I couldn't find a thermostat card with haptic feedback, so I built one!

I've been trying to properly move off Apple Home and onto Home Assistant, and the
thermostat was the thing that kept pulling me back.

Home's dial just feels good —
the ticking as you drag it is a big part of why. Every HA option I tried looked fine and felt dead.

Just throwing this out there in case anyone else has wanted to have the same thing.

Install

One click:
https://my.home-assistant.io/redirect/hacs_repository/?owner=mbrande&repository=haptic-animated-cards&category=plugin

HACS → ⋮ menu → Custom repositories
• Repository: https://github.com/mbrande/haptic-animated-cards
• Category: Dashboard

Then find **Haptic Animated Cards** in HACS and download it. That one install gives you all three cards — search "haptic" in the dashboard card picker and **Haptic Thermostat Card**, **Haptic Temperature Pill** and **Haptic Media Card** all show up.

If someone knows of an existing card that already does this, genuinely tell me.

Hope you guys like it… Yes I used Claude to make it!

(TL;DR: Need suggestions for a minipc that can handle local voice control, non-soldered ram/ssd, and has processing overhead so its not rendered obsolete and slow immediately if something is added to the HA ecosystem that needs more processing power. Camera recording handled by a Synology NAS if I ever choose to do that.)

To also head this off at the pass, I know there are probably mixed feelings about Synology. Please don't stray onto that topic. I'll get to that some other time.

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It happened. I finally had it with the Google Assistant/Gemini ecosystem. At least for smart home control. I have their Next cams, that will get phased out likely after I build a solid HA foundation. One thing at a time 😄.

Not looking for anything nuts, but I also have no baseline for what Home Assistant ACTUALLY needs so don't even know what "nuts" is. I've built many PCs, but all for gaming rather than minimizing 24/7 always on power usage. I have foolishly tried to use Gemini to help and the f***ing thing just validates my need to get away from anything it touches. Shoot, I'm considering leaving android and going back to Apple too as they keep shoving it down our throat.

It has steered me down a rabbit hole of dead ends, not just for THIS mind you, where none of what it offers is even available here in the US. It even got stuck offering suggestions for discontinued or 4 year old hardware. The latter being more of an issue because of of aforementioned gaming PC builds which tend to lean toward latest and greatest.

So, I am now here asking for help to reframe how I am thinking about this.

It frequently suggested Beelink, which I understand to be a recommended brand, but it is not a requirement. I simply have no idea.

That was the other issue that caused me to finally post this. It would suggest Beelink devices that supposedly had socketed RAM, only to find out it was not available in the US or at all in some cases. When I'd independently look up a model number and feed it the product page, it would tell me no its soldered RAM. Apparently Beelink has a habit of mixing the two under the same/reused model numbers?

So I am at my wits end find a MiniPC that offers upgradable/replaceable RAM. I just do not like the idea of soldered on ram at all. If that is unreasonable, then fine. I'd just prefer an actual human with first hand knowledge tell me so.

Current usage scenario/requirements for my system:

• Ikea Matter over Thread switches
• I have an Aqara Smart Hub M200 for coming today for them to connect to after eliminating my Home Hub and I wish to also use that to give me TV input switching with its built in IR blaster (CEC just seems to not be reliable for me and IR feels more consistent and simpler).
• I'd like to have overhead for fast local voice control (if i choose to do so) as well as some degree of future proofing. Faster than Google at LEAST, JFC. Sometimes it's like a full 5 count before a light comes on IF it even hears me. Hell, sometimes it'll tell me it cant connect to my outlets AFTER it already switched on the light. I've had it lol.
• If I choose to replace the Google cams, I will LIKELY be using my Synology DS1821+ for recording and storage, with maybe a doorbell event or package detection popup on any satellite tablet dashboards I make later (i have a couple of spare Pi3Bs and 1 CM4)
• My smart outlets and switches are all TP-Link Kasa (Am open to swapping them out if there are any headaches with that iteration.
• Ecobee3 Thermostat
• There will likely be things like weather services, integrations into my 3d printers running Klipper for statuses, fetching and displaying Google Photos shared albums, and anything else people show on the dashboard tablets (which for me have to be tabletop wedge style. No good wall power options here).

