Hi all, my last post unfortunately got removed as it was suspected that the post was made by AI. That was not the case (though even my wife thinks I speak like AI 😂).

I have made an Android companion for Home Assistant that is able to auto generate a complete dashboard for your convenience. You only need to set up areas in Home Assistant (and obviously setup your devices) and the app will try to build a complete dashboard for you.

The app is made for fun and will be released to the Play Store soon. There is a closed test currently ongoing and you can opt-in by sending me a DM with your Google email address so I can add you to the testers list. All feedback is welcome

Because there are too much features to mention I will post the details below, the code is open source and can be found on github.

## Home Assistant Community Post
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/hki-7-a-highly-customizable-android-companion-that-automatically-builds-the-ui-for-you/1017467

## Github
https://github.com/jimz011/android-hki7

*Disclaimer: This project is created with help from AI-assisted development tools. I know we live in a world where there is much AI-slop. But I actually want to show you that AI can also be used to create something good and not just stupid video's, cheap apps or dumb images. If you disagree with this, then do not install this app.

Hey, wondering if any of you who have had experience buying both the name brand zigbee (Sonoff, Aqara) door and window sensors are able to provide a contrast to any of the cheaper zigbee white label products available on AliExpress, and how they work in HA.

The price different isn’t huge, but it’s significant when x15-20 sensors that I’m curious if it’s worth spending a bit more and what you get.

The cheap option I was looking at: https://a.aliexpress.com/_mqqDrn1 these are approx CAD $6-7 a sensor

And then the aqara option: https://a.aliexpress.com/_mKV6k1D these are approx $15-16 a sensor

Aqara is a little more than twice the price.

Also, my only experience to date has been with ring zwave sensors. Zwave seems a lot pricier these days, and I can’t find any options for less than CAD$20 a sensor. I know zwave support in HA is great, so this will be my first foray into Zigbee.

Aqara seems to maybe allow for a bigger gap between the sensors, but they seem to use same batteries.

Has (or does) anyone use HA on a larger scale other than at home? Workplace? Apartments? Rentals?

I have about 25 Bali (aka "Springs Fashion") shades around the house. They all appear as battery powered devices in the Z-Wave network -- and that's certainly how most people install them. But I actually have all of mine hardwired to a power supply in my attic.

I don't want or need Z-Wave taking the time to query and display their battery status (100%). And I'm thinking that if they were properly configured as mains-powered that they might be available to act as Z-Wave repeaters.

It's not a big deal, but does anyone know of a way that I can override whatever device configuration item to show them as mains-powered?

I’m setting up my first HA. I got a zbt-2 without thinking about setting up the mesh repeaters. Do I need to think much about whether any zigbee repeaters (sonoff or thirdreality or …) work better/worse with the ZBT-2? Or “zigbee is zigbee” and these are basically interchangeable?

Is there something that would be controllable via home assistant something like in the pictures

My idea is to make a in ceiling speaker using a 6in speaker pi zero 2w with poe power ​to connect to home assistant.

I need to know is this a dumb idea

Looking for a mini PC to run HA with frigate.. My celeron 3350 will not do the job. Any ideas for budget friendly option ?

After a lot of firmware reverse engineering with Claude and Codex AI (of course !), the fan, water-level sensing, pump/circulation, and filter drying are working on ESPHome.

The water pump was the real nightmare—it took ages to figure out the correct GPIO sequence and required the fan, tach feedback, water detection, and an 8-second startup delay before it would run.

This might be the first publicly documented working ESPHome port for this humidifier. It’s still experimental, but the repo includes the component, YAML, confirmed pinout, flashing guide, stock backup/restore instructions, and all the reverse-engineering notes.

It’s also pretty easy to flash thanks to the accessible J3 header, and the repo includes its confirmed pinout.

I hope this helps anyone else who wants to get rid of vendor apps entirely and never install one—even for devices like this SwitchBot unit that supposedly work locally.

GitHub: https://github.com/phdindota/switchbot-humidifier-esphome

I've been using the voice assistants pretty much since the day they were released. The main issue I face is response speed. Using the built in (and quite frankly, very powerful) voice intents makes everything pretty much instant. But even with decent hardware the responses that use the local LLM can vary from 2 - 15 seconds.

