in times when everyone is crazy about ai, im just a retro fan. i like real physical stuff, collecting vintage, and i just like to make somethin smart every now and then. everything here actually works and runs on home assistant, got all the modern gadgets like voice assistant inside, but id rather focus your attention on the physical side and all these details.

ps. everything i could actually buy is original from the 60s and 70s, some parts are iconic for people who remember the communist era in poland, and whatever i couldnt find or buy i built myself.

ps2. if u find this interesting ill post a video with more details later, this panel is just part of a bigger retro project and there are a few more cool features to show.

Thanks to the combined efforts of a few community members, PowerSync and Teslemetry custom integrations, plus Teslemetry in the upcoming 2026.11 release, make Home Assistant the first and only consumer platform that can directly control a Powerwall 2 and Powerwall 3's charge and discharge rate, down to the watt, and it only works locally (aka no cloud).

I have already used this to setup Predbat to charge and discharge my Powerwall 3 directly, and it should open up the doors to allow Tesla Powerwall owners to take full control of their batteries.

This capability does need the Tesla Fleet API for initial setup only, and it hasn't been integrated into the Tesla Fleet integration yet, so PowerSync and Teslemetry are the only ways to try it out in Home Assistant right now, but that will change in time.

EDIT: Turns out PowerSync Cloud enabled this capability at the same time, so it's technically a tie for first.

I love doing smart home stuff to make her life easier. She had recipes all over. Some in books, some from bookmarks on her phone, some she just googles to find it again. I decided to make things a bit more organized.

I chose to use a binder with sports card protective pockets. I make the card on my PC with a pic of the food then have it printed at Walmart photo. Then I stick an NFC on the back of it and write the recipe name to the NFC tag.

I have Mealie installed on my local LLM box (Gemma4). I already have the recipe loaded in Mealie and that’s what’s called.

I put the Mealie integration on HA so the pipeline runs through there first.

It’s displaying on an Echo Show 8 Gen 2 that I unlocked yesterday. It’s running View Assist currently.

Overall I’m pretty impressed with how Gemma can strip out all the ads, commentary, etc from online recipes and give just the needed info. I also took a pic of a cookbook page which Gemma and mealie worked together to do the same.

Nice side result - girlfriend approval factor went up by 20 points!

I made this (with the help of AI, of course) to control my smart home from a small 3D model of my flat, and thought some of you might like it. Here’s what it does:

• Build your home in 3D in the browser. Trace rooms on a grid and drop furniture from a catalog, with a live 3D preview.
• Objects bound to real devices. Clicking a lamp toggles the real light. Lamps light the room and cast shadows, and the sun moves with the time of day.
• Auto-generated widgets. A side panel with a widget for each device, grouped by room.

Free, open source, installs through HACS: https://github.com/CarlesRojas/ha-diorama

Feedback welcome!

Just found out about actionable notifications. What a game changer. So many things you can do quickly. Just getting things figured out with them. So far I just have open camera feed if door opens.

What is everyone else using actionable notifications for?

I will preface this by saying that everything regarding Home Assistant was built off vibes and the soldering portion of this really put my skills to the test (I have no skills). With some custom CAD and my Prusa XL for 3D printing the case (and the tank lid in clear PETG), it is almost done.

I started this because I wanted to monitor the water level in my Waterbox AIO. Then I realized I could automate my Kessil light. Then, obviously, “what about pH monitoring?” And temperature was easy enough to add, so I could finally ditch the shitty dummy probe from Amazon.

Naturally, this turned into an ESP32 aquarium controller with a custom Home Assistant dashboard, optical water-level sensors, pH calibration, and a draggable sun that controls the lighting. Apparently I needed another hobby inside my hobby.

The tank has Java fern, Anubias, hornwort, water spangles, water onion, and a few other plants, with no injected CO₂. It also has a betta—or at least it did. He’s currently in a hospital tank, which unfortunately might soon become a hospice tank. Hoping he gets to come home and enjoy the unnecessarily elaborate setup I’ve built for him.