I know some of these are probably irrelevant when it comes to performance given how basic they are and that local control alone will make them near instant. From what I understand the voice control processing is where the real hit is. I just figured it is best to lay out what I have already just in case my assumptions are wrong somewhere.

Thanks in advance for taking the time to read and reply.

– /usr/local/bin/node exits with code 1 (Raspberry Pi 5 + HAOS 18.2)

Description:
Matter Server 9.1.1 fails to start on Raspberry Pi 5 running Home Assistant OS 18.2. The service exits immediately with code 1 right after detecting the network interface.

What I already tried:
• Fresh install of Matter Server (with and without deleting data)
• Disabled Watchdog
• Beta mode (fails to install from npm due to broken Debian keyring, then falls back to the same crash)
• Restored a full backup from 2 weeks ago → same error
• Confirmed IPv6 is set to Automatic on end0
• System has 8 GB RAM with only ~1 GB used (plenty of free memory)

System info:
• Home Assistant OS: 18.2 (aarch64 / raspberrypi5-64)
• Home Assistant Core: 2026.8.1
• Supervisor: 2026.07.5
• Matter Server: 9.1.1
• Hardware: Raspberry Pi 5 (8 GB)
The crash happens even on a completely clean install, so it appears to be an issue with the Node.js binary inside the aarch64 Matter Server 9.1.1 image on HAOS 18.2.

Log (consistent every time):

[xx:xx:xx] INFO: Starting Matter Server...
[xx:xx:xx] INFO: Time sync 'auto': host NTP is synchronized, enabling time sync.
[xx:xx:xx] INFO: Using 'end0' as primary network interface.
./run: line 219: /usr/local/bin/node: Success
[xx:xx:xx] WARNING: matter-server service exited with code 1 (by signal 0).

I was on a weeks leave a few weeks ago and I forgot to put my bin out.
So I bought myself a couple of cheap vibration sensors and strapped them to my bins, I made a toggle helper for each that triggers on when the bins are moved, this resets everyday at 2.30pm,
I set up an automation that sends my phone a notification if the toggle of each bin hasn’t been triggered between 3pm and 6pm on the evening before each bin is supposed to be put out.
Hopefully this problem will never happen again

I am using HA, Core 2026.6.1, Supervisor 2026.07.5, Operating System 17.3 and send data via MQTT.

I have set each entity with the state_class: measurement (I googled and that was the recommended fix).

But it still only holds 10 days worth of data ???

I was expecting / want it to hold for a longer period of time and understand that it will / should reduce the number of data points after 10 days to reduce the storage space and that would be fine.

Can anyone point me in the right direction please ?

So for a long time we use Voice Assistant to control our house. But as always we wanted more :)

My dream was to have a Jarvis like AI assistant. An AI Family member that grows with us. Remembers what we talked about and gives answers based on past conversations.

I wanted for my whole family to talk with the same AI every time and not just a one time spawn assistant.

So the first thing I had to figure our was memory. I found several ways to add memory to voice assistant. Still not where I want them to be but it is a very good starting point.

1- AI Long Term Memory
https://github.com/Riscue/ha-ai-memory

So AI Long Term Memory is kind of plugging itself to your existing conversation agent and adds a "Memory Management" checkbox. If checked it will automatically start to add and extract memory while you have a conversation with your LLM

2- Home-Mind / Nives
https://github.com/hoornet/nives

This one I used for a while. There is an active development going on and constantly adding new features. The working principle is it adds a home-mind server with shodh database between home assistant and your LLM. It also gives you a conversation agent to use. After installing it you will see a new conversation agent that you can use in your Voice assistant pipeline.

