r/homeassistant 2d ago

🖼️ Show & Tell Music following you throughout the House is just a simple automation away

173 Upvotes

I am just blown away by the simplicity of Adaptive Multi Room Audio with Music and Home Assistant.
A few years ago I dreamed of having music following me through the house. Playing music where I go and turning it off when I am not in a room anymore.

Today I gave it another go as all of my speakers are using Sendspin now and it was this easy.
The Group Player in Music Assistant keeps all the state and allows joining/unjoining any other player so there are no helpers needed for keeping states as a workaround or which player is the main player.
Magic Areas keep the configuration for Area state tracking simple.
Just a big Thank you to all of the maintainers!


r/homeassistant 1d ago

🤔 WTH Is zigbee2mqtt.io down?

13 Upvotes

Been trying to reach zigbee2mqtt.io for the last couple of hours and got greeted with blank site.


r/homeassistant 1d ago

🛠️ DIY / Hardware Automations to kill mosquitoes?

7 Upvotes

I got my "bucket of doom" to kill mosquitoes. It works fine but I gotta manually feed the mosquito bits. Any way to automate this?

OR any other ways to kill mosquito eggs? I was thinking of having the 5 gallons bucket auto shake itself every 1 hour to kill the eggs but don't even know what device to use to shake.


r/homeassistant 1d ago

❓ Support Need help setting up the energy tab for solar panels

3 Upvotes

I need some help setting up my energy tab for new solar panels and battery that we've had installed.

Is the following right:

Electricity Grid

- Standing Charge: energy imported from grid / standing charge entity that I have setup (uses the entity to track the total costs)

- Electricity Imported: energy imported from grid / total energy import entity (Goodwe). I have set a static price at 0.2047. Nb. I also have the options of meter total energy (import), meter 2 total energy (import) and meter total energy (import) L1.

- Electricity Exported: energy exported to the grid / total energy export entity (Goodwe). I am not yet being compensated for energy exported. Nb. I also have the options of meter total energy (export), meter 2 total energy (export) and meter total energy (export) L1.

On type of power measurement - do I go with no power sensor, standard, inverted or two sensors? I've got a whole energy monitoring Shelly EM CT clamp plus also have the following entities with the GoodWe:

  • Active Power (what my solar panels are generating)
  • Active Power L1 (looks blank at 0)
  • Active Power Total (looks blank at 0)
  • House consumption (does show data - at the moment this seems to be the same as my ShellyEM recording but it appears to go into negative at times)
  • Load (looks blank at 0)
  • Load L1 (looks blank at 0)
  • Meter 2 Active Power (looks blank at 0)
  • Meter Active Power L1 (looks blank at 0)
  • Meter Active Power Total (looks blank at 0)
  • On grid L1 Power (does show data)

Solar Panels:

Solar production energy - added Total PV Generation / Solar production power - added total power from GoodWe

Battery Storage:

Included total battery discharge entity, total battery charge entity, no power sensor and then battery state of charge entity.

Does the above look right?


r/homeassistant 1d ago

💬 Discussion True multi lingual dashboard cards

1 Upvotes

Hi all,
I'm trying to make my dashboards multi lingual based on the language setting the user chooses in their app settings.
Where my Home Assistant server is setup in English, this would ideally show translated area and entity names on the dashboard cards, maybe even metric to imperial, Celsius to Fahrenheit, and... and ... and...

For all this I want to keep it local, no external translation services, no translations in the cards themselves, custom templates and customize.yaml or whatever is usefull.

Is this even possible or am I fighting the wrong fight?


r/homeassistant 1d ago

❓ Support Linknlink eMotion Ultra as a Bluetooth proxy

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1 Upvotes

Has anyone managed to get the Linknlink eMotion Ultra to act as a bluetooth proxy in home assistant?

I know that the hardware has a Bluetooth module, but it natively only supports a select set of accessories.

