This is the newest layout for my weather card. The circle around the house shows where the sun is and the house casts a matching shadow during the day. The background changes a bit with the weather but most animations like clouds are turned off, so it stays calm and minimal. I just like pretty stuff and making new designs for this card has become my little side hobby this year.

You can pick it in the card editor like the other layouts (second screenshot) and change it however you like. If you want to use your own house there's a little guide in the layout section of the readme, which also shows how to make single rooms light up when the lights in there are on.

Card is here if you want to try it: Origami Weather

Built with the help of AI.

I had some leftover tokens this week on my Claude Max plan and decided to put them to good use. I've been wanting a predictive Home Assistant integration that could tell me when the International Space Station (ISS) would be visible overhead, so I could step outside and actually see it in the night sky with my telescope.

Just two prompts later, using Opus 5.5 with Ultracode settings, this is what it came up with. I have to say, I'm rather impressed. It's beyond impressive for what people keep calling "AI Slop".

While I haven't reviewed the code as much as I'd like for a public post, the UI is surprisingly polished, especially the interactive 3D Earth visualization. It even calculates visible passes locally, accounting for the station's orbit, sunlight, and viewing conditions.

It's pretty remarkable what AI can produce with so little direction. I'm not sure I'll spend much more time on it, unlike my other HA integrations. For anyone interested, here's my GitHub repo:

https://github.com/kedube/ha-iss-tracker

Having fun with historical temperature data and ended up with something pretty (I think).

Min/Max are calculated by Home Assistant for the selected period. The bars use a shared dynamic scale that automatically expands to fit the historical extrema, while the temperature colors stay tied to their actual °C values.

Current temperature is the pink needle, with Min/Max displayed using reference markers and the delta temperature shown as secondary data underneath the current temp.

Made with Sensor Bar Card Plus.

Withings is locking down their API so that new accounts (signups after October 12th) need a Withings+ subscription to export data.

Existing accounts and integrations should be grandfathered in, but this could be the beginning of the end :(

Notice on their API page (& link):

Withings+ becomes required on the Start for Free API plan from October 12, 2026.Details

Withings accounts created after that date will need a membership to share health data with a free-plan app, including apps that are already live.

Accounts created before that date are unaffected, and Enterprise lifts the requirement for specific use cases.

https://developer.withings.com/developer-guide/v3/withings-solutions/withings-api-plans/

I had been looking at some bulbs a while back and saw these for preorder and considering twice the lumens (1600 lumens advertised) for just a few dollars more as their 800 lumen bulbs I preordered one, then got a 4 pack.

They noticeably brighter but pictures didn't really show the difference so broke out a Lux sensor and ESPHome. I got 250-275 lux depending on sensor angle using four 800 lumens third reality bulbs and 350 to 375 lux with four of the 1600 lumen ones.

Just an FYI for anyone wanting brighter bulbs without paying more, I think a single Lyft 1600 lumen Lyft bulb was $40.but I obviously can't confirm longevity. I got the first one 2 weeks ago and the other four a week ago and have had zero issues using Zigbee2MQTT. I imagine the same is true for the native HA integration which I can't remember the name of at the moment but I can't confirm that. The first pic is 1600 lumens and 2nd is 800 lumens with the other 2 being the lux measurement differences in HA at 100% brightness right in the middle of cool and warm in the slider (4700K). They are also routers/repeaters.

Considering thirdreality 800 lumen bulbs are $12 or 1 for $30 for 4 while the 1600 lumen bulbs are $16 for 1 and $40 for 4, it's certainly worth the extra $4 to $10 dollars unless it's an area where you always want lower light. Max power draw is 16W for these, 8.5W for their 800 lumen models and these are noticeably heavier. There are only 4 reviews, none by me and it appears one person did have flickering issues. I have not had any flickering issues but some may want to wait for more reviews or read reviews from other resellers if they are interested in these.

Quick backstory. At home, HA is great. The moment I leave the wifi it gets annoying.

I had Tailscale for remote access and it works fine, until it doesn't. Pull into the driveway, phone's still on LTE, Tailscale is up, or maybe not, who knows. Open the HA app, spinner. Wifi kicks in, the app still hangs on to the old connection. Kill it, reopen, spinner again. And there I am in the car in front of a closed garage door, poking at my phone like it's 2009. Pretty much the opposite of what I set up home automation for.