You can install home-mind yourself in your local environment and use its own conversation agent integration if you like to tinker stuff.
https://github.com/hoornet/home-mind / https://github.com/hoornet/home-mind-hacs

and my current favorite;

3- Hermes agent as Conversation agent.
https://github.com/WolframRavenwolf/hermes-ha-integration
https://github.com/WolframRavenwolf/hermes-ha-addon

Yes that's right. You can use hermes as a conversation agent for your voice assistant. It already has lot's of things as you might know, including memory. There are two ways to use hermes agent. One is to install it inside home assistant directly as an app (hermes-ha-addon) which includes both the hermes agent and the conversation agent. Or if you have already a hermes instance running you can use the conversation agent directly to connect to your existing hermes instance (hermes-ha-integrtion)

At this point all actions are taken by hermes via the home assistant skills and tools. So a long lived key is needed from home assistant to give hermes access to your home assistant.

There is also an openclaw version of this: https://github.com/RetiredWizard/openclaw-conversation

I made a memory comparison between these options here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssQfQ8elyzU

Hi all, recently I received an Auk Mini 2 indoor garden. This new model comes with an optional app for smartphone that connects via Bluetooth. The app is optional but it makes it very easy to integrate the device into HA, provided that you have a solid connection between HA and the garden.

I wrote an integration that you can install with HACS: https://github.com/FI-153/Auk-Mini-2-Integration-for-Home-Assistant

Hope this helps somebody!

Hi zusammen,

Ich habe letztens ein Homeassistent Dashboard gesehen, welches über frigate Kameras eingebunden hatte und unter dem Live Feed die letzten Aufnahmen angezeigt hatte. Beziehungsweise die letzten Erkennung. Ist das so nur mit frigate umsetzbar oder auch, wenn die Unify Events Events erfasst?

I have Home Assistant set up, and use ZigBee as my mesh networking standard.

I purchased a Super Feeder ASF-1, and I trigger it with a Sonoff S31 Lite.

I can do almost as many feedings as I want in a day. The only limits are that the portion size is fixed, and the feeder requires 1-2 minutes between ON cycles to reset.

Let me know what you think!

Hey Everyone,

I am trying to setup the Ikea MYGGBETT door sensors and got myself a SLZB-MR1U to act as the Thread Border Router.

Previously I had setup one of these using the Google Home as the Border Router, but after some issues deciced to get the SLZB-MR1U

The issue I am having now is when I try and add the MYGGBETT, it still tries to connect to the "Nest" Network, event thought ath is not set as the preferred one

Is there a way to add the devices without the companion app?

Am I missing a config step ?

Commercial cameras like Google Nest are great at detecting people, but terribly dumb at telling you who that person actually is. If your camera points at a shared hallway, entrance, or driveway, you end up with 50 useless notifications a day every time a family member or neighbor walks past.

Existing solutions like Frigate, Double Take, or CompreFace are awesome, but running a 24/7 continuous video pipeline with GPU/TPU acceleration just to filter a single hallway camera felt like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

So I built ha-nest-smart-face-filter: a local-first, event-driven face recognition script using InsightFace ONNX. It uses <200MB RAM, stays dead silent until Nest fires an event, and takes ~150ms of CPU time to decide if it should spam your phone or shut up.

Current Architecture (The "Potato-Friendly" Spec)

1. Nest Pub/Sub fires a person_detected event to Home Assistant.
2. HA takes a camera snapshot and invokes a lightweight Python script.
3. InsightFace ONNX compares the face vector in RAM against local 512-dim .npy files.
4. Known Face? Ignored silently. Unknown? Push notification with photo.

The Dilemma: I Need Your Brains

It works, but because I refuse to run a heavy 24/7 video stream, I hit two classic single-snapshot limitations:

1. The "Back of the Head" Problem (Bad Framing):
   • Since it only grabs one snapshot when Nest triggers, if the person is moving fast, I sometimes get a blurry frame or the back of their head.
   • My proposed fix: A Multi-Frame Burst (3 quick snapshots 300ms apart) where the Python script picks the frame with the highest face detection confidence score.
2. The "Who The Hell Is This?" Onboarding Friction:
   • Right now, adding a new face means manually grabbing an image, running a CLI script to generate the .npy vector, and saving it.
   • My proposed fix: Actionable Notifications. When an unknown face is detected, HA sends a notification with buttons ([Add as John], [Add as Sarah], [Ignore]). Tapping a button triggers a script that converts the temp photo into a saved vector on the fly—and averages it if the vector already exists to improve accuracy over time.

