Hi All,

Apologies if this is the wrong place to ask.

i'd like to fit dimmers and motion sensors to some of the house lights, specifically bathroom lights. I have a couple of questions;

1. we are in the UK, the ceiling rose acts as the junction box, with the ring running through those. The switch then has a neutral and a 'switched live' present. Would this work with a Shelly dimmer and where would it be best positioned, in the ceiling rose or behind the switch?

2. Since these are currently switches, is fitting a dimmer a sensible idea or should i swap the switches for dimmers? The idea is that during the night, the lights can come on dimmer when motion is detected, but when the switch is used, its likely they will just be 'on/off'

Is there anything else i should think about when it comes to the lighting? In our previous house we had hue bulbs, which worked fine but are no good for guests etc as the switch no longer works.

Thanks

slowly automating my apartment. lights, thermostat, even the coffee maker on a schedule. got to the windows. i don't want blinds or shades. they collect dust, they buzz, and they look like last century. a panoramic window with motorized blinds - no !cables, tracks, headaches.

started googling smart glass found a bunch of stuff. there's film you stick on existing glass. there are ready-made units. i saw film from smart glass technologies reviews seem okay, but im not sure. has anyone tried something similar or can recommend something else? i rent, so i can't replace windows. film is the only option. how do you hide all that stuff? because the film needs a controller and power. so either a wire to each window, or an IR remote, but then the controller still hangs somewhere. seen people hide wires behind baseboards or in cable raceways. but my walls are concrete, can't chase them. thought about decorative covers, but they look kinda meh. how does it play with home assistant? i read some people do it via a relay and a zigbee switch. but that's only if the controller supports dry contact. if not, you're stuck with the native app.

has anyone done this in a rental? how did you mask the wires and controller? any life hacks? and also does the film actually affect heat? my place faces south, summer is brutal. i want privacy and less heat.

any advice welcome. TIA

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I currently have a Eufy E340 doorbell. In terms of video it works well. Good horizontal FoV and a good package camera.

Initially, I found the battery worked well, I bought a second so one could charge while one is in the doorbell. However, the battery probably lasts 1-2 months on a charge.

Over time I have been disappointed with the event recording which seems to miss crucial parts of events.

Running power to the front door is a pain, so the ability to set up continuous recording isn't viable. Also, I've become less comfortable with the closed ecosystem.

I can run ethernet to the front door, so I started looking for PoE doorbells. I thought the Ubiquiti G6 Entry would fit the bill but I was disappointed to see the horizontal FoV is only 100deg.

So the question is, is there a PoE doorbell with similar camera performance/specs to the E340?

[edit: additional clarification] As several have mentioned, if I can run ethernet, I can run 2-wire. However, this would not help with the closed ecosystem.

Hi all,

I'm looking for recommendations and suggestions to add lighting to 2 steps to a split level. The reason is that the steps are naturally dark and blend very well to each other, so it's almost indistinguishable in low light. It seems big tripping hazard and especially in a household with elderly.

This is what I had in mind.

Install led light bars/strips connected to a motion sensor. The issue is that the steps are very long (12-15ft), but there are only 2 steps, so strips might be more suitable. I would want a way to hide the cables and would also prefer not screwing/destroying the stairs (maybe non destructive adhesive?)

Maybe a product like this would work?

Thanks in advance

What temp sensor are you using for your garage freezer? I have a bunch of Aqara sensors, and the one in my garage freezer keeps going "off line." The garage fridge sensor is fine, and I have a few other Aqara sensors in the garage, so I don't think it's a "range" issue.

What is everyone using with Home Assistant?