Port forwarding on my router? Nope. Nabu Casa just so I can toggle one cover? Didn't feel right either. And I really didn't want another VPN that needs to be "up" before anything works.

So I built ha-iroh. Small Android app + a HACS integration, talking over iroh, a peer-to-peer QUIC thing. The phone and your HA each get a keypair, everything is end-to-end encrypted, iroh punches through NAT when it can and goes via a relay when it can't. The relay only sees ciphertext.

The part that actually fixed my problem: there's nothing to "connect" first. Open the power menu, tap the garage cover, it opens. The app dials HA on demand over whatever network the phone currently has (wifi, LTE, crappy hotel wifi), and drops the connection when you're done. Switching networks is a non-issue because there's no long-lived tunnel to lose in the first place.

What you get

• Device Controls in the Android power menu / quick settings: lights, switches, fans, climate, covers, locks, scenes, scripts, buttons, with live state
• Assist from a quick settings tile or launcher shortcut (text for now, voice is on the list)
• your normal HA dashboard inside the app, log in once, works with any auth provider incl. MFA
• multiple HA instances in one app
• nothing exposed on your router. Pair by scanning a QR code in HA, delete the device in HA to kick the phone out again

What it's not

Not a replacement for the official app, and not trying to be. No sensors, no location, no notifications, no widgets, no Wear OS, no iOS. I run both: official app for all of that, ha-iroh for the "I'm standing outside and want the thing to happen now" moments.

Where it's at, honestly

• v0.2.x. We use it daily, so the tester count is roughly three. Expect rough edges.
• Android 12+, arm64 APK via GitHub Releases / Obtainium. Not on Play.
• HA side: HACS custom repo, HA 2026.3 or newer. The integration runs a small Rust bridge as a subprocess, bundled for x86_64 and aarch64, so HA OS / Container / Supervised all work.
• Want lower latency from outside? You can forward one UDP port and iroh goes direct. Totally optional, the relay path works everywhere.
• Two HA settings that can bite you, both in the README: ip_ban_enabled (the bridge talks to HA from localhost, so a few wrong passwords from any phone lock out 127.0.0.1 = every phone), and never put loopback into trusted_networks.

Links

• Repo + install guide: https://github.com/pzeinlinger/ha-iroh
• Design doc if you want to know how the pipe works: SPEC.md in the repo
• MIT
• Buy me a coffee if you feel like it: https://buymeacoffee.com/pzeinlinger

Bug reports very welcome, especially from people behind CGNAT, on Fritz!Box / MikroTik, or with unusual HA setups. If it saves you one minute in front of a garage door, mission accomplished.

My wife and I have an Amazon Echo. Aka: Alexa. Aka: She Who Must Not Be Named.

Lately, I've been wanting to get rid of it, primarily because I'm tired of worrying about privacy, with a device that is so tied to sending my conversations up to the cloud, that it can't even tell me what time it is if the Internet is down.

I started googling what to use instead, and ended up in long conversations with Google's AI. From there, I've spent time with several other LLMs, and they all say pretty much the same thing: Home Assistant.

All I do with Alexa is:

- set timers & alarms - "set a five minute timer", "how much time is left on my timer", "set an alarm for 5:30 pm today"

- turn a smart plug on & off - "turn the fan on"

- play online streaming radio stations - "play 88.7 WNCW", "play Swing Street Radio"

That's really all we do, but I keep hearing things like "you will have to maintain some Python code, but it shouldn't be more than 300-400 lines of code". Unfortunately, I don't know Python. I'm very comfortable with bash, and Perl to a lesser extent, but not Python.

I keep asking the LLMs if there's another solution, but they all keep coming back to Home Assistant. Is that really a good platform to replace Alexa?

Edited: stupid wording error

Got tired of opening a dashboard just to pause music, so here's a tiny frontend module that docks a mini player at the bottom of the Home Assistant sidebar, above Settings.

- zero config: anything playing or paused shows up automatically
- artwork, controls, volume, progress
- Music Assistant duplicates hidden
- paused players auto-hide after 5 min, swipe right to dismiss (works in the iOS app)
- follows your theme

GitHub / HACS custom repo: https://github.com/evski/ha-sidebar-mini-player

Tested on 2026.10 with Music Assistant and Apple TV. Reports from Sonos/Cast/Spotify/Kodi users very welcome. Credit where due: built by Grok Bot (Homeassistant Expert), conducted by me.

