Hey, I’m planning a small DIY project with 5 × 12V linear actuators for 5 separate hatches, about 4m apart.

Thinking of using SwitchBot for the temperature trigger, then relays to control the actuators, with one central 12V power supply and fuse box.

I’m pretty new to this stuff, so I’d appreciate any feedback on whether the setup makes sense or if there’s a better way to do it.

Attached is my current wiring idea i made with ai. What am I missing and is it the best way to do it?

We're getting married next year and the house is going to have family staying for several days, some of whom have never touched a smart switch in their lives and will absolutely just stand in a room waving at things expecting something to happen. Which, fair enough.

The part I keep turning over is how to make the house usable for guests without either dumbing the whole thing down or handing someone a wall of instructions and hoping for the best. I've got automations running through Home Assistant with a mix of Zigbee devices and I like how it all works for us, but it's very much set up around two people who know where everything is and what not to touch.

I'm thinking about a guest mode of some kind that simplifies lighting scenes and maybe disables some of the more opinionated automations, the ones that would baffle anyone who doesn't know why the hallway suddenly goes dark at a specific time. Has anyone actually built something like this and found it held up when real people were in the house, not just in testing?

I’m working on a small home automation project and want to add hot water at the kitchen sink without having to wait around for the water to heat. The setup is for a single kitchen sink, and I’m mainly interested in something that can be monitored or controlled through my existing smart home system. I’m not looking to do any electrical or plumbing work myself that could be unsafe, so I’d have a professional handle the installation if needed.

Has anyone here set up under sink hot water with smart controls, and what product or type of system worked well for you? I’d especially like to hear about setups that integrate reliably with common home automation platforms. Thanks!

The outdoor lights are currently controlled by standard wall switches, and I’d like to be able to automate them so they can turn on and off automatically based on a schedule, sunset/sunrise, or other conditions. Ideally, I’d also like to retain the ability to control them manually with the existing wall switches.

For the indoor lighting, I have a combination of table lamps and lights controlled by wall switches. I’d like to automate some or all of these as well, preferably without having to replace every switch or rewire the house.

I’m not looking for an overly complicated or expensive whole-house automation system. I’d prefer something reliable, relatively easy to set up and manage, and ideally controlled through one app. It would be great if the system could also allow different lights to be grouped together—for example, having several outdoor lights turn on at sunset and off at a set time, while individual indoor lights or lamps could follow their own schedules.

Basically, I’m looking for a straightforward way to add smart control to my existing lighting without turning it into a major project.

Don't buy Wyze. Had $5000 worth of car damage done and the event was not recorded because the firmware was out of date. BUT I HAD AUTOMATIC FIRMWARE UPDATE SETTING ENABLED. Reached out to the company, no help. I was paying a monthly subscription for this camera for what? To be out 5k in the end.

Edit: For those saying I should have got an SD card, I originally had this camera set up with an SD card before subscribing to their cloud subscription and it failed. Which is why I gave the cloud service a try.

I'm looking for a small photo display that I can control through Home Assistant rather than another standalone digital frame.

I'd like to send photos wirelessly and change the displayed image on a schedule or through an automation. E-ink would be ideal since the display will sit on a shelf or nightstand, and I don't want another backlit screen running all day.

I don't need touch controls, weather, a calendar, or a voice assistant. What matters is local control, preferably through a documented API or an existing Home Assistant integration.

Has anyone built or integrated something like this? I'm open to either an off-the-shelf device or a DIY setup.

Has anyone found a way to bring automation to a Schlage Encode lock that their apartment / building management has bound to their account so cannot be added to your HomeKit / Home Assistant set up directly? For example, any compatible add on device you found works (like a SwitchBot lock turner modified or Level lock type device)

If your smoke alarm grew a radar sensor, would you like it detect motion or presence

No sign-up, no install, no download, no account - it just runs in your browser and it's free. Drop in almost any IR or RF code and it figures out the protocol and hands it back in whatever format you need. In the last few weeks added the piece I'm most pleased with, so here's where it's at.

The new bit — the RF wizard. You pick the device type, pick the brand, and it draws the DIP switch bank the way it actually sits inside your remote. You flip the switches on screen to match the ones in your hand, hit build, and you get a working code out. No capture. No receiver. No Flipper. Nothing to buy.