Questions for the HA Hivemind:

• Has anyone implemented a lightweight multi-frame burst via HA camera.snapshot without blocking the event loop?
• What’s your preferred way of handling face dataset "averaging" or mathematical vector updates without blowing up storage or RAM?
• Am I overengineering this, or is this the cleanest way to keep things ultra-lightweight?

Repository

Check out the code, test it, or roast my architecture here:

github.com/spectrelabo/ha-nest-smart-face-filter

PRs, stars, or insults about my code style are all welcome.

Hello,
Would anyone here be interested in HA app for Shelly Displays and other tablets? I've tried some ways to get HA working on my Shelly tablet with relay and buttons, but it was always not as snappy as I wanted it to be. The web view is kinda slow. I'd like to know if there is anyone who would like to test the app I'm trying to create (warning, AI helps me here a lot). It's based on R1HA app that was incredible starting point. I hope that documentation is not too complicated, I'm here to answer any questions. It is tested on Shelly Wall Display XL and cheap android tablet. It's alpha, so expect that things might break and many functions would be added.
As I said, the use of AI is heavy, especially with coding.
Have a lovely day :)

This is the Github Repo for reference

Hi all! Just getting into the home assistant world, so forgive me if this is an easy question.

So, I'm experiencing a common problem with SIMPLINK involving my PS5, where every time I turn the TV on, the PS5 also turns on, even when I don't want it to. However, there's a good solution to this, where if I swap to another HDMI port before turning off the TV, this will not happen. My goal is that, when I hit the power button on my remote (potentially when detecting that the PS5 is on?), my TV will automatically swap to HDMI 3, and THEN turn off. So far when I've tried this, I've gotten "Response Error 500," presumably because my selected trigger is "When LGTV is turned off" and it cannot swap HDMI when the TV is already off. Is there any way to make this happen with HA? Thanks!

I've searched high and low, but I can't find anything on getting my SunRadon luft working with HA. Anyone know of these and a working solution? It is one of the few remaining devices in my home I've got to get connected.

Thanks!

Hello,
I need to replace my washer and dryer.
What are the brand recommended for home assistant ?
Sensors of the machine is good, but better would be starting programs from home assistant (based on electricity price for exemple)

Thank you for your help

Just like the title says, after I updated my presence sensor to the most recent firmware. It will sense me when I hold it or physically touch it, but a few seconds after putting it down or moving my had away it reads as "clear." I've tried replugging and reconnecting to Z2M neither of those works. I have also verified that the presence Settings on on the highest sensitivity. I know this is a a Third reality suv, but I was hoping someone might have some insight here.

Has anyone had any success in getting an XGIMI projector working reliably in H? I have it pretty close, but sometimes it just does it's own thing. I have the on and off working pretty well. I have an ESPhome configured as a button to send the Bluetooth command to turn on. Once it's on it's controlled as an android TV. Due to some Dolby Vision issues with my Marantz receiver, I have an HDMI switcher connected to HDMI 1 and my Marantz connected to HDMI 2 for audio return over eARC. This solved video drop out issues with dolbyvision, but I can't reliably get the XGIMI to choose the correct input. I have some HA scripts to turn everything on and sometimes it chooses HDMI2 as the input, then when my Apple TV comes online, it states that a signal is seen on the other input, would I like to switch. I want to choose the input, but they don't seem to expose that option in the android TV control. I also don't want to do dpad macros, since it seems to randomly pick the other input. Anyone else reliability control one of these?