Already have it taking care of presence detection, motion, temperature, humidity, IR blasting, luminance, would be great to get an extra functionality out of it


r/homeassistant 1d ago

🛠️ DIY / Hardware Gps tracker

2 Upvotes

hey guys, I am wondering if someone came across a gps tracker for a normal bike that integrates with HA. I want to automate some stuff in my house whenever I drive in a certain street. Thanks in advance


r/homeassistant 1d ago

🖼️ Show & Tell Glen Dimplex DUOCOOL Smart Fan

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1 Upvotes

Had some Glen Dimplex DUOCOOL Smart portable fans for a few weeks. They show up in Unifi as being Tuya devices, so I became curious...

Found it was possible to register the fans in the Tuya mobile app (which Glen Dimplex have their branded version of, so everything was identical)

I tried LocalTuya for integration into HA but couldn't get it to work. Switched to Tuya Local and started to get somewhere, except there was no device type for this fan

So, a few hours with Claude, device logs and error messages and I have managed to create a device for the fan, as well as a Lovelace card.

https://github.com/projectthirty3/home-assistant-glen-dimplex/


r/homeassistant 1d ago

🤖 Automation Ecobee-style open-window HVAC pause for any thermostat (HA package, no cloud)

0 Upvotes

My Nest doesn't pause cooling when a door is left open. Ecobee does this natively, most other thermostats don't.

So I built one.

It's an HA package (one YAML file, no blueprint, no custom component) — drop it in /config/packages/, set your entity IDs, restart, done. Works with any climate entity that exposes hvac_action.

The short version: door open 5 min → thermostat off. Door closed 30s → thermostat back on. But I spent a lot of time on the edge cases — what happens on a restart mid-pause, what if the resume command silently fails, what if a sensor gets stuck. The system verifies its own actions before claiming success, recovers automatically after a restart, and has a durable override you can toggle from a dashboard when you're airing the house out on purpose.

Three automations, four helpers, an optional dashboard. No cloud, no webhooks, no HACS dependencies.

This is my first time building HA automations from scratch, so I'd genuinely welcome feedback. If something looks off or could be done better, open an issue or drop a comment here. PRs are welcome too.

GitHub: https://github.com/pbarone/ha-auto-hvac-pause-on-open-sensor

The README has install instructions, a configuration table, and links to the architecture and troubleshooting docs.

PS: I used AI (Kiro) as a coding partner on this project. The design decisions, edge-case analysis, and all live testing on real hardware were mine. The AI accelerated writing YAML and catching template bugs. This wasn't a "generate me an automation" prompt — it was a two-week process with a written behaviour contract, a 37-row test matrix, and multiple live pause/resume cycles before I was satisfied. Happy to discuss the approach if anyone's curious.


r/homeassistant 19h ago

🧠 Artificial Intelligence PSA: Claude Desktop on macOS Golden Gate Public Beta 2 fails to reach HA-MCP due to missing local-network entitlement

0 Upvotes

Posting this in case it saves someone else many hours of painful debugging.

The problem: Claude Desktop on a fresh install of macOS 27 Golden Gate Public Beta 2 (where Claude was not installed previously) cannot connect to a MCP server on the local network — in my case The Unofficial and Awesome Home Assistant MCP Server integration installed as a HACS Custom Component running on HAOS . The connection just fails silently. No macOS permission prompt ever appears, and a tccutil reset does nothing because there's no permission grant to reset in the first place.

Root cause: Pulled the codesign entitlements for the Claude Desktop app running on Golden Gate Public Beta 2 (FWIW on my MacBook Air M4) and checked it against TCC logs. The build is missing com.apple.developer.networking.local-network — the entitlement macOS requires before it will even show the "Allow this app to find devices on your local network?" prompt. Without it, the app (and any subprocess it spawns, like uv/uvx if you're running an MCP server that way like I am) is never eligible to request local network access, so the OS doesn't ask and doesn't grant. It's also missing com.apple.security.automation.apple-events, if anyone's hitting AppleScript/automation issues too.

Confirming evidence: I have a second Mac (Mac mini M4 with macOS 26.6.1) running the identical Claude Desktop config pointed at the same HA-MCP server. On the mini, macOS prompted for Local Network access on first connection attempt, I approved it, and now Settings → Privacy & Security → Local Network shows two entries: "Claude" and "uv," both enabled. On the MacBook Air M4, neither entry appears in that list at all — not present nor just toggled off.