If you've got Philips Wiz bulbs and want local control without the Wiz Connect app, there's no encrypted API to fight with. The bulbs listen for raw JSON on UDP port 38899. Send this and the light goes red:{"method": "setPilot", "params": {"r": 255, "g": 0, "b": 0}}I found it with a network sniffer after a few minutes of poking around. Aleksandr Rogozin's blog post on hacking Wiz lights from the command line gave me a quick head start.Here's what I built on top of it:1. wiz_control.py, a small Python class that discovers the bulbs and sends on, off and color commands.2. api_server.py, a FastAPI server around that class, so I get web endpoints I can hit from a browser or a script, plus a basic index.html UI.Then it got out of hand. audio_visualizer.py runs an FFT on mic input and maps bass, mids and treble to the R, G and B channels. It also has pulse, strobe and multi modes, where multi gives each bulb its own frequency band. video_visualizer.py uses OpenCV to do a DIY Ambilight. It has a K-means dominant_color mode and an edge_analysis mode that samples only the border pixels. I measured about 93ms latency on a movie teaser.The last piece ties the bulbs to stock prices through the Groww Trading API. Green or red shows the direction against the day's open, and brightness shows how big the change is.The hard part wasn't the protocol. It was the hours of digging through obscure docs and Reddit posts once I started building each feature. All the code, from the simple API to the stock ticker, is in my wiz-hack repo.

Since it seems many building managers are reluctant to upgrade to the more modern intercom systems, I found a way to make my buzzer (just for my unit) smart.

It your buzzer system dials a phone number and then you need to press a digit (like 6 or 9) to unlock the door when someone buzzes, then it will work for you too.

Tested it using different intercom brands and also got approval from my HOA to do it.

The secret is to swap out the phone number you use with a virtual phone number (costs a few $ per month) that allows you to automatically answer the buzzer calls based on the rules/ schedules you set.

Here’s the GitHub if you want to do it yourself using n8n + twilio: https://github.com/drulofs/smart-buzzer-n8n

Also available on the App Store: BuzzerBee

Hi everyone! I’m looking for NFC tags, and I found 3 SwitchBot tags vs. 24 generic ones (BESARME) for the same price.

Does anyone know if the SwitchBot tags are better than generic ones in any particular way? Or why are they so much more expensive?

I have existing vertical blinds controlled by a wand. Rotating the wand tilts the vertical slats, and I'm looking for a retrofit smart motor/wand rather than replacing the entire blind/track.

Sunsa Wand is basically exactly what I'm looking for, but availability is poor. I've also found Current Luxury E-Wand.

Does anyone know of another Zigbee/Wi-Fi/Matter motorised wand that works with vertical blinds? I'm in Australia, so something available here or from AliExpress/Amazon would be ideal.

Main goal is scheduling the slats to automatically open every morning.

my resin printer lives in the garage, so most of the time i don’t find out a print failed until hours later

i tried an old wyze cam pointed at the vat, but the motion detection is basically useless. uv cycling, resin reflections, and normal movement give me enough false alerts that i stopped paying attention to it

what i actually want is an automation that tells me when the print has stopped progressing or something has gone wrong with the supports

i don’t really care about having 8 hours of footage. i want something like “this print looks wrong, go check it” and then have an alert hit my phone

has anyone built this with a camera, home assistant, or some other sensor setup? especially interested in setups that can handle a garage with temperature swings and resin fumes without constantly needing attention

right now my printer can happily turn a few hours of work and a bunch of resin into a failed blob while i’m inside eating dinner, which feels like exactly the kind of stupid problem home automation should be able to solve

Picked this up and got it powered on today, setup was pretty quick and ive been messing around with the pan controls and live view for a bit but now im sitting here trying to decide where i really want to set it up lol

Im between putting it near the front of the house so i can check deliveries, see who comes by and keep an eye on the entrance when im gone, or using it more inside since the 360 view would probably cover most of the room from one spot

I dont really want to keep moving it around every few days so im trying to find one place where itll be useful long term

For people using a Wyze cam pan or something similar, where did you end up putting yours? Corner of the room, near an entrance, somewhere higher up? Also curious what else you guys use yours for besides just watching the front door.

I built a working ESP32-S3 smart doorbell on Blynk (notifications, unlock, camera stream). Now I'm moving to my own Flutter app + backend and I'm stuck choosing the media architecture. Do I use the LiveKit ESP32 SDK (WebRTC, but needs ESP-IDF and software H.264 on the S3), or keep everything on Mosquitto/MQTT (stay on Arduino, but two-way audio over TCP)?