Hardware / supplies

• Waterbox AIO 10 aquarium
• ESP32-S3 development board — N16R8 version
• Screw-terminal breakout board for the ESP32
• Waterproof DS18B20 temperature probe with a DFRobot terminal adapter
• Two DFRobot SEN0205 optical water-level sensors
• ElectroCookie solderable prototyping board
• Resistors for separate voltage dividers on each water-level signal
• DFRobot Gravity Analog pH Meter V2 interface board
• H-101 pH electrode
• DFRobot Gravity 16-bit ADS1115 ADC module
• pH calibration buffers and probe storage solution
• Kessil A80 Tuna Sun aquarium light
• M5Stack DAC2 module — GP8413 dual-channel 0–10V output
• 3.5 mm TRS cable and screw-terminal adapter for the Kessil control connection
• WAGO lever connectors for power and ground distribution
• Hookup wire, connectors, solder, and plenty of patience
• Aqara G3 camera
• Home Assistant and ESPHome running on my home server

I built custom cards for:

• pH: sliding scale, species reference bands, alerts, and a two-point calibration form that saves calibration to the ESP32
• Temperature: animated thermometer plus expandable history
• Water level: an illustrated tank with subtle surface ripples and a slowly swimming fish; the displayed level changes between normal, low, and critical
• Lighting: an interactive sun that controls the aquarium’s simulated day
• Camera: tank view alongside the readings

The lighting controls

There are two modes:

• Live mode follows the actual time.
• Manual mode lets me drag the sun across the sky and immediately change the lamp’s brightness and spectrum. It holds that position instead of snapping back to the clock.

There are also separate brightness/spectrum sliders and a settings panel for sunrise, sunset, ramp duration, peak brightness, and dawn/daytime/dusk spectrum.

The current freshwater profile runs 10am–4pm, with a 30-minute ramp up, a 50% daytime plateau, and a 30-minute fade down. Spectrum stays toward the warmer end of the Tuna Sun’s range.

I completely renovated our server room and upgraded the lighting to make it a bit more functional using Home Assistant, WLED and our monitoring.

The light visualizes real-time network bandwidth usage with flowing light waves and infrastructure alerts through color changes.

You can find more details over at r/WLED and r/cableporn.

Renovation and recabling:
https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn/comments/1xfddqn/renovated_our_server_room/

Technical:
https://www.reddit.com/r/WLED/comments/1xeliw5/realtime_bandwidth_visualization_in_our_server/

I really appreciate all your feedback!

I maintain ws_core, an integration for personal weather stations. It takes the raw readings (temperature, humidity, pressure, wind, rain total, and optionally UV, solar radiation and lightning) and calculates a myriad of items.

It's out for a few months, and quite a few of you are using it, thank you also to whomever has contributed to it.

Screenshots of the two of the dashboards:

Some examples what you can do with it:

• Water the garden only when it needs it. It calculates evapotranspiration (ET₀) and a water deficit from your own readings, can feed Smart Irrigation, and has a blueprint that skips watering after rain.
• Pull in awnings and blinds before strong gusts.
• Get warned before frost, in time to cover plants or drain outdoor taps.
• Know when it's too hot to work or exercise outside, from UTCI and WBGT heat stress.
• Rain alerts from your own gauge, plus an optional countdown to the next rain.
• Fire danger, a barometric outlook from your own pressure readings, snow, degree days and more, if you want them.

There are a ton more features in there, all documented properly.

It comes with 10 ready-made automation blueprints and 5 dashboards, and setup suggests the right sensors for common stations.

New in recent releases

• Forecasts that learn from your own station. Pattern Forecast gives the chance of rain in the next 1, 3 and 6 hours, frost overnight, a hot day, strong gusts and thunderstorms, learned from your station rather than a regional model. It can learn from the history Home Assistant already has, so numbers can appear minutes after you turn it on. Each forecast says when it has proven itself (maturity: skilled), so your automations can wait for that.
• A rain chance that keeps score. It checks your station's rain estimate and the forecast provider's against your gauge every 6 hours, and leans on whichever has been right more often where you live. 2.13.5 makes the comparison fair by scoring both on the same 6 hours.
• Sensors that explain themselves. A blank value now tells you why: a missing sensor, a formula that doesn't apply right now, or a model still collecting data.
• Faster storm warnings. Nearby lightning raises the alert straight away and keeps it for 30 minutes after the last strike.
• A new phone-friendly dashboard (screenshots): the whole picture on one screen, pop-ups for the details, and an optional photo of the current weather behind it. Needs only Bubble Card.