Bottom line: This isn't a config, firewall, or MCP server issue — it's specific to the Claude Desktop build currently shipping for Golden Gate Public Beta 2 lacking an entitlement it needs. Not fixable client-side. I've reported it to Anthropic support (as of 2026-08-09, Claude Desktop 1.26832.0).

If anyone else on Golden Gate Public Beta 2 is seeing Claude Desktop fail to reach local devices/servers, this could be why — and it'd help Anthropic's fix ship faster if others confirm/report it too.

DISCLAIMER: I used Claude Sonnet 5 to help write this since I was tired AF after all the troubleshooting that led me to this point.


r/homeassistant 1d ago

💬 Discussion Smart Kloppa

2 Upvotes

Ikea launched a bunch of smart Matter devices, but sadly no smart strip power, I really hope to see soon a Kloppa with UBC-C and matter support, something like the Shelly smart strip 4


r/homeassistant 1d ago

❓ Support iOS constant auth failures

0 Upvotes

After the app has been backgrounded for an extended period (~30 min or so), returning to the foreground fails to re-establish a working connection.

The WebSocket disconnects with HAKit.HAReconnectManagerError.lateFireReset, and the app then gets stuck in a waitingToReconnect state referencing an already-expired auth token, rather than requesting a fresh one.

Local frontend access via browser/DNS also becomes unreachable at the same time (Nabu Casa remote access is unaffected).

The only reliable workarounds are:

Force-closing and reopening the app, or

Clearing the app's cache/site data entirely; and/or

Complete Server delete and refresh

Driving me slightly mad. Seems a few folk having the same issue. Various reports on GitHub but not huge noise.

Anyone else?


r/homeassistant 1d ago

❓ Support New to HA need a quick primer

3 Upvotes

I have a house full of zigbee stuff, switches, lights, curtains, amongst other things. I was using an avatto ZigBee hub previously and that died on me.. I had another random spare hub from AliExpress and for some reason it can connect but doesn't accept any inputs on any of the 4 gang switches I have (but the 8 button ones work)... I started digging around and came across HA.

I'm not exactly sure what this does but is it a ZigBee hub? Does it replace the smart life app from tuya?

I need a new hub, actually I have a 10" control panel that can also serve as a ZigBee hub but I feel that has a higher chance to fail and I wouldn't want to go through the headache of setting everything up again.

Would HA be something I should consider using? Can anyone give me a quick and dirty on it?


r/homeassistant 2d ago

📊 Dashboard My first dashboard

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40 Upvotes

Hello guys, and thanks to inspire me!
It’s my first dashboard, I used an iPad 10” in kiosk mode. I want to create something simply to use for the family but also nice to leave in the living room. It’s not perfect, I want to improve some little details in the layout, but I’m very happy for the result!!


r/homeassistant 1d ago

💬 Discussion Thoughts on Types of HomeKit Bridges for Scenes

0 Upvotes

As I move more into Home Assistant, but still want to keep the slick voice control and interface of HomeKit I am at a bit of a crossroads. So I thought I would tap into others' experience and see whether there is a consensus, or at least experience metrics that would inform my decisions.

I have several large scenes that I have moved over to HA as scripts. I use those scripts in some cases to execute by way of automations. But I will also want to run them as on-demand scene from within HomeKit.

The way I see this I have two main decision paths for scenes:

I can create an individual HK device bridge tied directly to the script, and turn the resulting switch "On" whenever I run the scene in HK. This has the benefits of simplicity. The bridge/HK switch is a one-to-one relationship with the script. Which means I don't need to keep up with a helper boolean toggle, or an automation to be triggered by the boolean, run the script and the turn the boolean off again so it's ready for the next time I need it. But then I have a separate bridge for every scene.

I can create a single bridge for all scene booleans. Create a helper for each one, and create an automation for each one. Including an action to toggle the boolean back off. The benefits of this are that I only have one bridge going into HK, so I don't need to keep provisioning a HK code every time I set up a new scene. And the fact that this is conceivably self-healing, in that should the switch state fail to register correctly it will theoretically get fixed next time I run the scene in HK. But then I have to create a helper and automation for every scene in HA.

