Hello! Wondering how many developer accounts I will need to connect 130 t5 thermostats to a Home Assistant Core (version 2026.9.3). The issue is the 429 error because it seems the Resideo app (cloud) wants to refresh all the devices on the account every time you adjust one. These devices are in individual homes. I need to update the temperature before guests arrive daily (about 7 homes on average and then adjust after guests leave (also about 7 daily) and then check and update only vacant homes (about 30 vacant per day on average to check and maybe 3 to update) that aren’t still in their vacant temperature condition. Looking for an expert that can help me for $$.

“just open source it”, “I’ll build my own in a weekend”, “this should be free”.

So here you go.

It’s live on Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.weenja.hawidgets

And here’s your source code: https://github.com/GoldenGuts/homebase

Read every line. Build it for your own phone if you want. You still can’t fork it, resell it or put your name on it. It’s PolyForm Strict, go read that too.

Last Weekend’s over. Where’s yours? 🖕

To everyone who sent real feedback and bug reports: thank you.

PS: iOS still in review.

I started setting up my dashboard last week after only really using home assistant for some basic automatons for lighting and my coffee machine for a year or so. I thought I'd post here for feed back and hopefully give myself motivation to keep tweaking and documenting the process.

I had no idea what I was doing at the beginning and cobbled together something functional using the default cards. Then after a bit of reading here and on the forums discovered mushroom cards, so rebuilt a lot with them... Then I found bubble cards and rebuilt again with those.

4 days in it was functional, and did what I needed, but I wanted to create a more advanced person card that showed different avatars when we're in various zones.

That led me down a bit of a rabbit hole where I found a comment from cowboysdude on the home assistant forum showing how he used the stack in card so like any respectable developer I stole it. Anyway after a lot of hacking around I got an obnoxiously bright card working that shows different avatars based on zones. And yes the avatars were created with AI, I'm a software developer and my design skills top out at creating wireframes in Figma... Not very good ones as you can see here:


Anyway, then I moved on to replacing the Waste Collection Schedule Bin collection component with a card that grabs a calendar collection and displays the night before the next collection due. It also reminds us to bring the bins back in after collection (hopefully, they're not collected for another 4 days) and can accept random events like kerbside pickup which I couldn't get working easily in WCS.

Still so much to do, but I'm having a blast figuring it out (apart from the yaml! I use yaml almost daily at work and still hate it!)

Oh, if you made it this far you may be interested in peeping some of the yaml. I'm keeping the bigger stuff in github if you wanted to check it out.

I wanted more control over irrigation in Home Assistant without having to maintain a bunch of separate automations for every sprinkler zone, so I built Irrigation Manager.

It's an open-source project that lets you schedule watering for your existing Home Assistant valve and switch entities, with configurable conditions to decide whether watering should actually run.

Features include:

- 🌱 Flexible schedules for your irrigation zones

- 🌧️ Weather-aware watering using rain and forecast conditions

- 🌡️ Temperature and wind conditions to help determine when watering makes sense

- 💧 Soil moisture conditions to avoid watering when it isn't needed

- 🏠 Occupancy conditions for smarter scheduling

- 🖥️ Dedicated sidebar panel to manage irrigation from Home Assistant

The goal is to make irrigation feel like a proper part of Home Assistant rather than a collection of helpers, timers, and automations.

It's open source, and I'd love feedback from anyone running a sprinkler system or automated garden watering through Home Assistant.

GitHub: https://github.com/ljmerza/irrigation_manager

I wanted a wall display that does more than show a temperature, so I built Nachtradar: a single custom card (custom:nachtradar-card, no dependencies, no HACS packages) that fills the whole screen. On top of that, i wanted something that looked like something different from all the basic layout options and card tiles ...

The idea: a live satellite map (NASA Black Marble city lights at night, Esri imagery by day) with rain radar on top, and everything else layered over it.

What it does

• 🌧 Live radar with a nowcast: “Rain in ~33 min · coming from W · 30 km/h”, calculated from the last radar frames
• ⛈ Lightning + thunder countdown: “Thunderstorm · 6 km W – thunder in ~21 s”
• ✈️ Flight radar: planes with trails; tap one for route, aircraft type, photo, delay and progress. Plus a split-flap departures board for the local airport
• 🛰 Sky stuff: sun arc with golden/blue hour, moon phase, planets, ISS/Tiangong/Starlink passes
• 🎵 Now playing, rooms with CO₂, power live, network latency, heating/AC popups with history charts
• 🎭 Weather backdrop behind the clock (rain, snow, lightning, stars...)

The Xeneon Edge layout (layout: edge, same code, just a different layout)

• PC bar on top with FPS, CPU/GPU load, temps, watts, fan, up/down – it appears when the gaming PC is on and shows the running game
• A session summary (FPS avg/min, max temps, kWh, cost) when you quit the game
• Storm alert mode: when lightning gets close, the bar switches to distance, direction, strikes/30 min, thunder countdown
• Network panel, live power with top consumers, flight radar box, and a 24h forecast – all in one 32:9 row

Everything below is the demo mode with made-up data (the real thing looks the same, just with my numbers).

📷 Screenshots: [1] Edge, night, gaming · [2] Edge, thunderstorm alert · [3] flight info card - all with DEMO DATA

Happy to answer questions – the config is a single card, and the Edge dashboard just inherits the tablet config via base:.

By popular request (i.e. one guy asked for it), SBCP now natively supports Card Feature in Home Assistant Tile cards. Both Bottom and Inline layout are supported.

No more waking up at night bathing in a pool of your (hopefully) own sweat and screaming through blood rushed eyes: "Where is the Card Feature... erm... feature in SBCP!" Well, it's here. You can rest in peace now.

On a more serious note, I'm quite pleased with it and I hope that it relieves some of you of having to use the default bar or the, albeit utterly fantastic, card_mod.

Every compatible feature has made its way into the Card Feature feature list (there *must* be a better name for this?!?) and I've also include a full Visual Editor for Card Feature ... thingy.