Privacy. The calculations run inside Home Assistant. By default it fetches a forecast and runs an hourly sanity check against Open-Meteo (free, no API key); you can turn both off, and everything else that uses the internet is opt-in. No telemetry.

Getting started

1. Search for Weather Station Core in HACS, download it and restart Home Assistant.
2. Add the integration and check the sensors it suggests for your station.

I test on a Shelly WS90 and would love to hear how it does on other stations.

Docs

• Method and equations: https://kmich.github.io/ha_ws_core/science/
• Pattern Forecast guide: https://kmich.github.io/ha_ws_core/guides/pattern_forecast/
• Sensor reference: https://kmich.github.io/ha_ws_core/sensors/
• Source: https://github.com/kmich/ha_ws_core

AI disclosure: I used AI coding tools extensively while building this integration. All architecture decisions and hardware validation were done by me, and I reviewed and tested the resulting code against my actual Shelly WS90 station.

This "little" remote control opens and closes the rolling gate in front of our house, as well as the garage door, from a distance as I approach the property via internet.

Bonus features:
- the current charge level of our home solar battery (which helps me decide whether or not to plug in the car to charge)
- the arrival time of the next train at the nearby railway crossing (i.e., when the barriers will come down)
- button for our wallbox in the basement; unfortunately, it always defaults to a "neutral" state, but it needs to be set to "off" to schedule a delayed charging session via Home Assistant

The device consists of an ESP32 and a 2.8-inch ILI9341 touch display, housed in a small plastic box. The ESP32 connects to the car’s Wi-Fi network and our home’s Home Assistant server.

I've been building out my Home Assistant setup for years, and it finally reached a point where I’d like to share how I built it. The most important difference to other setups is that while as much as possible is using YAML configuration over UI, no YAML is written by hand. Everything is defined in Python through a framework I built (PyConf), which compiles down to ~457,000 lines of generated YAML from about 63,000 lines of Python.

The framework is what makes it fun to work on. The house is defined as a hierarchy of areas (rooms, porches, garages, plus an accessory dwelling unit), each knowing its lights, locks, cameras, thermostats, and media players. Devices are typed objects: adding one to an area registers all of its entities automatically. Devices and entities carry semantic tags, so a magnet sensor registered as an exterior door becomes a security device that shows up on the security dashboard and triggers door-open alerts, while lights tagged 'accent' stay out of occupancy automations. Behavior lives in self-contained “apps” with their own configurable inputs, so you can tune things from the UI without touching code. Dashboards are generated from the same model: 13 of them, including one per wall-mounted tablet, each automatically showing the views for the devices in its room.

It is developed like software, because it is: 5,400+ automated tests across 374 test files, a six-stage pre-commit pipeline (ruff, usort, black, flake8, YAML regeneration, mypy), validation that catches duplicate automation IDs and missing actions before deploy, and git-based deploys with automatic rollback if validation or reload fails. I started this long before the AI revolution, but it turns out that this is what makes AI based development much easier and more robust. Using this model, it is trivial to ensure that when I add a device, I do it in one place. It’ll automatically show up on all dashboards where it needs to show up, without me or AI having to remember to update all the configs.

Scale: 1,000+ connected devices across 83 areas, 120+ ESPHome devices, 33 cameras, 40+ manufacturers.

