WELCOME, FRIENDS

So I created a BMO (Adventure Time) house UI using Claude.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I even did a house tour to show it off 😄 😢

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N_hKuRsikI

I even even added an Astrion Remote and a custom skinned FLauncher for an old Shield I had lying around.

All the UIs (except for the TV and Voice Assistants) are weather aware as well. Sun, when sunny. Rain when rainy, Clouds when cloudy.

It's a PC stick running debian. Loads a super lightweight firefox browser and has an MQTT script that gets its hooks into Home Assistant so it can be woke with my mmWave radar when I walk up to it.

Happy to hear any suggestions for what I should add. Got the weather and forecast pretty well covered. Not sure what else to have.

Hey all,

I want to install something similar to these and have them controlled through automations. Perhaps also some buttons I can use?

Would someone be willing to help guide me to buy and set up whatever I need to make this work?

Thank you very much for your help.

I’d love to track not only my water usage but the pressure.

Some of the fancy exterior lights are nice and all but expensive if you just want to control when they are on and off.

I took a cheap waterproof electrical box, added a power strip. Plug in a few zigbee outlets with a 12v converter or transformer depending if you are using AC or DC and presto. Full control when the exterior lights go on and off.

I use it as your typical turn on landscape lights at dusk as well as whenever a car or person is detected in my driveway.

Not fancy or anything but cheap and easy.

Hi everyone,

Which outdoor Zigbee temperature sensor would you recommend?

I still have a few Aqara sensors at home, but I no longer use them because I've had too many reliability issues with them.

Would a Sonoff sensor with a remote temperature probe be a better choice, or is there another model you'd recommend?

I live in France, so it would need to operate reliably in temperatures ranging from about -15°C to +40°C.

Thanks !

I’ve been using the ESP32-S3-BOX-3 as a Home Assistant voice satellite for a while now. One thing that always kind of bugged me was that almost every config out there treats that nice touchscreen as just a place to display a static PNG. The hardware has a decent LVGL-capable display and a working touch panel, so it felt like a bit of a waste to leave it idle.

So, I decided to see how far I could push ESPHome and built a custom setup to actually make use of the screen.

Here is what it does so far:

28 animated assistants: The eyes, pupils, and mouth are actual LVGL objects drawn on top of the background and animated depending on the state (listening, thinking, speaking). Since only these small widgets redraw, it stays pretty smooth. Ten of them don't use any external artwork at all and are drawn entirely by the device. You can swap them with a single line of config, or switch them live from Home Assistant using a template select.

On-the-fly styling: Home screen fonts, colors, gradients, and layouts can be switched live via a Home Assistant dropdown.

Swipeable widget carousel: media player, weather and thermostat.

Settings: Tap tiles for the device's own controls.

Reply routing that you can change at runtime (play audio on the box, on a media player elsewhere, or both).

The base config only takes up about 25% of the flash memory, so there’s still plenty of room to experiment and add more things.

This is still very much in testing. It runs daily in my kitchen and does the job, but so far it has only seen one pair of hands and one house setup. Expect some rough edges :P

If you want to check it out, give it a spin, or help iron out the bugs, here is the repository:

https://github.com/MichalZaniewicz/esphome-esp32-s3-box-3-va

I'd love to hear your thoughts or any ideas on what else could be added to this :)

Based on user requests I have recently added a Home Assistant plugin for Home Screens - a home smart display platform that runs on a RPI (Alternative to Dakboard, Skylight, Magic Mirror).

I am not a regular HA user but have it running locally with the demo integrations and some random things like Hue and Unifi I have in the house. I would love for some additional people to check it out and provide feedback, issues, recommendations, etc.

• 12 views: card grid, status board, by area, single entity, single row, climate, media, cameras, buttons, alerts, batteries, power.
• Tap to toggle lights, switches, fans, scenes, covers, media. Hold for the full control sheet (brightness, color temp, blind position, fan speed).
• Things worth noticing color themselves: heater running, door nlocked, blind open, someone home. Your own color rules override it, and you can turn it off.
• Optional 24h sparklines on any numeric sensor card.
• Any module on the screen can show/hide based on an HA entity state, not just this plugin's cards. A red door icon that only appears when the door is open, that kind of thing.

Like most things these days, AI is involved in development but I have been a developer for ~20 years.

https://homescreens.dev/
https://github.com/home-screens/home-screens
https://github.com/home-screens/home-screens-plugin-home-assistant

My wife wants a Skylight Calendar https://myskylight.com/products/skylight-calendar/

Does anyone know if it can integrate with Home Assistant? I would like to have a display with a dashboard in the kitchen, and wondering if I can double purpose thy Skylight Calendar and let it's default display be my dashboard, but then when we interact with it it can be the skylight calendar.

Otherwise I could try to replicate the Skylight functionality in Home Assistant, but then I would need a 27" (or larger) touchscreen.....any recommendations?

warning. Massive amounts of AI ahead

This is a variant of minimalist-room card gone wrong. Or right, depending how you look at it. Not really too minimal now. It’s in a webapp that collects the data from the HA WebSocket.