It would be nice to have a trigger or hook that is available that tells whether voice intents are being used or if the query is going to the LLM.

So if the LLM is going to be used you could fire off a TTS that says, "just a moment..." or "let me think about that..." Currently ChatGPT's voice chat does this. This lets the user know something is eventually going to happen. It also buys some free processing time while the phrase is being said, thus making the action seem faster.

Is this already in the pipeline somewhere?

Music Intro Quiz

A couple of weeks ago I posted here about Guess the Intro, a self-hosted "name that tune" game I built for the family. Plenty of you tried it, so here's the follow-up on where it's got to.

How it plays:

- The main setup casts to an Android TV (I use a Shield) — it shows the live scoreboard and plays the intro clips itself, loudness-normalised with an exact start/stop. This is now rock-solid — the audio-dropping / board-crashing pain a few of you (and I) hit is fixed for good after a long diagnostic slog.

- Phones are the buzzers — everyone answers multiple-choice on their own phone, with a speed bonus for answering fast.

- No cloud, no external APIs at game time — it all runs on your own boxes off your own library.

What I'm after here: there's a Music Assistant path that pushes the clip audio to a speaker (or speaker group) instead of the TV. I run it Shield-first, and honestly my own network is segmented into VLANs in a way that makes it awkward to get the game box, HA/Music Assistant and the speakers talking for a proper test — so that mode is only lightly tested. I'd love a few HA Cast / Music Assistant users on a flatter setup to try it and tell me how it holds up.

Also new since the first post:

- Pre-built multi-arch Docker images (GHCR + Docker Hub) — docker compose pull and go, no build-from-source.

- A half-time trivia round, better scoring, and a stack of stability fixes from real family game nights.

It pulls intro clips from any Subsonic-API library (I use Navidrome; LMS etc. also work). Free and open source (MIT).

Repo + setup: https://github.com/colfin22/intro-quiz

Happy to answer setup questions — or help you get it working. One gotcha worth knowing up front: casting needs the app served over HTTPS (Cast devices won't load a plain-HTTP page/stream reliably), so a reverse proxy with a cert is part of the setup. Glad to walk anyone through it.

Edit: should've mentioned — the music library side needs a Subsonic-API server (Navidrome, LMS, etc.).

Hi, I want to share my experience creating Home Assistant dashboard cards with AI.

I was looking for a particular card but couldn’t find anything suitable. Then I thought, why not ask ChatGPT to make it?

The first one was the Energy Calendar card. I gave ChatGPT a screenshot from the Tapo app and asked, “Can you make a Home Assistant card like this?” About 10 minutes later, I had a .js file ready to upload to Home Assistant. I was genuinely surprised it looked almost exactly like what I had requested. After a few updates and improvements, I had the perfect card for my setup.

Next, I tried to find a good card for my Eufy E28 vacuum. I tested several existing cards, but some features didn’t work properly. I asked ChatGPT again, provided a few screenshots and explained what I wanted. After several updates, I had a complete vacuum card with:

• Live status, battery, water level and dock information
• Start, stop, return home and locate controls
• Map display
• Controls, configuration and diagnostics tabs
• Scene and room-cleaning buttons
• Options to choose, hide and reorder entities

I also created:

• Cleaning Timetable: A repeating cleaning rotation for multiple people, with custom names, colours, icons and durations.

I have no real coding experience. I created all of this by describing my ideas to ChatGPT, uploading screenshots, testing the files and reporting what needed to be changed.

Altogether, it took us 😄 about seven hours to create and improve everything.

Honestly, it was much easier than I expected. AI can be extremely useful for creating custom Home Assistant cards when you can’t find exactly what you need.

What's everybody using instead of these now they can't be flashed to ZigBee?

All was good until a few days ago. But now the Blink integration refuses to authenticate. Logged out and back in on the app. Sure the login info is right but it does look to now send a 6digit two factor code to my phone…. Thoughts?

Investigating replacing RF smart blinds with Zigbee, installed Z2M and got myself the above blind, didn’t think to get the remote as I had seen Z2M could se the limits of the blind itself, but it appears that the “border” function is not exposed on this particular tubular blind motor, have I bought the wrong motor or is this not possible on this version?

I think I've reached home security monitoring endgame.