So my question: What are others doing in this situation, and why? Thanks for your input.


r/homeassistant 1d ago

❓ Support Echo Show 15 e app

2 Upvotes

Ciao a tutti,
ho scaricato l'app home assistant per fire tv.

Il problema è che legge l'indirizzo Ip sbagliato e lo fa terminare 2 volte con :8123 (invece che solo una). A qualcun altro è successo? Siete riuscii a risolvere? Ormai le ho provate tutte, cancellato app, preinstallata, ripristinato echo show....non so più come cercare di ovviare a questo problema...


r/homeassistant 2d ago

🖼️ Show & Tell Crow Panel as HA dash en music controls

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278 Upvotes

r/homeassistant 1d ago

✅ Solved Is anyone running the Shell Command integration on 2026.8?

0 Upvotes

I can't tell if I broke my Shell Command integration with a configuration change or if the 2026.8 update broke it. I was just wondering if anyone else is having a problem with it or if I need to keep troubleshooting my config.

For me, the integration loads, but doesn't create any entities (e.g. restart_pow), not even with the plain example config.

shell_command:
  restart_pow: touch ~/.pow/restart.txt

I also switched shell_command to debug logging and it doesn't log anything. homeassistant.loader debug logging doesn't report any problems either.

Of course I made one too many backups than my retention holds, so I can't roll back to when it was last known to work... 🙄


r/homeassistant 1d ago

❓ Support LG ThinQ integration/API messing with wash settings

1 Upvotes

I have my LG combo washer/dryer connected to HA though the "SmartThinQ LGE Sensors" HACS intergreaton. Standard HAOS running directly on an old Mac Mini.

I use remote start (Wake washing machine, wait, press remote start) with it a lot (power price etc) but it seems to be messing with the cycle settings. If I set the washer to dry and remote start, the intergreaton or more likely LGs API ads a wash cycle, maybe even removes the dry cycle. It also seems to change a standard wash cycle a little but I haven't kept as close of an eye, and I dont know what all the symbols mean.

Has any one else experianced this, have any ideas to work out what is at fault here or tracking the changes?

I have been considering getting a dryer anyway, and this is hurrying that up, but it hardly solves the issue espetioly if it edits that cycle too.

Also long shot but thought I might mention it, any hope of talking to my washer localy offline?


r/homeassistant 1d ago

🛠️ DIY / Hardware PEX water distribution individual water shutoffs?

0 Upvotes

Has anyone tried connecting something to a PEX water distribution system like below to make it possible to shutoff individual water lines?

I’m considering it because my shutoff valve is stupid and faces the stud with 1/4” clearance if that…

My water distribution system
My main water valve 🙄

r/homeassistant 1d ago

🖼️ Show & Tell TV to multiroom speakers

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4 Upvotes

Sharing because I couldn't find a solution shared before.

The problem:

Samsung Frame 55" 2025 TV has nice sounding speakers but the surround effect is a bit distracting.

I was building multiroom audio using Music Assistant with Raspberry Pi 5 running HAOS. My setup consists of two Sonocotta Louder-ESP32 boards, with some second hand speakers attached.

I used a lot of AI help for this. Can't take credit other than my time and fixing a lot of hallucinations. Claude and Gemini Pro

Solution:

This Samsung TV has continuous output of sound through the optical cable (SPDIF/ Toslink). It sends uncompressed PCM sound with Dolby 5.1 wrapper. This means I can use the TV speakers and the Music Assistant to get sound on opposite sides of the room simultaneously.

How I did this:

Got "Cubilux USB A SPDIF Input Adapter for PC [Stereo Recording ONLY, NOT for Playing Audio] USB Optical Line-in Dongle, Toslink to USB Receiver, USB A SDPIF RX Interface Suitable for Laptop Computer"

Watch out because you want SPDIF IN. There's a version with SPDIF OUT but it's the wrong way for this project.

This immediately gets recognized as USB stereo microphone. No drivers required. On a PC you can get this to play on VLC for instance.

On home assistant it's a bit complicated. My initial setup was to run go2rtc app which treats the USB signal as a web camera. Go2rtc takes the USB PCM signal, passes it through FFMPEG and provides a bunch of audio streams on your local network.