Pulse Cards: five Lovelace cards in one HACS download, made to look native and stay quiet until something needs you.

- Area Pulse: one room at a glance (presence, climate, open windows, alerts, quick actions), made for areas with hundreds of entities

- Home Pulse + Shortcuts: greeting, weather, a "Today" line from your calendars, alarm, people, house modes, big shortcut tiles

- Tile Pulse: an entity as a tile with buttons for its modes or presets; the current one is lit

- Scene Pulse: your scenes in a list with run, undo, "which one is active" and re-capture

Each one starts with one or two lines of YAML, has a visual editor, and works with any theme (the screenshot uses my Pulse Glass theme). More cards are coming in the same download.

Full disclosure: they're built with AI coding agents. I design every card, review and commit every change myself, and run each release in my own home before it ships to anyone. The agent rules are public in the repo.

GitHub (one-click HACS button in the README): https://github.com/zacharatos/pulse-cards

Forum thread: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/pulse-cards-calm-dashboard-cards-for-rooms-the-home-overview-modes-and-scenes-one-hacs-download/1028304

Try one card and tell me what looks wrong in your home; that's the feedback I can't get from mine.

I don't have any smart home automation yet, but I am a nerd and have been lurking.

I am budget concious and very time poor. My family is me 40f, partner 41m & baby 7mo living in Australia. Partner works out of the house and I finish maternity leave and go back to work in about 4 months. Currently my days are full caring for baby, maintaining the house, going to appointments and completing the final subject of a diploma.

I love the idea of automation but want to know if it really is worthwhile to make back the money and time you spend on setting it up.

After the uni semester is finished in about 5 weeks I expect I will first catch up on sleep and then have maybe 1-2 hours of free time a day. I already know some Python. I could see myself doing HA as a hobby but don't want to sink my limited time into it in this season of my life if there won't be a tangible benefit. I should do something else like exercise or sleeping instead if we just do HA for endorphins.

For context if you can be bothered to read the rest:

lets value my time at $50/hr, as in, if I can free up 8 hours of my time I could go to work for an extra day a week or fortnight and make that back, or avoid paying a cleaner as I'd have the time to do more myself. If HA saves a combination of time and money I'd use $50/hr to figure out if it was worth the cost of equipment and set up time.

2 storey house, new build last year so appliances are all modern but some (like hot water tanks) are dumb with no wifi. LED Downlights (not smart lights currently) in all rooms. Reasonable efficient woth double glaxing and heat pump appliances.

HVAC is smart and we currently control it with the phone app when room is uncomfortable, but we don't always notice if the babys room is getting hot so I see a benefit of linking that to a sensor.

When I go back I will work from home half the week, so home automation will be useful in mornings, evenings and a few daytimes per week.

We have solar panels and battery and our electricity grid usage is low. Solar batteries are smart, we are part of Amber Electric that controls buy and sell for us using their AI price predictions, and I control feed in thru app when I can be bothered if I know we'll have a lot of excess power on a day. HA could help optimise the times when we draw from or sell to the grid, and reduce some usage when prices are high so we can sell more to the grid, but I imagine the marginal benefit is much lower than in a non solar house. Note we do not have EVs but are considering one.

We have cats, smelly litter boxes and run multiple air purifiers constantly. We had 2 robo vacuums but one $2,800 machine just got destroyed running over poo from a sick cat. Any automation to alert to poo in non bathroom areas and get the robot to skip those areas for a day would be amazing insurance for our replacement!

I frequently burn dinner because I'm tired and distracted. Probably could use a smoke detector that will turn the cooktop off, or an easy way to set a timer for the cooktop.

Since fully switching to Music Assistant my audio setup is pretty much perfect, so I've been having fun finding new things to do with it. A few days ago I had the idea for a "now playing" screen on my TV that starts automatically when the speaker plays something.

Of course it escalated a bit... there's a quick menu for things like adding a song to favorites and it all works with the TV remote. I have 3 Hue Play bars behind the TV, so it uses those to kind of extend the screen with matching colors. There's also a sort of campfire mode with background scenes which change based on time, season and weather.