A few of my favorite automations:

• Bed weight sensors detect who is in bed; getting up at night lights dim WLED floor strips so you can see without waking anyone or bumping into things.
• Two CPAP machines on smart plugs: when power draw crosses a threshold, the house goes into night mode.
• The dishwasher's status shows in the under-cabinet toekick lights: red = dirty, yellow = running, green = clean.
• Temperature and humidity sensors in the fridges, so a failing fridge gets noticed before the food does.
• Opening a window pauses heating/cooling, closing it resumes, including a sliding door and motorized window that aren't smart out of the box, driven by a Raspberry Pi with an SDR replaying RF remote commands over MQTT.
• Garage bays on ratgdo smart openers, with WLED bay lighting that follows the door state and controllers that shut down if they overheat.
• A medication reminder that starts polite at 9 AM and gets progressively less polite through the day, with NFC tags and notification buttons to mark pills taken.
• Five BambuLab 3D printers reporting completion and failure individually, so you know exactly which one needs attention.
• A 4-level alert system (Clear/Info/Warning/Severe) with per-person subscriptions, rate limiting, and actionable buttons, so a garage door alert comes with a 'Close it' button.

Self-healing is built in: tablets that lose connection get navigated back home, stale backups trigger alerts, and anything unavailable for 24+ hours gets flagged. WLED controllers and Inovelli light switches are automatically provisioned, so config drift is fixed quickly, usually without anyone noticing. My Zigbee network used to need daily restarts; since I moved to the ZBT-2 coordinator it has been flawless, so the auto-recovery I built for it mostly sits idle now, which is the best possible outcome for a self-healing system.

The house also has voice satellites that pause media in the room when they activate, and six dogs tracked three ways: BLE room triangulation, GPS collars, and AirTags for when one hides under furniture.

Happy to answer questions or go deeper on any piece, especially the Python-first config side.

I'm looking to replace the switches in my house to smart switches, wanted to know which ones that are available in the UK are compatible with Home Assistant and work well, for people in the region with experience :)

What I need - light on+off+dimming on the switch directly.

Scenes would be an added bonus, but not necessary.

Thanks!

I have been planning to install a couple of those tablets/displays around my home, but other than being able to activate the alarm or turn things off when leaving, I cannot find a good reason for them.

Yes, they look nice, but they're completely useless. What's your take on this? Tell me why I'm wrong.

1. My phone is always in my hand, I can always check on things.
2. If I need a camera panel, that seems to be an OK reason, but which wall would be a good place to put it so I can always see things? Monitoring 6-7 cameras would surely require a large monitor to be visible from 10+ feet away. A small tablet is useless.
3. It's much more practical to switch my TV to the camera feed with the press of one button than to turn around and focus on a small tablet 12 feet away.
4. A nice display next to a bed or the sofa by the TV seems much more practical than a fancy tablet on the wall.
5. Why would I want to go to a wall tablet to change the music and control my Spotify?
6. Voice controls are mostly enough for anything i ever need.

Literally moving in this week so I'll be purchasing asap , I'm new to this so let me know how you installed also but I do have HA set up on an old pc and ready to go

I recently discovered that it is possible to "change mode" on the newer IKEA KAJPLATS Matter-over-Thread light bulbs. This was a major source of happiness for me as I thought that the cheap zigbee solution was over and was already considering starting to switch to Philips Hue (which is 2x to 3x the price, yikes!).
TLDR: you reset the light (turn on and off 6 times), wait 5 seconds, and then you turn on and off 12 or 15 times (12 for "white" bulbs and 15 for "filament/incandescent" lights). I did it using a short script:

alias: Reset light
sequence:
  - variables:
      switch: switch.livingroom_relay_left
  - repeat:
    count: 6
    sequence:
      - action: switch.turn_off
        target:
          entity_id: '{{ switch }}'
      - delay:
          hours: 0
          minutes: 0
          seconds: 1
          milliseconds: 200
      - action: switch.turn_on
        target:
          entity_id: '{{ switch }}'
      - delay:
          hours: 0
          minutes: 0
          seconds: 1
          milliseconds: 600
  - delay:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 0
      seconds: 5
      milliseconds: 0
  - repeat:
      count: 15
      sequence:
        - action: switch.turn_off
          target:
            entity_id: '{{ switch }}'
        - delay:
            hours: 0
            minutes: 0
            seconds: 1
            milliseconds: 200
        - action: switch.turn_on
          target:
            entity_id: '{{ switch }}'
        - delay:
            hours: 0
            minutes: 0
            seconds: 1
            milliseconds: 600
mode: single

I got tired of grabbing my phone to dim the lights mid-movie, so I made an Android TV app. You pick one key on your remote, press it, and a Home Assistant panel slides in over any app: lights (brightness/colors), climate, scenes, locks, covers, cameras. Back closes it.