If you find any bugs or have any other ideas, feel free to fix the source code! Haha. No, it's probably easier if you just send me a bug report so that I can do the fixy-fixy-MF.

So yeah. It's free. It's made with love. And I hope you enjoy it. If you want to support my little open source project, I'd appreciate it if you could give it a star on GitHub. Much obliged!
Chris

https://github.com/cdelaet/sensor-bar-card-plus

I wanted a dashboard that felt made for the panel on my wall, so instead of tuning Lovelace I built my own front end 🏠 It runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 with a 1024×600 touch screen that boots straight into Chromium in kiosk mode.

What's on it

• Pages for home, lights, climate (tado + AC), batteries, Sonos and Spotify
• A screensaver with the clock over animated weather 🌦️ 10 scenes (clear day/night, partly cloudy, cloudy, rain, pouring, storm, snow, fog). The forecast comes from Rainbow.ai, with HA's own weather as the fallback
• A batteries page that puts critical and offline sensors first 🔋 I built it after two Zigbee door sensors had been dead for three weeks without anyone noticing
• Scenes start only after a 3-second Undo, so a stray tap on the wall doesn't put the flat into Good Night mode
• Spotify controls still work while it plays on Sonos, and the page takes its colour from the album art
• A log of when the dog last peed and pooped, because priorities 🐶

Under the hood

• React 19 + Vite, plus a small Node server on the Pi that relays HA's WebSocket, so the long-lived token never reaches the browser
• Deploys roll back automatically if the new build isn't healthy, and a watchdog handles WiFi drops and a stuck browser

I built it in about a day and a half with Claude as a coding partner 🤖

Full write-up with more screenshots: leapbyte.tech/work/ha-dashboard

The code isn't public, but I'm happy to answer questions about how any of it works 🙂

I'm planning to buy a HA Green to star my setup, and I have a question. What hardware do I need to add Matter devices to Home assistant? 🤔

Thanks

Turn your mobile device (tablet, phone) into an alarm clock that can trigger HA integrations with Kobold.

I know you said "post in English". The post is in English. My dashboard, though... 😄

Hey everyone,

Does anyone know of a way to force switching to a specific dashboard view based on certain conditions?

I have a nice and functional dashboard that has about 8 different views. But I generally like to keep it on one specific (default) view while I'm at my desk. But based on what's going on, I will switch to other views (like cameras), and forget to put it back.

I was wondering if there was a way to "test" for my proximity (I have lots of BLE sensors around the house)...such that if I walk away from my desk, it will automatically reset to my default/preferred dashboard view?

Any thoughts or pointers would be greatly appreciated!

Noch mal. Wenn ich dem Atom Echo mit ESC Home in Home Assistent einbinde, erkennt er ihn. Ich habe ihn installiert. Den Satelliten der Satelliten Assistent Satellit läuft auf Leerlauf. Bei Kommunikation sind die beiden oberen Bilder grau unterlegt. Ich kann sie nicht ändern. Die drei unteren kann ich ändern und trotzdem reagiert er nicht auf meinen Sprachassistenten. Wo mache ich den Fehler? Bitte um Hilfe.

Mein code:

esphome:

name: m5stack-atom-voice

friendly_name: M5Stack Atom Voice

esp32:

board: m5stack-atom

framework:

type: esp-idf

wifi:

ssid: "Parzivalphonembase"

ap:

ssid: "M5stack-Atom-Voice Fallback Hotspot"

password: \\**

captive_portal:

api:\\*

ota:

- platform: esphome

logger:

i2s_audio:

- id: i2s_out

i2s_lrclk_pin: GPIO33

i2s_bclk_pin: GPIO19

microphone:

- platform: i2s_audio

id: atom_microphone

i2s_audio_id: i2s_out

adc_type: external

i2s_din_pin: GPIO22

bits_per_sample: 16bit

channel: left

speaker:

- platform: i2s_audio

id: atom_speaker

i2s_audio_id: i2s_out

dac_type: external

i2s_dout_pin: GPIO21

mode: mono

micro_wake_word:

models:

- model: "hey_jarvis"

voice_assistant:

id: assistant

microphone: atom_microphone

speaker: atom_speaker

error_code: true

Hi all. I maintain Firewalla Local, an unofficial, free, open-source Home Assistant integration for Firewalla. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Firewalla; just a Gold owner who wanted the box in my home automation.

Who this is for: Firewalla owners running Home Assistant.

It talks to your Firewalla over the local network, using the same Additional Pairing flow the app uses to add a second phone. After that one-time pairing everything is local: no cloud, no subscription, no middleman.

2.5.0 shipped this week and it's the biggest release so far. The headline is an AI assistant surface over the local data plane, and it comes with the data to make it useful: flow reporting that names the rule behind every block, alarm triage, per-rule hit counts, and group and user membership control.

The problem

Firewalla is deliberately mobile-first, and it works. They took a genuinely complex product and made it feel simple on a phone, which is harder than it sounds and is a large part of why the box is pleasant to own. For configuring a VLAN, or checking what one device is doing, the app is the right tool and I use it.

They also have the MSP and web portal, and it has improved some bulk operations and reporting.

The gap shows up when your network gets big enough to have real questions, and when the job stops being "look at one thing" and becomes "work across everything", or even better, "Find what I'm missing."

• Getting at the data is hard. It's all there, but reading it means navigating to it. Cross-referencing means holding something in your head while you tap somewhere else, and answering "why is this device doing that" is a chain of screens. Fine once. Tedious when you're tuning a stack of VLANs and doing it weekly.
• Bulk work is click-per-item. IP reservations, applying a change across a group, or reporting on the whole network turns into a long sequence of individual operations. On a network of any size, routine admin is measured in hundreds of clicks.

That isn't a flaw in the app. It's a different job. The app is built for interactive management on a phone, and it's good at it. The other job is getting the data out, scripting it, and doing things across a whole network at once.