What you're looking at is the following pipeline:

1. Tapo/Reolink Cameras recording to Frigate 24x7 - all Ethernet
2. Cameras pass ONVIF events to HA integrations - some custom, HACs and official (Tapo Camera Control + Reolink Integrations)
3. Cameras pass RTSP streams to Frigate recording to an internal NVME on a Proxmox LXC hosting Frigate.
   1. No object or motion detection in Frigate.
4. Home Assistant triggers on ONVIF camera events to:
   1. Create events in the Frigate timeline, for easy Frigate scrubbing.
   2. Create Local LLM Calls for Image to Text Description (passes through to M4 Mac Mini running oMLX - gemma4:e4b)
   3. Create LLM Vision Event for the Dashboard LLM Vision Timeline Card - also replaced the LLM Vision Thumbnail with a 5 second Frigate GIF of the event.
   4. Create a Discord message with:
      1. LLM Description Message
      2. High Quality Snapshot
      3. 5 Second Frigate GIF footage for easy discord Review
      4. Links to Review the camera and other cameras nearby at the same timecodes as the event was detected for full footage review across multiple cameras.

I could probably have done this without Claude, but honestly it would've taken multiple weekends of effort and some serious debugging, testing, investigation and dry documentation reading effort.

This was all done with minimal guidance and direction from me on Opus 4.8 on High+Ultracode, I ran Claude Code on an isolated Proxmox LXC and gave it MCP (Unofficial Version) and SSH access to Home Assistant.

As someone who has used Home Assistant for a couple of years now with complex automations, I am honestly frightened at how little I had to interact with the LLM to get this all working.

Getting a random 433MHz remote or an IR code into Home Assistant was always more of a hassle than it should be — capturing the raw timing, getting the format right for ESPHome or my BroadLink, and hoping it actually fired. So I built a little browser tool to take the pain out of it. Free, runs in the browser, no account, no install. Sharing in case it helps someone here.

You paste or drop almost any IR or RF signal — a raw capture, Flipper .ir/.sub, BroadLink Base64, Pronto, LIRC, Global Caché — and it identifies the protocol, shows you what it is, and outputs it in whatever format you need. For HA that means:

• ESPHome remote_transmitter raw block you can drop straight into a config (IR and 433/315/868MHz OOK)
• Arduino rc-switch if you're running an ESP with a cheap transmitter
• BroadLink Base64 for an RM4 you already have

The RF side decodes and generates 11 fixed-code 433/315/868MHz protocols (Princeton/PT2262, Nice, CAME, Holtek, Gate TX, Intertechno/Nexa and more) and reads/writes Flipper .sub. Rolling codes (KeeLoq, Security+, Somfy) it flags as rolling instead of faking a clone — those change every press, so no tool can.

There's a live waveform so you can see the signal, and a "rebuild clean" button that re-times a messy learned capture before you save it.

https://readyware.net/signal-editor.html

Thought some of you here might find it useful. If there's a format or protocol you use that I'm missing, drop it in a comment and I'll add it.

I'm running homeassistant on Pi4B for several years and finally decided to migrate from SD card to external NVME connected via USB.

First I've tried to make it to boot from nvme. Didn't worked.

Then I've tried to use a built-in feature move data to external disk, the problem here is that I see my disk in the drop-down I can select but it's not getting selected, but then the move button become available.

Disk was cleaned and formatted to extfat32 using MacOs's disk utility.

Homeassistant was fully rebooted after inserting the disk

No new errors in the log.

What else I alcan check and am I doing anything wrong?

I don't really want to spend extra 100eur to buy a used optiplex to use it instead.

Tapo camera into apple home

Ok so i have done all the things that i am supposed to do and still no luck. These cameras are not native home compatible so i have a home assistant green and i am trying to do it that way. Ive done the VLC and can get it to play but i seem to be stuck at that point… i don’t know what to do to get it to add to home assistant viewing or to get it into home.I am looking for step by step (treat me like the idiot i feel like right now) the cameras are great but i want it all on the one ecosystem for storage and viewing. I don’t want to have to do the tapo subscription. Do i need a seperate hub? I thought that the home assistant could act as the hub.