You can also link a doorbell button or sensor to a camera, so a small camera window pops up over your show when it fires.

Local only, no cloud, no ads, no analytics. Pairing is a QR code that opens your own HA login page, so 2FA works.

Google makes me run a closed test with 12+ people for 14 days before release, so I'm looking for testers with an Android TV / Google TV. Testers get Pro for free.

Join: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.aykutkorkut.flickbar (or email hello@haflickbar.com with your Google account and I'll add you)

More info: https://haflickbar.com

The camera picture in the screenshots is a sample image. Not affiliated with Home Assistant.

https://github.com/xman2000/temperate-card

My take on the ubiquitous thermostat card.

• It uses a few helper scripts to automatically switch between heating and cooling mode so that a cold morning and hot afternoon can be handled without intervention.
• Simple, intuitive buttons to set a comfort range with heat below and cool above targets and the ability to "allow" heating or cooling independently.
• It detects and respects when the temp is set at the thermostat. The card gives you a clear alert so you can re-engage control easily from Home Assistant.
• A clean reflexive design that can be swapped between bar and dial modes.
• Collapses to a simple display of the current temperature, the comfort range you selected, and an status icon (animated for heating and cooling).
• Visual editor for a custom experience.

Looking for a little feedback before I submit to HACS.

Found these very old “Stick N Find” Bluetooth things, they’re like the precursor to AirTags released in the 2010s. Assuming they still working any reason to not throw them away? Not sure if there’s any creative way to use them.

Hey all, i bought a house this summer and really working on making things smarter and more intuitive with even a kettle that turns on as soon as my alarm goes off in the morning.

But i wanted to measure what my NAS, Switch, HAOS PC and everything else in the powerstrip uses and the problem with the smart plugs is that they don’t fit together in a power strip, so i really hope someone found a powerstrip that could measure usage each (EU) socket individually, or do i have to make one myself? Since i did found “smart power strips” but they do all or nothing so it’s just like buying a normal strip with a smart socket.

Hope anyone can help me find a solution, ideally one for 6 - 9 plugs

Frigate Events Card v2.6 is out. It's a Lovelace card that puts your recent Frigate events, live WebRTC view, continuous timeline playback, and temporary false-positive masking in one card.

Available directly in HACS now — search for "Frigate Events Card" under Frontend.

What's new in 2.6

• Timeline playback: review your Frigate footage and events right inside Home Assistant. Scrub continuous recordings with color-coded event markers, play at up to 4096x for an instant timelapse, and tap any event marker to jump to that moment.
• Temporary mask manager: right-click (or long-press) a false detection to create a padded mask with a duration. The manager now shows a fresh camera snapshot with the mask polygon overlaid, live countdowns, per-mask duration changes, and one-click removal.
• Actionable Notification Blueprint: add a temporary mask right from your device's notification, so masking a new false positive takes one tap.
• New active masks sensor: sensor.frigate_active_masks exposes the active count, mask details, pending-restart state, and Frigate version for dashboards and automations.
• Live WebRTC feed: continuous live view above the gallery with self-healing reconnect and an optional mute toggle.
• Mobile friendly Timeline: optimized for phones, tablets, and TVs, so you can review your Frigate recordings from any device.

Mask features use the optional frigate_temp_mask companion integration. If you already have it installed, update the component and restart Home Assistant after upgrading the card.

Install

HACS → Frontend → search for Frigate Events Card → Download.

Or grab the release here: https://github.com/saihgupr/frigate-events-card/releases

yaml type: custom:frigate-events-card frigate_client_id: frigate event_count: 5 live_view: true live_view_entity: camera.wyze_camera video: true timeline_on_click: true

Feedback and feature requests are welcome.