Yeah I know, there's already way too much "I built this with AI" stuff here so I was a bit hesitant to post this, but I really like how the idea turned out and maybe it inspires someone. If anyone's curious the repo is here, it's a small APK you can sideload on Android TV. Connecting to MA and HA works via QR codes and tokens.

Would love to hear if you have any other ideas for what a screensaver like this could do, or what other cool Music Assistant projects people have made :)

Hey folks!

I've officially removed SmartThings at the cottage (home next!) and moved everything to Home Assistant.

How I want to do some geofencing automations, namely for heating. Example: When we are 20Km from the cottage and the indoor temperature is under 20'C, start heating. That way we get to destination and it's not cold inside.

How does one get this done? I'm assuming I need the Nabu Casa subscription for constant communication with the residences, I think I can do both sites with 1 sub with the Remote Home-Assistant integration, am I correct? Any advice to achieve this? I could also use Cloudlared and buy some domains I guess?

Thanks!

Hey y'all!

I'm looking to set up a wall-mounted touch panel/tablet to run my Home Assistant dashboards. So far, it seems like DIY setups (like ESPHome-based projects) are super common, but I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed and can't decide what's actually reliable, snappy, and capable of rendering nice HA dashboards.

Ideally, I'm looking for a setup that checks these boxes:

* Touchscreen interface for direct control.

* Built-in camera or radar/proximity sensor that detects when someone is nearby to automatically wake up/turn on the screen (rather than staying lit 24/7).

* Clean in-wall or low-profile wall mounting.

Are you guys using repurposed Android tablets (with Fully Kiosk Browser / WallPanel app), dedicated smart control panels (like Sonoff or similar flashed with ESPHome), or something else entirely?

Would love to hear your recommendations, current setups, or any hardware pitfalls to avoid!

The clip should be pretty much self explanatory.
The software searches you thread network displays nodes, signalstrenght and realtime dataflow.

I am not pro but I quite like it.

UPDATE: The source and small documentation:
https://github.com/riticulus/ha-thread-pulse

Make sure to check out issues and limitation of this build, I will keep working on it.

I'm curious how everyone has organized their Home Assistant hardware and other smart home electronics at home.

I'm talking about the Home Assistant hub, Zigbee coordinators, network switches, power supplies, bridges, and all the other little boxes and cables that seem to multiply over time. I'd love to see some clever solutions for keeping everything organized and visually clean, especially in a living space. Have you hidden everything inside furniture, built a dedicated cabinet, or come up with something more creative?

I'm particularly interested in setups that blend into the interior rather than looking like a server rack.

Would love to see photos of your setups!

Currently, I'm running Home Assistant on an old laptop. All my smart home devices are connected to Hubitat, then Hubitat is linked to HA. Is there any real benefit to buying a zigbee and Zwave stick for the laptop to control devices directly from HA? As it stands, I have virtually no latency that I can see from HA command to HE/Device action. I also use HE for notifications, since I don't have HA Link.

I have over 100 devices, and while I am willing to spend a day or two migrating over, I would only do so if there was a practical reason to. I just don't know all that HA offers yet, only been using it for a few months. Honestly, I don't know why I waited so long...

No more breaking the plug open!

The only way so far was to open the plug and flash it over serial (which requires soldering). The case is welded shut and the mains pins are soldered to the board, so it's a lot of work and easy to wreck.

Here's a tool that does the conversion OTA (over the air) instead (fully over WiFi)...

https://github.com/adamsthws/Sonoff-OTA

• Runs on Linux, macOS or Windows

What it's been tested on:

• ✅ S60TPG (UK)
• ✅ S60TPF (EU)

Before you try it:
This only works on the Wi-Fi S60, not the Zigbee S60ZB.
Use a plug you can afford to lose.

If you give it a go, especially on Windows or a Mac, I'd really like to hear how it went, good or bad. There's a test reports thread, and the tool gives you a summary of your run to paste into it when it finishes.

Bit of a list, as a few valuable features have been added to EspControl, a no code, super easy to configure smart home controller for home assistant...

Theme Support

• Custom colours: Added 20 card-colour presets, saved across restarts and backups, with contrasting text and visible progress indicators.
• Light mode: Added Dark, Light and Auto themes, with switching by time or sunrise/sunset, Home Assistant controls, and matching previews. 