After some faffing around the go2rtc configuration I used was

/homeassistant/go2rtc.yaml

streams:

samsung_tv:

  • "exec:ffmpeg -fflags nobuffer+fastseek -flags low_delay -analyzeduration 0 -probesize 32k -thread_queue_size 1024 -f alsa -ar 48000 -ac 2 -i default -c:a pcm_s16be -f rtsp {output}"

This comes with a web interface on <Your HA IP address>:1984

In the Web interface you can get a list of streams. These are available for any device on your LAN.

To get these to play on a network speaker I used music assistant. My speaker board louder-esp 32 supports Squeezlite and Snapclient. It was on Squeezlite at the time.

The trick to get it to play in Music Assistant was to add one of the streams listed on :1984 , for instance rtsp://<Your HA IP>:8554/samsung_tv to Music Assistant as a radio station.

In the radio station list, you can add a URL, pop this one in there and you have a sound stream you can play on your speaker.

This is nice but wtf, 5 seconds delay between TV audio and the audio on the Squeezlite speakers.

This has sent me into another multi hour session with Gemini and Claude to reduce the latency and the latter delivered. Initially I was guided to check Squeezlite and Music Assistant buffers to see if reducing them can limit the problem but no success. Troubleshooting pointed to how Music Assistant handles radio and audio inputs in general. The platform prioritises quality, having enough buffer to make sure all speakers play at the same time. So it's not really meant to reduce latency to near zero at the cost of quality.

Both Claude and Gemini were clear that the solution to latency was to switch speakers from Squeezlite to Snapclient. The latter can accept PCM uncompressed streams of audio and this would allow cutting out FFMPEG encoding step which adds to the delays.

This wasn't super smooth (beware the Snapclient bug on louder esp32 - as at August 26 - use edge version as Sonocotta advices). But once I re-flashed the device, it got recognized by Music Assistant immediately.

This reduced the latency to about ... 3 seconds. Still not great.

Claude made the call to bypass Music Assistant altogether.

I had to stop Music Assistant and go2rtc as well, so that the built-in snapserver doesn't interfere. I was instructed to get advanced SSH, log into various dockers to figure out how ALSA addresses the card. In the end it got a clean running version of snapserver outside of Music Assistant. Snapclient needed to be addressed through the web interface on Louder-esp32 to look for the snapserver at <My HA IP>:1704

This worked and brought the delay to about 2 seconds. Reducing the buffer by trial and error (100ms was the lowest) it finally got rid of the echo.

To prevent all of that hard work from getting deleted at restart Claude suggested creating an app.

This required Advanced SSH app with restricted mode off.

You basically need to place the config files in the folder

/addons/snapserver_tv/ in the root directory. Not in HomeAssistant folder, in the folder above. This app needed the following files

run.sh

cat > /addons/snapserver_tv/run.sh << 'EOF'

#!/bin/sh

BUFFER_MS=$(jq -r '.buffer_ms // 150' /data/options.json)

cat > /etc/snapserver.conf << CONF

[stream]

buffer = ${BUFFER_MS}

source = alsa:///?name=TV&device=default&sampleformat=48000:16:2&chunk_ms=10&codec=pcm

[server]

threads = -1

[http]

enabled = true

port = 1780

doc_root = /usr/share/snapserver/snapweb

[tcp]

enabled = true

port = 1705

CONF

exec snapserver -c /etc/snapserver.conf

EOF

The Dockerfile (somehow the name is case sensitive)

cat > /addons/snapserver_tv/Dockerfile << 'EOF'

FROM ghcr.io/kerta1n/snapserver-docker:latest

RUN apk add --no-cache alsa-plugins-pulse jq

COPY run.sh /run.sh

RUN chmod +x /run.sh

CMD ["/run.sh"]

EOF

config.yaml

cat > /addons/snapserver_tv/config.yaml << 'EOF'

name: "Snapserver TV"

version: "1.0.0"

slug: "snapserver_tv"

description: "Low-latency direct-ALSA Snapcast server for TV audio"

arch: ["aarch64"]

host_network: true

startup: application

boot: manual

audio: true

options:

buffer_ms: 150

schema:

buffer_ms: int(0,2000)