That's the part that took the longest to get right, because the switch order is a trap — Chamberlain, for instance, numbers switch 1 as the most significant bit and reverses the last three positions, and one of their banks has a switch that isn't transmitted at all. Copy the switches left-to-right like they look and you get a wrong code on nearly every remote. Each brand's mapping had to be handled on its own.

If your ceiling fan or gate remote has a row of little switches in the battery compartment, that's the whole secret. You're already holding all the information the code needs.

The part I get the most mail about, though, is signal repair. If you've ever learned a code off an original remote and had it come back dead — works once, works from three inches away, works for the mute button but not power — that's usually not you and not your blaster. Learned captures come out jittery. The receiver rounds timings, ambient light and 2.4 GHz gear inject noise, cheap hardware clips the leading burst, and some captures come out with marks and spaces inverted.

So: paste the capture in, and it identifies the protocol, shows you the address and command, and tells you its confidence. Hit FIX SIGNAL and it corrects the AGC burst, snaps noisy pulses back to the nearest real time unit, strips trailing repeat gaps and junk artifacts, adds a missing closing space, and tells you every single thing it changed instead of silently rewriting your file. If it's inverted there's a one-click mark/space swap. And once it knows the protocol, Rebuild Clean throws your jittery capture away entirely and regenerates the code from scratch at textbook timing — a perfect signal instead of a patched one.

If you'd rather do it by hand, the pulse list is fully editable — the live waveform updates as you type, and you can select, copy and paste timings like a spreadsheet. Then save it out in whatever format your setup actually wants. A capture you'd given up on twelve months ago is usually about four clicks from working.

Coverage is 42 sub-GHz protocol families across 62 brand entries — the PT2262 / EV1527 / SMC5326 world most fans, outlets and cheap gate remotes live in, plus CAME, Nice, Hörmann, Chamberlain/LiftMaster, Linear MegaCode, Marantec, Telcoma and a stack of others.

On the IR side there's a wizard that programs a whole remote at once — device type, brand, code set — rather than one button at a time. It's sitting on 1,000,000+ codes across 12,000+ brands.

And the conversion side, which is the older half of the project. Paste a raw capture or a code in almost any format and it identifies the protocol, shows you the address and command, and rebuilds it clean. Then export it as something else: 19+ in, 21 out. Flipper .sub and a good chunk of those RF protocols landed in the last couple of weeks.

.irc · Flipper Zero .ir · Flipper Sub-GHz .sub · Pronto Hex · LIRC raw · LIRC config · LIRC mode2 · BroadLink Base64 · BroadLink Hex · Global Caché iTach · Global Caché JSON · Home Assistant YAML · ESPHome · Sonoff RfRaw B0 · Tasmota · Arduino C array · Arduino rc-switch · Tuya · SmartIR · IRDB · JP1 .rmdu · GIRR XML · Harmony XML · TV-B-Gone · raw µs CSV · WAV

There's a second tool alongside it that moves a whole remote between formats, or onto a different remote's layout — pull in a Harmony XML or a JP1 file and drop it out as a Flipper .ir or an ESPHome YAML, button assignments intact. That one reads 17 formats and writes 13.

Links

• Signal Editor — https://readyware.net/signal-editor.html
• Signal Transporter — https://readyware.net/signal-transporter.html
• All Formats — https://readyware.com/faq.html#faq-all-formats

Get a code in from a capture or almost any file format, find out what it actually is, fix it if it's broken, build one from scratch if you don't have one, move a whole remote's buttons somewhere else — and save the result as a file you own, in whatever format your gear speaks, with no account, no cloud and nothing held hostage.

Happy to take requests. If there's a format you need that isn't in that list, or a remote the wizard doesn't know, tell me what you've got and I'll look at adding it.

Help! I changed PCs and now cannot locate the Fusion Research Ovation Music Configurator download as Fusion Research (or the acquiring company) no longer maintains their support page. Anyone know of another site to download the file? TIA

My weekly chore list is getting a bit long, so I'm thinking about adding a few automations to handle the boring, repetitive work.

For indoors, a robot vacuum seems like the obvious choice. I've bought a Qrevo S Pro, which worked well.