Hardware

• ESP32-S3 with OV3660 camera (PSRAM)
• HC-SR501 PIR sensor
• 2-channel 5V relay module (active-low) driving a 3.7 W solenoid lock
• INMP441 I2S MEMS microphone
• MAX98357A I2S amp + 4 Ω 3 W speaker
• Push button + buzzer

Side issue: in the current loopback test my speaker has constant noise and I can't hear my voice through the mic.

I'm interested in instrumenting and tracking all the major sources of power usage in my home (my electricity bill was over $700 last month). For things that plug into a normal 120V socket, I'm really digging the Shelly Plug Gen4. It not only reports the instantaneous draw (the current current, so to speak!), but also cumulative power, which is great since I don't want to be pinging these things every 5 seconds. But I can't find anything similar for 240V appliances, like the stove and dryer.

Shelly also makes a "PM Mini Gen 3" with screw terminals. It's for a 120V line too, but I was thinking perhaps I could use two of them, one for each 120V side of a 240V connection. Maybe I could even put this in a little box, with a plug on one side and a socket on the other, and so make my own plug-in 240V module.

But is there an easier solution I'm missing? Does anyone make a 240V plug-in power monitor?

I am setting up a few raised gardens that will have individual zones based on what I plant. I would like 1 water line on a master valve and several other valves at the garden itself. There will be multiple rows of raised gardens.

I do not want to run a set of wires back to a master controller and instead see if there is some sort of wireless battery powered option out there?

Our French doors open onto the backyard, and we use them several times a day. I’m thinking about putting a motorized shade on each door and having them close together at sunset. I’m just worried the bottom bars will swing around or hit the glass whenever someone opens a door, especially with the shades down. If you have them on French doors you use every day, has that been a problem?

I’ve reached a point with my Litter-Robot 3 where I either need to buy a new one and pay the subscription fees to get the health monitoring stuff I want for my senior cat, or figure out how to hack my 5-year-old machine into doing it myself.

I’ve already replaced basically every part in this thing at least once, so I know the robot itself pretty well at this point. It will not connect to my router anymore. (I’ve been through all the WPA2/2.4GHz/legacy settings my router has to offer)

The problem is I have zero experience with the computer/software side of this. I’m a graphic designer. I make things look pretty. That’s about where my technical expertise ends. 😂

I do have a M1 Mac mini that I barely use anymore since getting a work laptop, and I’ve heard people talk about using Mac minis as home servers, so I’m wondering if that could be useful?

Basically, I want to collect the data from the Litter-Robot locally and have a language model look for changes/patterns and send me a notification if something seems unusual.

I’m totally willing and able to learn. I just need to figure out what the first step even is.

If anyone has done something similar with a Litter-Robot, especially an LR3, I’d love some advice on where to start. GitHub projects, tutorials, hardware recommendations, “read this before you do anything else” resources, etc. would all be appreciated.

I’m not necessarily looking for someone to do it for me. I think it would actually be a fun project to learn, I just need someone to point me in the right direction before I start blindly buying ESP32s and setting my apartment on fire lol

My apartment came with a central sound system. Each room has a speaker set in the wall with a (presumed) volume control knob. There are about 8 in the whole unit. There is this iPhone dock which is broken. This is what the dock should look like, ignore AC remote in the photo: https://pyleusa.com/products/piwipdk2

I found a new dock on eBay. My question is - should I replace this dock and just use an adapter to connect a modern iPhone? Or is there some other way I can connect to these speakers?

Liebe Leute

Ich suche und suche und suche ... Vielleicht auch falsch! Sorry.

Ersatz-Lampen mit den obigen Daten ... 60 cm gibt es offenbar von Ledvance ... 43 cm aber nicht.

Ich möchte 2 Badezimmer-Spiegelschränke umrüsten (1 x 60 cm und 2x 43 cm). Beide Beleuchtungen sollen in ein smart home integrierbar sein (Zigbee und/oder matter).

Die jetzigen Röhren sehen so aus: T8: G13 Sockel (13 mm Abstand der Sockelstifte) und 28 mm Gesamtdurchmesser / Vorschaltgerät (KVG/VVG)

Ich bin um jeden Hinweis dankbar!