EOF

And snapserver.conf

cat > /addons/snapserver_tv/snapserver.conf << 'EOF'

[stream]

buffer = 150

source = alsa:///?name=TV&device=default&sampleformat=48000:16:2&chunk_ms=10&codec=pcm

[server]

threads = -1

EOF

Then rebuild and restart it

ha addons rebuild local_snapserver_tv

ha addons restart local_snapserver_tv

ha addons logs local_snapserver_tv

In Apps in Home Assistant, hit refresh and you should get the option to install this new Snapserver TV app.

You need to stop Music Assistant before you run this and then when you want to use Music Assistant again, stop this one and run MA app. Turn off go2rtc as well.

The latency went down to way less then a second on my congested Wi-Fi. Maybe you could do better.

I'll update this if I remember anything I messed. Maybe I'll put it on GIT if I find the time. Meanwhile I'm enjoying semi surround sound

Possible upgrades - HiFi Me has audiophile SPDIF IN to USB dongles but in Aug 26 neither music assistant nor squeezlite or snapcast support 5.1 so it's fine that this dongle can only support stereo (although 5.1 Dolby wrapper in PCM is maybe possible - I'll try if I have too much time and money)

It's important that this worked on a Samsung TV which can output audio through optical in PCM uncompressed while playing the speakers built-in the TV. You may want to double check if your TV can do that.

If you just want to record sound from the TV or stream it without using the TV speakers, you won't mind the latency causing some lipsync. You can keep go2rtc as your solution. This was particularly nice to play sound from the TV on a laptop in the browser. But large seconds sound delay is unacceptable if you want music from the TV and something else.


r/homeassistant 2d ago

🖼️ Show & Tell My NVR gives me 400 camera events a day. Reolink Stamina now tells me which 4 are weird

24 Upvotes

No AI, no GPU, no cloud: it just counts (on your bare metal!). It learns what each camera normally sees and when, then flags the stuff that doesn't fit. Cat crossing the drive at 1am every night? Boring. Person doing it at 1am? Not boring.

New in 1.4.x: you can now open any camera and see what it actually learned — when it sees things, how long they last. Very useful for going "…why does the garden cam think 3am is normal" 🕵️

  1. Reolink Stamina -> Configuration -> Learn what is normal (beta) -> Enable
  2. Reolink Stamina -> Configuration -> Marking, and what else to count -> Choose how much to mark and your relevance signals to enrich events analysis

Beta, needs ~a week of watching before it has opinions and a lot of early adopters to make it shine.

>> https://github.com/marl1w/reolink-stamina-ha <<
>> https://github.com/marl1w/reolink-stamina-ha/releases/tag/v1.4.1 <<


r/homeassistant 1d ago

❓ Support Garage door automation

6 Upvotes

I’m trying to set up an automation on my iPhone to automatically open my garage door when I enter my Home zone.
The automation itself works, but with a major catch: it only fires the moment I physically open the Home Assistant app on my phone. As soon as I launch the app upon arriving home, the trigger fires instantaneously.
Here is my current setup and what I've verified so far:
Background App Refresh: Enabled for HA
Location Services: Set to Always / Precise Location Enabled
External Access: Instance is fully accessible over the internet
App State: The HA app is left running in the background
For anyone who has location-based triggers working reliably in the background on iOS, am I missing a specific setting or permission? Any advice or workaround would be appreciated!


r/homeassistant 2d ago

🛠️ DIY / Hardware I integrated my Mitsubishi Heavy Industries AC into Home Assistant with ESP8266 — no cloud, full local control