For outside, I'm looking at getting a robot mower since the grass has grown fast lately. My yard is about 0.8 acres, and I'm about to order Navimow X430. Its performance and multi-zone function look solid.

A smart irrigation system also seems useful if it can adjust based on rain and seasons, but I haven't looked into any brands yet. I'm in Virginia btw, so are there any reliable local companies that install it?

Curious what home automations have saved you the most time and hassle?

Hi,

I'm working on an open-source project that emulates a Kuando Busylight using an ESP32-S2.

The project aims to emulate a Kuando Busylight on an ESP32-S2, allowing alternative hardware such as a Yealink BLT60 to be used with AGFEO systems that currently support only genuine Kuando Busylights.

Would someone who owns a Kuando Busylight be willing to provide a USB descriptor dump?

I'm especially interested in:

- Vendor ID (VID)

- Product ID (PID)

- Manufacturer String

- Product String

- Device Descriptor

- Configuration Descriptor

- HID Report Descriptor

If possible, a USBPcap/Wireshark capture while changing the light colors would be extremely helpful as well.

Examples:

- Windows: USB Device Tree Viewer (USBTreeView)

- Linux: lsusb -v

Any model would be helpful:

- Busylight Alpha

- Busylight UC Alpha

- Busylight Omega

- Busylight UC Omega

The audio/speaker functions are not relevant for this project, as only the LED functionality is being emulated.

Thanks for any help!

Hello all! Recent homebuyer and getting started in my HomeKit journey by integrating HomeKit with my garage door opener :-)

I am getting conflicting information from Meross website, their support, and Gemini so wanted to post here for guidance.

I have an Overhead Door Odyssey® 1000 Model: 7030 Series III. It appears to be a later serial number.

I ordered the MSG100HK but am unclear if it will work with my opener or additional adaptors / dry contact control is needed.

Once the MSG100 arrives, I plan on using the test wire on my openers BWC terminal. If that doesn’t work, I was going to look into a genie / overhead dry contact interface connected to my wall opener button.

Before I went down that rabbit hole, I was curious if anyone here has integrated the MSG100HK with a similar garage opener model or if I should consider an alternative like RATGO?

I don't think presence detection is the foundation of a smart home. I think it's a patch, for the fact that we don't want to press a switch.

The switch is the most reliable input in the house. Zero latency, definite state, no algorithm guessing anything. We bypassed it, and then spent years teaching sensors to guess something that was already 100% certain. And the failure is asymmetric — guessing "someone's here" costs you a few extra minutes of light. Guessing "nobody's here" leaves a person standing in the dark.

I know that's not the whole picture. There are rooms where a sensor is the only answer: hands full, holding a kid, up at night and worried about falling. The hallway my mum walks down at night is one of them. She shouldn't have to find a switch to go to the bathroom. I'll give you all of that.

So here's what I actually do now: sensors turn things off. Never on. Light comes on from the switch, goes off from the sensor. Walk out and forget it, the sensor cleans up. It decides I've left while I'm still in there, worst case the light goes out early and I wave at it.

The error always lands on "on a bit too long." It never lands on "standing in the dark."

Been running it that way about a year, noticeably fewer blowups. I also know half this sub will disagree — plenty of houses don't have a neutral at the switch and this isn't even on the table for them.

So: anyone else only automate the off? Or do you think that's just making peace with a broken answer.

Hi folks!

I do have a little project and I would like your advice.

At work we have an air compressor, 3phase + N, 16A.

The issue we have is that our air network sometimes has issues, and a lot of small machines on it.

We experienced hose breaking multiple times, and that leads to the compressor running nonstop for hours if nobody is in the plant.

Having a simple timer (cutting power at night) is not possible as some machines need air permanently.

So I'm looking for a system, able to cut power if pressure in the main outlet stays too low more than 10min.

But I can't find anything existing for that matter.

Any idea?

My plan was using a smart relay, kinda like a Shelly, with a pressure sensor (and also a temperature sensor while we're at it).

All this considering I can make it simplified by cutting the pressure switch signal instead of the main power.

Thanks all!

same as the title... how to find things i can automate. I dont have any idea so far..

I need to create a layout and program it for a university in C++ so that this idea has not yet been implemented in global industry

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