GitHub: https://github.com/saihgupr/frigate-events-card

Hi everyone,

I’m thinking about repurposing my old HP Envy x360 15-cn0700ng as a dedicated Home Assistant server and wall-mounted touchscreen dashboard.

The laptop has the following specs:
Intel Core i5-8250U
8 GB RAM
SSD
15.6-inch touchscreen
360° convertible design
Working battery in good condition

My plan is to mount the laptop on a wall in tablet mode, leave it plugged in and running 24/7, and use its touchscreen to control my smart home.
I’d like the screen to turn off automatically after a few minutes of inactivity and ideally wake up simply by touching it, while Home Assistant continues running in the background.
I have a few questions:

Is it safe to leave this laptop plugged in and running 24/7 for several years?
I’m particularly concerned about battery degradation, heat and long-term reliability.

Has anyone successfully used an HP Envy x360 or other Laptop touchscreen as an always-available dashboard?
Can the screen wake up from a touch after turning off?

What’s the best way to run Home Assistant while keeping the touchscreen usable?
Would running Home Assistant in a virtual machine under Windows be a good solution?

What idle power consumption could I realistically expect with the display turned off?

Are there any specific precautions
I should take regarding cooling, battery health or power settings when mounting the laptop on a wall?
I’d especially appreciate hearing from anyone who has used an older convertible laptop for a similar setup.

Thanks in advance!

I gave a rundown in my last post (here) on Fred and how he runs the house. Now I'm looking to expand presence detection in some of the less traveled/static areas: hallways, entry, cellar/basement areas. Those spots don't need the two-radar boxes I use in the main living spaces.

This is v1: an HLK-LD2450 and a Seeed XIAO ESP32-C6 running ESPHome, in a printed shoji enclosure. The radar tracks up to three targets with zones. The C6 also runs a listen-only BLE scanner for Bermuda, so each unit adds a room-presence receiver too.

• The radar sits behind a flat 3.7 mm PETG face. The lattice and seal are a flush inlay, so the radome is the same thickness everywhere.
• Fully press-fit, no screws or solder. The wiring is a GH1.25 pigtail to DuPont.
• Two-colour PETG on a P1S with AMS, about 4 hours, 102 × 88 × 40 mm.
• XIAO C6 tip: pull GPIO3 and GPIO14 low at boot to use the onboard antenna.

The first unit is on the entry hall table. It runs empty-room tests before it's allowed to drive anything, and more are on the printer.

Anyone running LD2450s in low-traffic spots: how are you handling false positives?

This may be a weird one. I recently switched to android, and the one big thing I miss is Apple find my's ability to track my phone for family members and friends to see my location. Is it possible to have the companion app (which I allow location tracking at all times) to update find my as if my phone were an iPhone?

I do still have a mac and an active Apple icloud account.

I found Haven here on Reddit and wanted to try it on our living room Samsung. Credit to u/naturelgass for building and sharing the original project!

We adapted it into a household dashboard with camera snapshots, house status, weather, energy, water, and notifications. Home Assistant opens it when the Roku screensaver starts, and pressing Roku Home takes us back to watching TV. No TV root needed—it runs as a Tizen app.

Here’s the walkthrough: https://youtu.be/hda5WXHWlpI

Morning Tinkerers!

Look for recommendations about 3D printers which are easily exposed to Home Assistant. I am not looking for a top end model, but something that can handle PETG and ASA well for the use cases I currently have, mostly tidying up HA connected devices in the home and other bits in the car.

With the Bambu Lab firmware changes, I am just conscious that I do not want to buy something that will lose connectivity in the future.

I was originally looking at the QIDI Plus5 (non-affiliate Amazon link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0H44VXHHG ) but the price is prohibitive unless it was 50% off in a sale. Digging around, the FLASHFORGE Adventurer 5M Pro then started popping up a lot ( https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0CZPYPX47 )

Does anyone have any other suggestions up to about the £350 range? The 220mm³ volume of the Flashforge is already limiting some of my ideas into two part builds, so anything with a reliable larger plate?

Any ideas welcome!

EDIT: When I said ASA, I meant ABS - I know... that changes the whole playing field.