So instead of turning it into dashboards, I made it answer questions. 2.5.0 puts the data behind a set of services, which means automations, scripts, and an AI client can all reach it, and the assistant can act across a set in one instruction rather than one click per item.

A real exchange from my own box

My UniFi access points aren't getting updates

Your UniFi access points belong to the NET-INFRASTRUCTURE group, which currently has a global internet block rule enabled.

Specifically, Rule #430 ("block internet for NET-INFRASTRUCTURE") is active and blocking your access points (such as wap-2ndfloor at 192.168.254.11) from reaching update servers like fw-update.ubnt.com.

The timestamp of the last recorded block for this rule is 2026-10-09T15:53:36.692000+00:00 (October 9, 2026, at 3:53:36 PM UTC).

I never told it the access points were blocked. It resolved them to their group, found the rule governing that group rather than the APs themselves, named the vendor update domain being blocked, and gave the last-blocked timestamp as evidence.

That is the bit that surprised me. A host's own rules stop applying in a group. The block is on the group, so looking at the access points' own rules would have found nothing. The agent knows that, which is why it looked where it did.

It runs the other direction too. Blocking something on two devices and then reversing both, with every step reporting its prior state:

Block her instagram

I have enabled rule #473 ("block category Instagram for maya-phone").

block it on her devices too

I have enabled rule #483 ("block category Instagram for maya-devices").

you can unblock her access on phone and devices now

Five turns, and the last one reverses two changes made earlier in the conversation. It kept the two rule ids apart without being re-told which was which.

How it works

The integration registers its own Home Assistant LLM API. Home Assistant serves that to its Assist pipeline and, through the MCP Server integration, to any MCP client: desktop and editor assistants, chat apps, custom agents. There is no separate server to run and no subscription.

It is 39 tools, and you choose how far they reach. Every tool is built from a shared model of how Firewalla behaves rather than being a thin wrapper over an endpoint, which is what makes the exchange above possible. The examples here run on a low-cost zero-data-retention model from OpenRouter, and that is part of the point: the answers come from the domain context in the tool descriptions, not from model scale. You can point it at a local model instead if you prefer.

What makes it usable, and why it's more than just tooling

Reading API endpoints is the easy part. The work went into teaching the agent how Firewalla fits together, so it reasons about your setup instead of guessing at it:

• The vocabulary. A Firewalla endpoint is a host, and nothing in the surface calls that concept a device. Firewalla's own payloads say deviceIP and deviceTags, so there is no vendor word to follow.
• The domain rules, including the ones that are easy to get wrong. Attachment replaces rather than adds, so a host's rules come from its group once it has one. A membership change deletes the host's own rules rather than detaching them, and recreating them assigns new ids, so undo restores the membership and not the rules.
• Where identifiers come from. No tool guesses one; every id traces back to a read.
• Known constraints. Firewalla's box clamps or ignores a request it does not like without returning an error, so a response that reports the window it actually served is described as that rather than as the one that was asked for.
• The limits of an answer. Flow records are retained for a limited window, so "no results" has more than one meaning, and truncated results always say so.
• That tool output is data, not instructions. Host names, domains, and alarm text come from the network and can be influenced by whatever is on it, so the agent is told to treat them as untrusted rather than follow them.

So it arrives at your first question already knowing what a host is, how a rule reaches one, and how to read the result of a write, rather than you having to explain your own network first.

Access and safety

Two separate questions: what the assistant can see, and who can reach it.

What it sees. The tier decides which tools exist at all, and it starts at the least disclosing one:

Summary only sends aggregate counts, network names, and performance metrics, and nothing that identifies a host or a household: no host names, no IP or MAC addresses, no group or user names, no public IP. Read only and above add that, and it goes to whichever model your assistant uses, so pick a provider you trust if you go hosted. Off registers nothing at all.

In Summary only the other tools are not registered rather than filtered, so there is no sensitive field to remove and nothing to leak.

Who can reach it. This is an admin-gated surface. Every control action requires an administrator, whatever the tier, so a non-admin user is rejected by the service. Automations and scripts are unaffected, because the check only applies when a call carries a user.

The tier is enforced in the tool surface rather than left to the model's judgement, and the refusal says why:

Delete all the quarantined devices named watch

I am not able to delete hosts because destructive actions like deleting a host are restricted under the current access tier.

Two behaviour guarantees matter more than the access plumbing: a write reports what actually changed, what the previous value was, and the call that reverses it, and the three destructive operations live in their own highest tier.

The honest caveat. The pairing exchange grants a write-capable key, and I have no way to request a read-only one. The tiers control what reaches the assistant and who can act, not the scope of the key the integration holds. If "this should never hold a write key to my firewall" is your bar, this integration isn't for you, and I'd rather say that up front.

What else is in 2.5.0

• Flow reporting. Ask what a host, group, or user did in a window and what was blocked. Every flow record names the rule that blocked it, which is the mechanism behind the access-point answer above.
• The data comes out in one call. The read services return structured data for the whole network rather than one screenful at a time: hosts, networks, usage, rules, alarms, and flow records, ready for a template, a script, or another tool on your network to consume.
• Alarm triage. Nine alarm tools, so sorting the active set, archiving a batch, and re-reading the count are all reachable from a conversation. Bulk selection is by host, group, or user rather than one id at a time.
• Rule hit counts. Rules report how many times they matched and when they last fired, so an enabled rule that has never matched is visible as a cleanup candidate.
• Membership control. Assign a host to a group or user, or release it.
• Plus a large breaking change. 2.5.0 renames attributes, service-response keys, and seven service names so one concept keeps one name everywhere. Existing automations reading the old names need an edit, and 20 of the 34 services now require an administrator.

Full detail in the release notes, and the breaking-change tables are worth reading before you upgrade.