Disclaimer… i am not even sure i know what i am doing with the home assistant. I feel like there is nothing for a NEWBY… everything is geared for someone with just a bit more basic knowledge than this girl! HELP!! I don’t know code nor does anything with YAML make sense and i wouldn’t know where to even type that in. At this point i wish there was a pay per chat for someone to walk me through his.

I am trying to integrate my Nest thermostat with HA. When I click the integrate link OR search through the integration section, I do not get this page. I go to the next page with the project ID from the Google Cloud. How do I trigger this page? Or, has the integration changed in the last month? The video I am currently watching was released a month ago.

So I know about the email thing @tmomail.net or whatever the service is.

It works sometimes. But I think their internal spam filter prevents a lot of it. And it's a hit or miss if a message comes across.

Due to this, I wonder if there is a better free method.

I know about some paid services. But the problem with them is they charge for incoming and I can see a bot killing that. And then going for prepaid, I might as well use the contract thing and get unlimited since it isn't that far off. But I don't want to deal with any of that.

The alerts that is sent is mostly hey the fire alarm is going off or something like that. So it happening is hopefully an extremely rare event.

The other method is have is if my phone uses the app and then my phone automatically sends other people the text. But it clogs things up. Plus for some reason I need to open the phone before it gets notifications from the app. So if it is just in my pocket for hours. Then ya.

Does anyone know of any other method I can use? Something free? Like is there a way to hook it to a Google voice number or something like that.

Hi all,

Based in the UK if that helps. My bathroom light, has broke (the awful pulling cord thing) finally, so it's time to get rid of that nonsense and I'm looking for some smart bulbs but I have one main concern - I need a system that won't just be a motion sensor, my worry is that I go to take a shower, light comes on, then during the shower light will go off as it will stop finding the motion....

So looking for something that will trigger upon entering the bathroom and then switching off when exiting, as if some sort of wall mounted sensor around the door area, that stays on until "crossed" again, if that makes sense?

I already have kitchen fitted with Philips bulbs, but those are only controlled with an app/HA and I'd like to avoid just this approach for a bathroom and add the sensor part.

HA compatibility is of course bonus but I can't imagine a solution like that wouldn't be compatible.

So reaching out to you all, seeing the crazy stuff you are putting out there, makes this child's play for you I'm sure so thank you in advance for any suggestions!

Have a nice day!

I was thrilled to see the NYC MTA integration, and added it - my favorite subway stations.

However, I cannot get it to successfully see a Bus route for the SBS (select bus service) - at least in my testing, anything SBS simply returns an error.

To check, I added the M9 and M22 - those worked fine. But a M14A-SBS, M15-SBS simply returned an error.

All the sources I look at (APIs and static data / General Transit Feed Specification) show the above are the correct names, but the integration returns "invalid bus route". Digging into the code lead me to the py-nymta package (which I'm still investigating)

Am I missing something? Has anyone gotten a "SBS" bus route to work?

(I do see "ValueError" indicated from async_get_stops in the logs from the pymta package in the , but the message indicates that my API key is wrong, which it's clearly not as the M9/M22 and other random non-SBS ones work just fine)

I have been playing with View Assist on an Echo Show 8 with LineageOS and recently, a Facebook Portal 1st gen. Overall, I am closer than I've ever been to abandoning cloud-based assistants due to just how incredible View Assist is! One use case I wanted to mimic was syncing my voice assistant speaker with the Sonos Era 100 I have in my kitchen. I've been doing this with airplay, which works pretty flawlessly. I initially tried doing it by setting up the View Assist device as a Home Assistant media player in Music Assistant but the results were not great.

I did some digging and stumbled across this project: https://github.com/pantherale0/sendspinlite . This is a lightweight sendspin client that runs in the background and serves up a sendspin endpoint. I launched the app and it was immediately picked up in my Music Assistant instance. I was then able to launch the View Assist companion app and confirmed the sendspin service continued to run without issue. After an initial launch, the service appears to survive reboots also.

Overall, performance is pretty good! If I start music on my Portal and then add one of my Sonos speakers, there is usually a sync issue but if I start whatever I'm playing with the speakers already grouped, things work well. I've seen discussions of eventually integrating something similar to this directly into View Assist but until then, this feels like it will get me by in the meantime. Just wanted to share if anyone is looking for similar functionality. HUGE thank you to all the developers working on these amazing open source projects!