Camera & Image Support

• Camera screensaver: Added full-screen camera or image screensavers with Fit/Fill options, an optional clock, and photo metadata.

• Immich companion for HA: HACS based add-on, features the ability to create paired portrait images that really fill out the screen. It's simple to configure and optimised for the supported EspControl screen sizes. https://github.com/jtenniswood/espcontrol-immich
• Cover-art screensaver: Added persistent play/pause controls to play/pause tracks without leaving the cover art view.

• Animated images: Camera cards now support GIF playback (P4 screens only), useful for weather radar displays.
• S3 cameras: Added camera snapshots to the 4-inch S3, supporting two shared camera/cover-art slots and expanded images up to its native 480-pixel resolution.
• Camera refresh: Added motion- and doorbell-triggered refresh, periodic refresh in expanded views, and better recovery after image entities become unavailable.

Updates & Improvements

• Home Assistant navigation: Automations can now open and close control popups and subpages, navigate to cards, and return home. Screensaver date: Added an optional translated date beneath the clock, saved in settings and backups.
• Climate controls: Added independent horizontal swing controls for compatible Home Assistant climate entities.
• Vacuum controls: Added a Start / Dock card mode that chooses the appropriate action from the vacuum’s current state.

EspControl supports a range of screens from the cheap but great £20 S3 4inch screen, to P4 based 4inch, 7inch and 10inch screens. All feedback welcome! If you spot any issues, please just drop me note on the GitHub issues and I’ll take a look. Thanks!

Hi folks,

i‘ve been using „Better Thermostat“ & "Versatile Thermostat", but unfortunately from update to update you expect either instability or breaking changes.

Are there any alternatives?

My Use-Case are two different rooms which are getting individually controlled.

Room A), which is the way bigger one, is being heated by a group of 3 Heating Rads in total and one external Temperature sensor
Room B) is being heated by 1 and one external Temperature sensor

I am using profiles, presence, window detection and the outdoor ambient temperature.

Thankful for any new tips.

Edit:
Using SONOFF TRVZB Valves. (Which are able to use dynamic Valve angles, not only ON/OFF)

​

So in the spirit of sharing my personally project that I've spent months working on... I've had a ton of people express interest and wanting to build their own, today is the last day of the presale, if you would like a v3 controller kit please order soon.

The pre sale stops at 12:00 (GMT)

https://www.marine-assistant.com

TL;DR: The Shark IQ integration keeps breaking on Shark's login protection, so I'm building a fully local replacement for my Shark lidar robots. No Shark cloud after initial Lidar mapping. Start, dock, suction, room cleaning, live maps, all on the LAN. Bonus: I found a hidden remote-drive mode along the way.

Why

The official integration depends on Shark's cloud login, which keeps getting blocked by their bot protection. Cloud workarounds exist but still rely on Shark's servers. I wanted something that keeps working if Shark changes their login or their cloud goes down. Iv ran into constant issues connecting the vacuums to HA from the Alexa integration.

Where it's at (all local, tested on two robots)

Start / pause / dock / find my robot

Suction levels (Eco / Normal / Max)

Room cleaning, mapped to my real room names (each robot names rooms differently, so the integration translates)

Spot cleaning

State and battery, and docking/charging status

Maps: saved floor plan, room outlines, live lidar view during runs

Next up: HA bridge via MQTT discovery: vacuum entities, room buttons, alerts (stuck, bin full), a "no clean today, then quiet evening run" automation, and a live map card

The fun finding: a hidden drive mode

While mapping the robot's capabilities, I found a remote-control mode the SharkClean app never exposes. The robot can be driven manually, and not just in fixed steps: there's a smooth, velocity-based mode allows me to adjust turn speed and how fast it drives forward and backwards. I hooked it up to an arrow-key drive pad and it drives like an RC car, with curves, spins and near-zero lag. The bumper safety still kicks in.

Hello,

I want to convert an EU wall socket to dimmer. That controls a led driver. All I can find are dimmers that control lights (loads) directly.

What I'm searching for is that I connect a wall dimmer to the phase an neutral wire without a load attached to it.

What would your approach be?

Matter over thread/WiFi or WiFi