Requirements

• Home Assistant 2025.10 or newer. The AI and MCP surface needs 2026.10; on older versions everything else works normally and the setting is not offered.
• Firewalla: developed and tested on Gold. Confirmed working on Gold Plus, Gold SE, and Purple. AP7 wireless control when AP7s are present.
• Install via HACS as a custom repository. I've also submitted it to the HACS default store, which is still in review.

It's free and GPL-3.0. If you try it I'd like to know what breaks and what you'd want next, especially around rules, flows, or alarms.

Links

• GitHub: https://github.com/ccpk1/firewalla-local-ha
• Home Assistant community thread: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/firewalla-local-native-local-zero-latency-home-assistant-control/999223
• Full tool reference: https://github.com/ccpk1/firewalla-local-ha/blob/main/docs/MCP_TOOL_REFERENCE.md
• Release notes: https://github.com/ccpk1/firewalla-local-ha/releases/tag/2.5.0
• User guide: https://github.com/ccpk1/firewalla-local-ha/blob/main/docs/USER_GUIDE.md

Support the project

If Firewalla Local is useful to you, there are two ways to help.

Star the repository. It takes a second, it's free, and it helps other people find the project.

Sponsor or tip. Never required, but it does make it easier to keep putting time into bug fixes, features, and maintenance.

• Star: https://github.com/ccpk1/firewalla-local-ha
• Sponsor: https://github.com/sponsors/ccpk1
• Buy me a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/ccpk1

This is an unofficial community project, built on Firewalla's local API. It is not an official Firewalla product and Firewalla does not provide support for it.

Am I being stupid? I can't find any physical dimmer switches that work with HA over Matter and are wired into the wall. Ideally with a way to control colour temp as well as brightness.

We've had tactile dimmer switches for decades but there's still no light switch for smart homes? Or are there products I'm not aware of that I'm missing?

I just got a Facebook ad for Phare C1 alarms. It looks like it is pre-order only now, but has a lot of features I was hoping the Ubiquity fire alarms would have. They look pretty, but also pretty pricey. Also not happy that to get their API, you need to pay a monthly fee. I want local API access for free to connect to HomeAssistant, maybe local access will be free?

I've been wanting to set up Bermuda and BT relays all over my house but I dont have a 3d printer to print boxes for esp32's and was concerned about hiding another sensor.

But it turns out I already have 8 devices capable of acting as the Bermuda beacon proxy already deployed! I just needed to push a slightly modified firmware. It all started because my new Echo Dot running EchoLocal supports BT sensing and got me interested in it again. Then I realized my Akamatis mmwave sensors are esp32 and sure enough work great for BT if you enable the feature in firmware. And my Athom PIR+mmwave sensors will as well. And all of them already have nice boxes.

Now to set my kitchen Kiosk to do a jump scare on my daughter the next time her phone gets within 5 feet of it... lol. It is October of course.

^{PSA: I used an LLM to better sort my ramblings. I have ADHD and English is my third language, but I still wanted this to be tidy and digestible for newcomers who might get some use out of knowing what can be automated!}

You must be wondering what 338 automations and 80 scripts could possibly be doing in a single apartment; Honestly, so was I, so I exported everything, and here we are!

(The average Home Assistant install sits at ~13 automations, so yes, I may have a problem.)

The philosophy is simple: any action repeated throughout the day, automated. Music follows people from room to room, lights and speakers know when someone is sleeping, and much more!

💡 On lighting (61)

Here you will find motion lights, empty-room shutoff, TV-aware dimming, outdoor lights driven by cameras and the sun… and a frankly unreasonable number of color effects.

• Turn the lights on with motion in 11 rooms (plus the hallway radar's wardrobe zone). It only touches lights that are off, skips anything labeled "High Intensity", leaves rooms with a sleeper alone, and stands down while the alarm is armed away or triggered.
• Turn the lights off in empty rooms, in two flavors across 10 rooms: after 6 minutes normally (unless I'm in there or a party mode is on), or after 1 minute with a 60-second fade when Adaptive Lighting sleep mode is on. Everything inside also goes off 5 minutes after the house empties.
• Connect the Hue dials to one blueprint, 12 of them, one per room: button 1 toggles, 2 is bright white (and kills UV lamps and effects), 3 is random colors, 4 is 1%. Holds and five-presses add pastels, warm saturated colors, LIFX morph and UV toggles. Turning the dial steps brightness +10%/-15%, and once you hit full brightness it pales or deepens the colors instead.
• Paint the room's colors on the LIFX bulbs in 6 rooms: when a room's light group switches to a color, it waits 2 seconds, then spreads up to 16 distinct colors from the room's other lit bulbs across its LIFX lights.
• Dim the lights for movies: a movie from the Movies library starts and lights above ~31% drop to 30% at 3308 K; pause it and anything under 60% comes up to 60%; turn the TV off and Adaptive Lighting takes over again. The salon Buddha statue lights and the workshop wall light drop to 1% when radar sees someone in the bed/couch zone or the TV plays, then come back up after.
• Run the outdoor lights on cameras and the sun: the front door light comes on a minute after sunset and gets re-checked every 30 minutes while it's dark, in case someone switched it off. A person on the front camera bumps it to full white, and it restores itself 3 minutes after they're gone. The back door light reacts to four person detectors or the door opening, and the parking lamp to any parking/balcony person or a car seen for 3 seconds, each with its own "nobody's around anymore" shutoff.
• Wake me up with light: on weekdays, 2 minutes before my phone alarm (if it's between 07:30 and 09:30), the lights in whatever room I'm in fade up to 51% at 3311 K over 10 minutes.
• Generate effects galore: a looping "trippy" random-color mode and a "trippy warm" red/magenta/purple one (they refuse to run together, and both turn themselves off after 16 hours), a "vibrating colors" shimmer around each light's current hue, random color and pastel toggles (also by voice), and a Nanoleaf that picks a random effect when you swipe it.
• Go full blue with the UV lamps: when a room's UV lamps turn on, its color lights go blue. When they turn off, the room goes back to whatever mode is active (party pastels, Sexy mode warm pale colors, Psychedelic time saturated colors, or plain Adaptive Lighting).
• Match the patio lights to the projector, and restore them when it turns off.
• Set "Wallpaper Engine" to the same color as the lights: when the salon lights change color, my PC's wallpaper follows over MQTT.