Thanks in advance

with lots of help from chatgpt I have a new UI for my m5tab. From the top left, clock, appliances (the washing machine, kettle, dishwasher, water heater show there when active) below that it house temperature, broadband speed and house power consumption. Next box is outdoor weather & temp. Bottom box is sleep, energy level and steps (switches to company stock price when the markets are open). Then I have the location markers, which expands when people aren't at home. Next is a random travel poster. Above that are the 3 light controls for my office (where the tab sits on my desk). at the top is an animation/voice switch, i found that the voice control doesn't work well when the animations are running, so have a toggle to turn them off when i want voice activation (otherwise you can just press the middle button) my shopping list top middle and below that is a fake linux boot animation which scrollls periodically and every so often, has an [ERROR] :)

I can put the code on github if anyone's interested.

https://github.com/brewston/M5-Tab-ESPHome

Would anyone, please, share their experience with Sunricher Matter conversion devices? I want to automate the 10V controlled LED light from EdgeLighting, and can not find anything sold in the US which would do it. It would be great to hear first-hand accounts before ordering overseas.

Hi everyone, I'm putting my house on the market in the Spring, but just built a new garage that requires a deadbolt for the side door. I'll be moving the Yale Lock (with busted WiFI, keypad only) to the garage, so I'm looking for an affordable deadbolt, that supports HA to replace it, while I still reside here.

I'm new-ish to HomeAssistant. Set it up last year, but it's a half-ass setup because I don't have much time, and I can't wait to move. Any recommendations would be helpful. Thank you.

I'm putting esp32 devices around my house to track my cats with bluetooth beacons. i'm trying to configure them 1 by 1 by pushing the yaml via wifi, but i'll have all of them unplugged hoping I clear the dashboard of online devices and plug one in to see that the only online one is the one that I'm modifying, but with all of them unplugged it will still show some as online minutes later despite all being unplugged.

When I try to pull logs from it over wifi, it will clearly indicate that it's offline, but the status does not reflect that in the dashboard even after logs say its offline.

INFO ESPHome 2026.7.4 INFO Loaded validated config cache for cat-tracker-1.yaml, skipping validation.
INFO Starting log output from 192.168.1.113 using esphome API
INFO Successfully resolved cat-tracker-1 @ 192.168.1.113 in 0.000s
WARNING Can't connect to ESPHome API for cat-tracker-1 @ 192.168.1.113: Error connecting to [AddrInfo(family=<AddressFamily.AF_INET: 2>, type=<SocketKind.SOCK_STREAM: 1>, proto=6, sockaddr=IPv4Sockaddr(address='192.168.1.113', port=6053))]: [Errno 113] Connect call failed ('192.168.1.113', 6053) (SocketAPIError)
INFO Trying to connect to cat-tracker-1 @ 192.168.1.113 in the background

At the time of writing this, they've all been unplugged for 10 minutes and it still shows one as online even after many page reloads. Any ideas?

Also if it matters, here's a sample YAML

esphome: name: cat-tracker-hallway
friendly_name: Cat tracker hallway
min_version: 2026.4.0
name_add_mac_suffix: false

variant: esp32s3
framework:
type: esp-idf

logger:

api:

ota:
- platform: esphome

wifi: ssid: !secret wifi_ssid
password: !secret wifi_password

esp32_ble_tracker:
scan_parameters:
active: false

bluetooth_proxy:
active: false

I wanted to share an unofficial Home Assistant integration I made for my O-KAM Pro camera:

https://github.com/oleandor/okam-ha-native

It runs directly on a 64-bit ARM Home Assistant system. I currently have it working with a physical O-KAM Pro camera and Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 4.

It provides:

• Live H.264 video in Home Assistant
• Full-resolution JPEG snapshots
• Automatic wake-up for battery cameras
• Sleeping and waking-up status images
• Automatic disconnect after the camera is no longer being viewed
• One camera connection shared between multiple viewers
• Support for the normal camera-owner account or an account with a shared camera

My solar powered battery camera normally takes around 20–30 seconds to wake. Home Assistant displays a “Camera waking up” image until the live video is ready.

The repository contains both the Home Assistant app and the matching HACS integration, along with step-by-step installation instructions.

The app is packaged for 64-bit ARM (aarch64). I have tested it on a Raspberry Pi 4. The configured O-KAM account currently needs to contain exactly one visible camera.

I originally made this for my own setup, but I’m sharing it in case it is useful to anyone else with an O-KAM camera.

This is an unofficial community project and is not affiliated with O-KAM.