to do the dangerous deed.

Maintenance workers in Xianniang City in central China's Hubei Province demonstrated the removal of a 12-meter long nylon net entwining around a UHV with a flame-throwing drone on Tuesday.

"In the morning, our inspector found a foreign matter on the line. Through investigation, the nylon net was brought by strong wind, and severely affected the line’s safe operation. We’ll use a drone to deal with the emergency to ensure safety," said Feng Qi, head of Xianning power line maintenance station, Hubei power transmission and transformation project company.

Workers flew the flame-throwing drone towards the net, spitting fire at about four to five meters away from the nylon net and burnt it to the ground. In ten minutes, the power line resumed its normal operation.
More on: http://www.cctvplus.com/news/20170…

Turn Home Assistant into a thermostat

Instructions on how to integrate MQTT HVAC into Home Assistant.

NOTE Update: 2019-10-27  This custom component is no longer maintained.  In Home Assistant version 0.96, the climate component’s architecture was modified (known as “Climate 1.0”) and this custom component has not been updated to work with it.  As of version 0.99, graphing was corrected for MQTT HVAC so I have decided to discontinue maintenance of this custom component.  To be clear, the revised MQTT HVAC component now renders the graph correctly but lacks the command_templates included in my cu...

🎛 Desktop application (Windows / macOS / Linux) for Home Assistant built with Electron - mrvnklm/homeassistant-desktop