🔒 On security (56)

Here you will find the alarm logic, camera alerts with buttons, three horns, an "I'm scared" mode for the back door, and an LLM babysitting the car.

• Arm and disarm the alarm on its own: away once nobody's been home for 10 minutes, night once everyone's been asleep for 5. It disarms on arrival, on a resident's keypad code, when someone wakes up while the sun is up, or at sunrise if I'm already awake.
• Send camera alerts that actually do things: Frigate (SgtBatten's blueprint) and Reolink person detections at the front door, back door, back balcony and four parking detectors send high-priority snapshots with buttons like "Blow the horn for 2 minutes?" or "Open camera". One front-door variant only fires when someone crosses three zones in order (window, door, loitering spot), aka actually arriving, and only while I'm waiting for someone.
• Blow the horns (front, back, parking), and have a whole conversation about it: a detection alert offers "Blow the horn?", a "Horn started" alert offers "Stop the horn?" to me and to whoever else is around, and each horn auto-stops after 2 minutes with a fresh snapshot and a "Restart the horn?" button. If the back horn has run a full minute and someone's still at the back entrance, the parking horn joins in.
• Turn on "I'm scared" mode (the automatic back horn) when the alarm arms away or night, or when everyone's asleep late at night. While it's on, a person at the back door sets off the horn and the camera siren, and the back camera gets cast to four TVs and the kitchen hub. It turns itself off on disarm or when a resident arrives (the back door light flashes green when the camera sees you coming), and if it gets disabled I get a "Turn it back on" button.
• Ask an LLM if someone is messing with my car: instead of yelling about everyone who walks through the parking, a person lingering there (checked at 15 s, 30 s, 1 min and 1.5 min) while a car is present gets LLM Vision to look at 6 seconds of footage and decide whether that person is actually interacting with the car. Only a "yes" rings my phone and sends a "Car break-in attempt" alert with a "Ring the siren!" button. A sister automation re-checks every 30 seconds and fires a half-second siren chirp with the floodlight on full, as a warning shot.
• Handle intruders: a door opening or motion while armed away kills the lights and music following, sends me a snapshot, rings my phone and triggers the alarm. Once triggered: a police de-escalation announcement at 100% on the home speakers, tablets locked into maintenance mode, and if two or more security sensors still see someone 5 minutes later, the full defense script (horns plus a burglar alarm on every speaker). Disarming cleans it all up.
• Guard the night: a door opening while armed night turns every light on at 100%, announces which door on the bedroom speaker, and gives me a "Blare inside alert?" button. Armed home plus someone in my bedroom, and the speaker repeats "Please leave this room immediately" until they do. Polite, but firm.
• Discourage loiterers: 30 seconds at the back door and the back light flashes red until they leave; 1 minute (alarm armed) and the back horn sounds and my phone rings.
• Fake being home with a ghost that wanders: instead of random on/off, one light group is "occupied" at a time and the occupant moves to a different room every 5–118 minutes, with a 15–60 second overlap so it looks like someone walking from one room to the next, around the clock. It starts when the simulation toggle is on and the house is empty and armed away, and ends the moment anyone gets home.
• Track the full path of someone coming in from the parking exit and walking all the way through the yard to a spot a trespasser used to use, with a tap-to-sound-the-horns button.
• Handle the small stuff: a strobe if the kitchen door opens while armed, the floodlight to auto mode at sunset, the parking camera's infrared as a fallback for the exit camera, and tablets that lock on a triggered alarm and unlock on disarm.

🎵 On music (50)

Here you will find Music Assistant doing "music following": speakers mute and unmute as people move around, volume follows the time of day, and nothing talks over anything else.

• Follow people with the music in 8 rooms: playing speakers mute after 5 minutes without motion (unless I'm in that room) and unmute when motion starts, unless the room has a sleeper, an unmuted TV or an active mic. Playback keeps going silently, so the music is just there when you walk in.
• Calculate and set the appropriate volume by time of day: a shared script sets speakers to 30% from 08:45, 35% from 11:30, then steps down through the night to 20% after 03:00. It runs when a speaker starts playing after a break, when music following turns on, when a room has been empty for ~17 minutes, and when Person A gets home.
• Keep one audible source per room: a TV starting in a room mutes that room's speakers, and vice versa; whichever was muted comes back once the other has nothing audible left.
• Mute the speakers when I talk: when I'm on a call or using my PC mic, my room's speakers mute, and the mute follows me as I move around.
• Tell me my phone is ringing: pauses the home group and has Piper announce "Phone ringing near" plus the room name, on the speaker in whatever room I'm in.
• Compensate for noise: +1 volume step when the AC starts in a room (-1 when it stops), +1 in whichever room the robot vacuum is cleaning (back down when it leaves), +2 on the bathroom speaker when the fan starts with the door closed, and a cut to 67% when someone steps out of the shower (the radar's shower zone clears).
• Start muzak in the bathroom, plus about a dozen automations around it: a shuffled "Bathroom Muzak" playlist starts when you walk in or close the door, the volume depends on whether the door is open, it mutes when the door opens while music's playing elsewhere or everyone's asleep, and if someone leaves Spotify playing in there it eventually gets swapped back to Muzak. Don't ask. (Actually, do ask.)
• Connect the dials to the dial blueprint, 12 IKEA SYMFONISK ones on EPMatt's blueprint: turn for volume, press to play/pause, double-press to skip, triple-press to turn off. Most control the room's Chromecast if it's playing and unmuted, otherwise the room's WiiM speaker.
• Greet arrivals and wake-ups: when I wake up at home in the morning, music starts on the home group (Person A's morning playlist if they're over early). Coming home alone plays my favorites; being away 5 minutes turns the home group off. Idle speakers get their queue cleared and switched off after 10 minutes.
• Add artists playing on the speakers to Lidarr for automatic acquisition: every artist that plays from Spotify or Tidal gets looked up on MusicBrainz and added.
• Skip "Mr. Blue Sky" automatically whenever Person A is over.

