Blog
Real-world Home Assistant guides, hardware reviews, and automation blueprints. No fluff — just what works.
Our washing machine died, so I bought a Miele for its native Home Assistant integration — then found it has no delayed-start register like the dishwasher.
The logbook card shows both Detected and Cleared for camera sensors. The fix: an input_text rolling log, an automation with trigger IDs, and a markdown card.
The built-in MeteoAlarm integration shows one alert at a time. cap_alerts creates one entity per DMI alert — storm, cloudburst, snow and heat, independently.
Setting up a XIAO ESP32-C3 as a Home Assistant Bluetooth proxy, adding Fresh Intellivent Sky fans over BLE, and a crash that looked like bad range but wasn't.
Full FMDN setup for Home Assistant — fix the unavailable state, dark-theme the Leaflet map via shadow DOM injection, and know when FMDN isn't the right tool.
How I connected eTilbudsavis to Home Assistant, sorted the list by store with price in the description, and added proximity push notifications for each store.
A daily 06:00 spoken briefing in Home Assistant: Google AI TTS, three family calendars, EV charge status, Waze traffic, power price and waste day.
My HA SQLite database hit 963 MB in six days. The exact recorder config that cut daily growth by over 70% — full YAML and the reasoning.
The radiator turns off when the window opens and back on when it closes — built as a reusable Blueprint so the next room takes 30 seconds.
A nightly CI pipeline runs 22 tests against my live Home Assistant setup and opens a GitHub issue when something breaks — before I notice.
What the MyŠkoda integration actually gives you in HA, what's missing, and a useful EV dashboard with battery progress and pre-conditioning.
A PricelessToolkit MailBoxGuard wired to an AliExpress LoRa gateway: instant push when mail arrives, no battery change in over a year.
Unifying a Sonos speaker with four Google Nest Audio speakers via Home Assistant scripts — no third-party bridges, no subscription.
Circadian lighting with WiZ bulbs and the HA sun entity — no third-party integration, one automation maps solar elevation to colour temperature.
No more adjusting the outdoor light timer twice a year — one HA automation turns Govee and LEDVANCE string lights on at sunset, off at midnight.
The living room lights dim when a movie starts, brighten on pause and restore when the TV turns off — no scene button, no voice command.
One automation pauses the TV the moment either phone rings — regular calls resume automatically, Messenger video calls get a notification button.
How I got a Reolink CX810 4K PoE camera to read license plates with AI and push a snapshot straight to the TV when someone pulls into the driveway.
Bosch dishwasher via Home Connect: a dashboard with programme selection and finish-time control, plus a button that finds the cheapest hour to run.
How I combined four Google Calendars plus waste collection into a single colour-coded HA view that replaced the wall calendar we'd had for years.
An HA home screen where every card earns its place: conditional cards, a priority alert ticker, and a Škoda section that follows the charger state.
Energi Data Service in Home Assistant: track hourly spot prices, find the cheapest charging window, and automate Škoda Elroq charging hands-free.
Roborock S5 Max in Home Assistant: interactive map card, room-segment cleaning, and the maintenance tracking that saves your brushes.
5 Tado zones in Home Assistant with mushroom climate cards, a CSS breathing animation for active heating, and presence setback that works.
How I got the Sentinel camera to send useful, actionable alerts instead of 40 motion pings a day — one automation, a mute toggle, and action buttons.
Mammotion Flora (Luba Mini 2) in Home Assistant: GPS boundary mowing, weather-aware scheduling, and the satellite count quirk nobody warns you about.
The six CSS constants I use on every card across three HA dashboards, plus patterns for progress bars, map cards and the ::before overlay.
Moving Home Assistant from Raspberry Pi 4 to a Dell OptiPlex 7060 on Proxmox VE — VM sizing, USB passthrough, and why snapshots changed how I handle updates.