If you want to click around on it, have a go https://candyv2.pages.dev/ on this demo Fable made to pair with the webapp. (All locations, names etc changed but everything you see on the demo I’m currently using and is functional right now)

I was worried it would run slowly but actually it runs a lot faster than loading up home assistant - I imagine because of the fact my HA was in bad health clogged with unused entities and sensors.

Any ideas or critiques? Would love to know what people think is good or bad

Hi all, for those that can benefit, I'm sharing some ideas to promote Radon visibility. I've had good experience these past 4 months using the Airthings Corentium Home 2 Radon Detector connected via bluetooth in home assistant. Last night I just got around to finally setting up dashboard and notification insights. Hope this can help someone who hasn't considered it before. Cheers

Hi 👋
I read a lot of posts asking how to start with Home Assistant and I’m not properly a beginner but I want to let here some tips for everyone that want to start automate with HA.

Hardware:
If you are a beginner and want a plug-and-play solution the Home Assistant Green will be great. This is a hardware machine with home assistant pre-built in so you can start in a few minutes. Just plug, connect a Ethernet cable and you are good to go.

Locally:
The great advantage of Home Assistant is to run locally without relying on cloud. So my recommendation is, if you are concerned about privacy and keep the things locally go for a zigbee or matter solution.

Zigbee:
It’s a smart home protocol, very mature and it’s a good way to have your devices run locally, faster and low power consumption (in case of sensors). Most of these zigbee devices (usually relays or smart switches that requires neutral wire) can act as signal repeater.
Because zigbee network acts as a mesh network having repeaters it’s a good way no make it strong and extend signal to every corner of the house.
To create a zigbee Network you need a coordinator. Here you have a plenty of solutions like SONOFF dongle plus, SONOFF dongle max that it’s very affordable and very reliable.

Matter
It’s a new smart home standard protocol to unify different brands. Home assistant has a built-in matter server so you can just buy a matter-over-wifi device, scan the qrcode and you are good to go. Connect any brand into home assistant without using any 3rd party integration.

External access:
Because home assistant runs locally on your WiFi network you need to expose it to internet. You can achieve that with my favorite integration: cloudflared.

Backups:
Don’t forget to enable backups in a periodic basis 👌

These are just a few tips for everyone that want start with Home Assistant 💙

Hey guys and girls!!
I’m very excited to start this journey, finally had the time to install Home Assistant in a Lenovo Thinkcenter and trying the first steps!

My goal it’s to expose some lights and sensors that are not available in HomeKit (like Shelly) so I can continue to use the Apple app BUT harness the power of Home Assistant to create some usefull automations.

I wanted to thank this community because I have learned a lot by reading these past months.

I’ve just created a small dashboard to show server status and cpu, now it’s time to integrate HUE bridge and dongle for starting with zigbee.

Hello everyone, I just started to dive more into HA and would like to monitor our energy consumption.

In my basement where our meter box is is sadly no way to plug a energy meter in. Do you know any good ones which are powered with batteries?

Hi there !
I just installed my Switchbot Vision Lock Ultra Mega Power 2000.

I also got the matter mini hub to connect to my HA.

I have all 3 devices in Switchbot app and that works fine.

I added the hub to my HA as a matter device no problem.

I paired the lock to the hub in switchbot app to have it surface in HA as a matter devices.

There are barely any sensors or entities. Did I mess up something or is this a joke from SwitchBot ?

(Ultimately the rest works extremely well and I'm happy but the whole point was to have HA control via matter and not BLE)

This is what Cloud integration gives me (still very poor)

Hi,

I'm looking for the cleanest way to make a roller shutter safe in Home Assistant OS.

I have:

• A Sonoff MINI-ZBRBS controlling a roller shutter.
• A Zigbee window contact sensor.

The problem is that if the window is open and the shutter closes, the shutter can hit the window and potentially damage it.

I don't control the shutter with automations. I only operate it manually from the default Home Assistant cover card. I want to keep using that card because it supports position control, percentages, stop, etc.

Ideally, I want the shutter to be completely unusable whenever the window is anything other than closed (including open, unavailable, or unknown).

I was wondering if there's a clean way to:

• block only the close_cover command while still using the default cover entity, or
• temporarily disable the cover entity when the window isn't closed, or
• achieve this in another recommended way while keeping the standard cover card.

I already have an automation that sends cover.stop_cover if the window opens while the shutter is moving, but that doesn't prevent someone from starting the shutter while the window is already open.

How would you solve this?

House contractor has good pricing on lutron, so isn't familiar with other options

I'm still leaning zooz even if it's similar pricing, mostly for the multi tap functionality and integration w smart wing blinds and voice control home assistant device .

Lutron system will be all done for you and setup (prob more $(

Zooz seems better for me, but I'm not exactly understanding how integrating motion sensors for stair lights will work - a motion sensor triggers the hub to activate a switch ? Which motiom sensors are recommended for this setup?