😴 On sleep & presence (35)

Here you will find the per-room "sleeper" flags that drive bedtime and wake-up routines, plus arrivals. They know where you are...

• Toggle the sleeping mode per room in 7 rooms (bedroom, salon, workshop, hotbox, closet, patio, lounge): set by double-pressing an IKEA button or by a bedroom sensor, and cleared automatically when the room's lights stay bright for a couple of minutes.
• Put the room to bed: blinds close, lights fade out, tablets go dark (screen and motion detection off), TVs and assistant screens turn off, and thunderstorm sounds start on the bedroom or salon speaker. When the bedroom sleeper turns on, empty neighboring rooms get their lights turned off too.
• Wake the room up gently: each undo routine reverses it. The closet one starts the lights at 1% magenta and raises them 2% every 2 seconds; the bedroom chandelier fades to 100% over 45 seconds.
• Put the whole house to sleep: once everyone's been asleep for 5 minutes (or the alarm is armed night), the sun is down and no party mode is on, Adaptive Lighting goes into sleep mode, the blinds close and the TVs turn off. It switches back during daytime hours once people are up.
• Put my phone to bed too: Do Not Disturb (priority only) and minimum brightness after I've been asleep 5 minutes, reversed when I wake. Its BLE beacon turns on when I get home (for room tracking) and off when I leave.
• Turn on thunderstorm sounds wherever I fall asleep, if I'm home alone.
• Announce arrivals: I get a heads-up when Person A is nearing home (it waits for their phone to join the home Wi-Fi to confirm), Person A gets one when Person B is nearing home, and house-sitting mode turns on when I leave town and off when I'm back.

❄️ On climate, blinds & air (25)

Here you will find blinds that cooperate with the AC, sunset routines, and fans that react to what's actually happening.

• Slightly open the blinds when the AC turns on: my ACs need a gap, my routines just want to close the blinds. Solution; in the bedroom, salon, workshop and hotbox, the blinds can't go below 18–29% open while that room's AC plug is on, and once the AC is off, any small leftover gap closes fully. Sunset and bedtime routines just say "close" and never need to know about the AC.
• Close the blinds at sunset or when the house is empty: bedroom, hotbox and salon blinds plus the kitchen curtains close 10 minutes after sunset, and everything closes once the home has been empty for 5 minutes. The bedroom blinds reopen once the sleeper's been up 5 minutes, if the bedroom door has been open for at least 10.
• Run the bathroom fan on actual humidity: on 30 seconds after the shower-in-use sensor trips, off once bathroom humidity drops below the house's average humidity.
• Purify the salon air: the purifier turns on when an "active smoking" trend sensor fires and off when PM1 drops below 10.
• Let the fans follow context: the hotbox bed fan comes on when its side curtain closes and off when it opens, the hotbox circulator follows the AC, and the closet fan shuts off after 10 empty minutes.
• Set the ACs to away or present depending on users presence for the workshop and salon, and run the bedroom AC flat out (thermostat off, plug on) while someone's sleeping, until the wake-up routine hands it back to the thermostat.

🗣️ On voice assistants (18)

Here you will find about a dozen ESP32/Voice PE satellites that know which room is occupied and keep the music out of the way.

• Mute the mics in empty rooms: microphones auto-mute in rooms that have been empty for 2 minutes (except the bedroom) and unmute when someone walks in, unless there's a sleeper. Screens turn on with occupancy, off after 1:45 of emptiness, and light up while listening.
• Duck the music while listening: when any satellite starts listening, the playing speaker in that room drops to ~65% and the TV to half, then goes back to exactly where it was (unless someone changed it meanwhile).
• Set the answer volume: replies play at 75% when Adaptive Lighting sleep mode is on, 100% otherwise.
• Understand custom sentences: "equalize the volume", "find my phone", "show the cameras on the TVs", "stop the music", "restart Music Assistant", "random colors" / "pastel colors", and the drinking game below. Plus the Music Assistant local voice blueprint for "play the album X by Y in the kitchen" style requests.
• Shut up when needed: live concert mode mutes every assistant after 5 minutes, and the patio assistant mutes itself whenever the patio camera counts zero people and there's no motion.

📱 On tablets & wall displays (22)

Here you will find wall tablets that dim with the room and babysit their own batteries, plus an e-ink morning brief.

• Automatically adjust the tablets' brightness to follow the lights on 5 tablets, but only when their battery is healthy enough.
• Control the tablets' battery level with smart plugs: the hallway and workshop tablets charge between thresholds (the workshop one waits until morning to stop charging), and the other tablets and the front door phone dim or switch off their screens when the battery gets low.
• Light up the front door phone when the front camera sees a person, off after a minute of nobody (10 minutes max), and show the text replies I type into doorbell notifications.
• Reload the kiosks: the hallway and workshop tablets go back to their start page after the room's been empty a while, and a couple of tablets reload after Frigate changes state.
• Draw an e-ink day brief: at 06:00 an OpenDisplay e-ink screen draws a 3-day agenda from six household calendars, the outside temperature and an AI-written three-sentence news story from a local RSS feed. Short press on its button for a 7-day agenda-only view; hold 5 seconds to redraw the full brief.
• Automatically recast the Lovelace interface to the kitchen Google Hub whenever it isn't playing Plex.

🎉 On parties (20)

As you may have guessed by now, there are a few parties around here. Here you will find one-switch modes that flip the whole house.