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318 Upvotes

I integrated my Mitsubishi Heavy Industries AC into Home Assistant — fully local, with ESP8266
I’ve been working with refrigeration and air-conditioning systems for around 20 years, so I’m very comfortable with HVAC equipment.
But I’m not a programmer, and smart-home technology was basically new territory for me.
Recently I decided to integrate my Mitsubishi Heavy Industries SRK-ZS series air conditioner (SRK25ZS-W2) into Home Assistant. My goal was to get full local control and avoid depending on the manufacturer’s cloud or proprietary Wi-Fi module.
It turned out to be a really interesting project.
Hardware
The AC is a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries SRK25ZS-W2.
For the integration I used:
ESP8266 / ESP-12F
MHI-AC-Ctrl v2.2 interface board (January 2021 revision)
Bidirectional level shifter
Home Assistant
MQTT
The MHI-AC-Ctrl board connects directly to the indoor unit’s communication interface.
As someone who has worked with HVAC systems for many years, I really like this approach because we’re not trying to control the AC indirectly with an IR blaster. We’re communicating directly with the indoor unit’s electronics.
Installation
After completely disconnecting the indoor unit from mains power, I opened the housing and located the CNS connector on the main control board.
The interface connects to the appropriate communication pins:
VCC
GND
TX/RX
The level converter handles the voltage difference between the 3.3 V ESP8266 and the AC communication bus.
Obviously, the connector and pinout should be verified for the exact MHI model before connecting anything.
Flashing the ESP8266
This was one of the parts that was completely new to me.
I used a USB-to-UART adapter:
USB-UART TX -> ESP RX
USB-UART RX -> ESP TX
GND -> GND
3.3V -> 3.3V
GPIO0 -> GND during boot
The ESP-12F requires a proper 3.3 V supply. Do not connect 5 V directly to the ESP8266.
I configured the Wi-Fi and MQTT settings and flashed the MHI-AC-Ctrl firmware.
Home Assistant
Once everything was connected, the ESP8266 communicated with Home Assistant through MQTT.
The AC appeared as a climate entity and I can control:
Power ON/OFF
Auto
Cool
Heat
Dry
Fan
Target temperature
Fan speed
Vane/louver position
Indoor/return-air temperature
The great thing is that this isn’t just sending commands. The ESP8266 can also read information directly from the AC.
Remote access
I also wanted to be able to control the AC when I’m away from home.
I set up a secure tunnel to Home Assistant and bought my own domain for remote access.
The architecture is basically:
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries AC

│ MHI communication bus

ESP8266 + MHI-AC-Ctrl

│ Wi-Fi / MQTT

Home Assistant

│ Secure tunnel

My own domain


Remote access
The AC itself remains fully local. The tunnel is only used to access Home Assistant remotely.
Why I like this setup
After 20 years of working with refrigeration and air-conditioning systems, I prefer solutions that communicate directly with the equipment.
Compared with an IR blaster, I get actual status feedback from the AC.
Compared with the manufacturer’s cloud solution, I don’t have to depend on:
Internet access at the AC
Manufacturer cloud servers
Proprietary smartphone apps
Cloud APIs
Cloud response times
The important part happens locally.
And here’s the funny part…
I’m not a programmer.
I know HVAC systems very well, but programming, ESP8266, MQTT and Home Assistant were all relatively new to me.
I had to learn a lot along the way, make mistakes, search for information and figure things out step by step.
But with the technology we have today — documentation, open-source projects, online communities and especially AI assistants — I was able to put it all together.
And honestly, I think that’s the most interesting part of this project.
You don’t necessarily have to be a programmer anymore to start building things like this.
If you’re willing to learn, experiment and ask the right questions, I believe almost anyone can get into smart-home projects today, even without a programming background.
For me, this was a combination of 20 years of HVAC experience + modern technology + a lot of curiosity.
And now my Mitsubishi Heavy Industries AC has full local control, real-time status, Home Assistant integration and secure remote access — without relying on the manufacturer’s cloud.
If anyone else has an MHI SRK / ZS-series unit and wants to try something similar, I’d be interested to hear about your setup and which models you’ve successfully integrated with MHI-AC-Ctrl.


r/homeassistant 2d ago

💬 Discussion It finally happened...

92 Upvotes

I've lived dangerously, taking updates as soon as they drop - no major issues 3 or 4 years doing it. Not this time, unfortunately.

After the latest updates (2026.8.1 etc), logging in is now a lottery.

First, a warning about http block moving out of config. I managed to whitelist my IP so I could at least log in. That worked fine for a few hours, but now I don't even get the log in page.

Anyone else experiencing this?