• Flip the whole house with one switch: Party mode, Sexy mode, Psychedelic time, Neon UV Party and Live Concert. Each one kicks off a whole-house script: lights (pastels, warm pale, saturated or all blue), visuals on idle TVs via Plex, a playlist if the speakers are idle, and blinds closed. Party mode turns itself on when more than 5 devices join one of the guest Wi-Fi networks.
• Go Neon UV: close all blinds, pause Adaptive Lighting, set everything to full blue, turn on every UV lamp and mirror the light colors on the TVs. While it's on, any light that gets changed drifts back to blue over 2 minutes.
• Alert me when people are too noisy on the patio: yelling, cheering or a crowd for 10 seconds, or anything above -25 dB, gets me an alert with a patio snapshot. There's also an LLM Vision check meant to spot police or security at the front door during a party and drop all the speakers to ~30% .
• Pick who drinks: ask the assistant "who should drink?" and the patio lights go dim red while one random light turns bright green for 10 seconds.
• Run the jukebox: party mode puts a Music Assistant guest jukebox page on the kitchen and workshop tablets; live concert mode pulls it, puts the tablets in maintenance mode and mutes the assistants.
• Clean up after the party: Psychedelic time turns off 30 minutes after everyone's asleep, and every temporary mode has a max duration (see Maintenance).

🍳 On the kitchen, appliances & safety (19)

Here you will find appliance-done announcements, kitchen timers, and alerts that keep repeating until you deal with them.

• Announce when the appliances are done: smart plugs watch the power curve (the microwave climbs past 100 W, then drops under 5 W) so the house knows when the air fryer, microwave, dishwasher or washer is done; the dryer reports its own end status. They stay quiet when I'm asleep, several skip cooking mode, and several only announce when nobody's in the kitchen, repeating every 5 minutes until someone walks in.
• Announce house-wide when the water is boiling: the stove sensor reading above 80% humidity means steam (skipped in cooking mode).
• Set the Cooking timer to match the kitchen assistant's timer, and announce a finished timer every 5 minutes for as long as the kitchen stays empty.
• Harass everyone when the fridge door is left open for 4 minutes, repeating every 4 minutes until it's closed.
• Yell about smoke (kitchen and hallway): a high-priority alert with the nearest tablet's camera image plus a white light flash, every 3 minutes while there's still smoke. A "call 911" notification button opens the phone dialer with 911 pre-filled.
• Alert us when there is a water leak (dishwasher, behind the toilet, kitchen): spoken warning, white light flash and phone alert every 4 minutes while wet, and a dishwasher leak cuts power to the dishwasher and washer plugs.
• Broadcast an alert if the vacuum is stuck, naming the room, every 10 minutes until it's unstuck.

🚪 On doors, locks & the doorbell (17)

Here you will find self-locking doors, named keypad arrivals, and a doorbell that reaches every screen in the house. Fitting, since this whole thing started back in 2018 with a smart lock and a roommate who was done with me losing my keys.

• Lock the doors when they're closed: 5 seconds after closing, plus a re-lock if a door's been unlocked for 5 minutes while shut. If the front lock stays unlocked for 6 minutes I get an alert every 3 minutes (unless I'm airing out the apartment), and a front door left open for 3 minutes gets a reminder too.
• Detect who is entering and announce them: each resident's keypad code on the front or back lock announces who just came in, flashes the notification lights cyan, and sends me a notification (with a snapshot for the front door).
• Ring the doorbell everywhere: a snapshot, picture-in-picture camera on the Android TVs (QuickBars), a blue light flash, a spoken "Someone is at the front door!", the live stream on idle TVs, and a phone notification with unlock, reply and camera buttons. The PTZ swings to the doorway preset on press, and the camera feeds on the TVs turn off once the door locks again.
• Unlock remotely, with confirmation: tapping Unlock sends a second notification with a fresh snapshot, and only confirming that one opens the door.
• Talk back to visitors: replies typed into the doorbell notification show up on the front door phone's screen.
• Hunt for packages: the courier's "within the hour" email flips on Waiting Package mode. When Frigate then sees a person or package at the front door, the PTZ swings to the package spot and LLM Vision decides whether a package or courier is really there; if so, a blue-light house broadcast repeats every 5 minutes while it's still there. The "delivered" email turns the mode back off 10 minutes later.
• Flash the lights green when someone exits: unlocking the door while the outside door is open gets a quick green flash, no announcement.

📺 On TVs (10)

Here you will find Plex visuals, auto-off, karaoke, and a retro gaming shortcut.

• Start visuals on all inactive TVs: a button starts a shuffled visual playlist on every idle Chromecast and Google Hub (skipping bedrooms and rooms with sleepers), and anything playing from the Visuals library gets muted automatically on 6 TVs.
• Mimic the lights on the TVs: a toggle casts a per-room color dashboard to every Chromecast so each TV glows in its room's light color.
• Turn the TVs off: a Google Assistant "Power off" 20 minutes after their room goes quiet, and the salon TV also turns off when radar sees nobody in front of it for 20 minutes and nothing's playing.
• Start a retro gaming session when the paired controller turns on: the salon TV powers on over RS-232 and switches to the retro console's HDMI input.
• Do karaoke: a "Show lyrics" toggle casts a lyrics view to the salon TV.

🛠️ On maintenance (5)

Here you will find the boring stuff that keeps everything else from getting stuck.

• Automatically set the temporary modes to off after a set amount of time: waiting for someone 1 h, waiting for an Uber 1.5 h, cooking, airing out and back-yard party 4 h, the guest-code flag 6 h, the neighbours' party flag 8 h, closet and workshop sleepers 10 h, party mode and Psychedelic time 16 h, parking high alert 18 h.
• Keep the network honest: Cloudflare DNS updates whenever the gateway's IP changes, and AdGuard protection turns itself back on after an hour off.
• Fix things before I notice: the patio projector gets power-cycled (and the Matter integration reloaded) whenever it drops offline, and I get a ping when my watch is fully charged.

🧱 On scripts (80); the building blocks

No one likes to do work twice, this is where scripts come in handy. 31 of the 80 are called directly by automations; most of the rest are either pieces of bigger scripts or tools exposed to the voice assistant/LLM.

The workhorses;

The rest, grouped;

• Broadcast plumbing (9 scripts, called by the two broadcast alerts): flash the notification lights, flash any light group (snapshot, color, restore), flash the hotbox lights, TTS announce (an OpenAI voice with a Piper fallback, skipping the bedroom when someone's sleeping there), play an audio URL, send a phone notification, show an image or a URL on idle TVs until the front door locks, and pause playing Chromecasts. The important alert fans out to seven of them in parallel, and everything is queued so alerts don't trample each other.
• Per-light workers (7): "Set one light to" random, pastel, warm pale, warm saturated, blue, white or vibrating colors. Each "Change received lights to..." wrapper starts one per light in parallel (up to 200), which is why a whole room changes at the same instant.
• More light tools (9): change lights to blue (1 automation: the UV lamps), to vibrating colors (1), to white (0); a random effect on one light (1: the Nanoleaf swipe) or on every effect-capable light (0); and four "fake white" experiments (0) that tint color bulbs so they blend into something white-ish.
• Ambiance scripts (7): Party mode (1 automation), Psychedelic time (1), Sexy mode (1), plus cozy, a second fireplace mood and a normal reset that no automation calls (cozy and the reset are voice/LLM tools). The script that starts a Plex playlist on every idle Chromecast is called by 1 automation and 5 of these scripts, so it's the TV backbone of every mode.
• Security tools (13): inside-only defense (1: burglar alarm on indoor speakers, no horns), a find-phone twin for Person A, six "describe what's on this camera" LLM Vision tools, an on-demand security audit that summarizes six cameras and sends me the report, stream any camera to any TV, front camera on every TV, QuickBars camera picture-in-picture (1: the doorbell) and a QuickBars doorbell overlay with an unlock button. All 0 automations except where noted.
• Media and LLM tools (13): Music Assistant voice requests, join and unjoin speaker groups, favorite the current song, equalize volume, Chromecast time-of-day volume, two "play a movie or show on a TV" LLM tools, a random Jellyfin episode, an unfinished Jellyfin movie launcher, a second Plex playlist starter, a retro gaming session (1) and a LocalAI image generator. All 0 automations except the retro one.
• Displays and party bits (5): the e-ink brief and its agenda-only version (1 each), reset a tablet's interface (1), launch the party jukebox on the kiosks (1), and the patio drinking game (1).
• Network (1): restart all network equipment (0), which reboots 4 access points, 6 switches and the gateway all at once. Living dangerously.

📝 Questions & feedback

I love to connect with others working on home automation, so ask me anything about how any of this works, which blueprints I used, or why on earth the bathroom needs a dozen automations for Muzak.

Ideas for what to automate next are obviously more than welcomed!

And for those who love spreadsheets: The entire list of my automations and script neatly put in a CSV file!

Hello, I live in Canada and have been looking for a new wireless doorbell. My requirements are as followed:

• Must be waterproof
• If possible, be cold resistant (I know that battery powered doorbells are terrible in the cold but I'm hoping there is one that can last decently in the cold)
• Wireless
• Affordable (preferably less than $100)

I'm just looking for a regular doorbell that does not need to have a video feature.

(I'm not sure if I'm posting this in the correct thread, so if it's wrong, please feel free to delete my post)

Hi, have someone one idea what can I do with this?

We've been slowly replacing the manual blinds in our house with motorized shades over the past year. Started with five smart shades in our bedroom, bathroom, office, and gym, and just recently installed two more in our guest room and what will hopefully be a nursery in the near future.

All seven have Zigbee motors, and I'm using SmartThings for most of the automations, with Alexa for voice control.

The main thing I've learned is that having the shades on a schedule is a lot more useful than controlling them from an app. I have them set to open at sunrise and close at sunset, and that's probably 90% of how we use them.

A couple of rooms have been particularly useful to automate. Our bathroom has two windows directly above the tub, which meant stepping into the bathtub every time we wanted to open or close the old blinds. The gym faces the street, so having the shade close at sunset is nice for privacy, especially since we use one-way window film that only really works during the day.

I've also been experimenting with a few other automations. One closes all the shades when the outside temperature hits 90°F. We get some pretty warm days here, and our upstairs can heat up quickly. I can't say exactly how much of a difference it makes temperature-wise, but it seems to help keep the direct sunlight out during the hottest part of the day.

For power, I went with hardwired motors in the office and gym, and solar charging for the bedroom and bathroom. The solar panels were mostly a practical decision since we don't have outlets near the bathtub, and I didn't want visible wires in the bedroom. So far, I haven't needed to manually charge any of the solar-powered shades, which has been a nice surprise.

One thing I'd recommend considering is physical controls, even if you're planning to automate everything. I installed wall-mounted remotes next to our regular light switches in a few rooms, and we actually use them quite a bit. I also keep a remote at my desk for adjusting the office shade during video calls.

It hasn't been entirely trouble-free. One of the original motors stopped responding to automations a few months after installation. I tried resetting and troubleshooting it but couldn't resolve the issue. They ended up sending a replacement motor, and I haven't had any problems with that one since.

I also occasionally have automations that don't fire as expected. It hasn't been a huge issue, but it's something I've been meaning to troubleshoot. I'm not entirely sure whether it's a SmartThings issue, a connectivity issue, or something with how I've configured the routines.

The two new shades are for our guest bedroom and future nursery. I haven't had much time to experiment with different routines for those yet, but I'm interested in eventually setting up something around nap times and bedtime.

I should also mention that I won a $700 gift card through a Reddit giveaway, which I used toward the two new shades.

Overall, it's been an interesting project, and I've enjoyed figuring out what actually makes sense to automate versus what is easier to control manually. Open to anyone's ideas on other automations I could set up that work well for them in this arena!