Hi everyone! I wanted to share this project where I finally managed to interface with the original microphones, buttons, and LEDs of an Echo Dot 3 on its original PCB.

Basically, I only replace the board that handles power, the speaker, and communicates with all the existing chips. All 4 microphones work (even though ESPHome currently supports a maximum of 2), and I have full control over the buttons and LEDs. I still have to test the speaker.

I’ve integrated everything into Home Assistant with Voice Assistant, and I have to say the microphone range is really good.

The PCB development is still in progress. If you're interested, I'll post updates once the development is finished! 💪

Recent iO firmware doesn't broadcast during a brushing session anymore — the official integration's timer sits at 0 and then jumps to the total at the end.

Turns out the data moved from BLE advertisements to GATT notifications, so a passive listener has nothing to hear.

Made a custom integration that keeps the passive listening and adds a connection while the brush is awake: live 1 Hz timer, live pressure, quadrant, mode, and a brushing log it builds itself (last session + duration + sessions today).

https://github.com/thomasgregg/oralb-ha

Full protocol notes in the README, including two traps: ff06 looks like pressure but is the button, and pressure is actually on ff0b. Tested on one iO Series 10 — reports from other models welcome.

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.

Havent seen anyone mention all the new flairs and also tags.

Thank you for adding so many more! Copied and pasted flairs here for visibility.

• 🌱 New to Home Assistant
• 🧠 Experienced with Home Assistant
• 🛡️ Privacy first
• 🧭 Freedom of choice
• ♻️ Sustainability
• 🫶 Home Assistant Cloud
• 🐝 Ooh the Zigbee
•  〰️ Riding the Z-Waves 
• Ⓜ️ It does Matter 
• 🧵 Follow the Thread 
• 🧵 Just one more border router 
• 📶 Have you tried 2.4GHz? 
• 🏠 Running Home Assistant OS 
• 🚢 I carry Home Assistant on my container ship 
• 📝 Look at my YAML! 
• 🔴 Connecting the dots in Node-RED 
• 🌐 It's always DNS 
• 🔒 Local-first 
• 💥 Broke it again 
• 🔁 Have you tried restarting? 
• 🐛 It's not a bug, it's a feature 
• 🧩 There's an integration for that 
• 🔋 Another dead Zigbee battery 
• 💤 Automations fire at 3am 
• 🏡 Spouse-approved 
• 🗑️ It worked before the update 
• ⏰ Waiting for the next release 
• 🛠️ Held together with tape 
• 🏚️ The house runs me now 
• 📟 Notified by my fridge 
• 🚪 The door is still ajar 
• 🎖️ Automating since 0.x 
• 🧩 Custom integration developer 
• 🎴 Custom card developer

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for a battery-powered Zigbee rain sensor that works well with Home Assistant preferably Zigbee2MQTT

Requirements:

• Battery powered
• Zigbee (no Wi-Fi)
• Local operation (no cloud dependency)
• Reliable long-term outdoor use
• Available in Europe (Amazon.de would be a plus)

I'm mainly interested in detecting when it's raining, but measuring rainfall amount would be a nice bonus.

Has anyone found a sensor they would actually recommend? I'd especially like to hear from people who have been using one for several months.

Thanks!

I’ve been working on a family health and fitness project for my Home Assistant setup, and I’ve now released the integration publicly for anyone else who wants to try it.

It’s called Health Sync by ResiyHome:

https://github.com/ResiyHome/resiyhome-health-sync

I’m a longtime home automation tinkerer, but not a full-time software developer. This started because I wanted a better way to bring our family’s health and fitness information into Home Assistant, compare progress, build automations, and eventually create a fun family fitness dashboard.

Health Sync connects Home Assistant to the new Google Health API and creates a separate set of entities for each authorized person.

Some of the available data includes:

• Steps and Fitbit-attributed steps
• Distance and active energy
• Exercise and active-zone minutes
• Average, minimum, maximum, and resting heart rate
• Heart-rate variability
• Sleep duration
• Awake, deep, light, and REM sleep
• Daily VO2 max
• Blood oxygen saturation
• Daily and sleep respiratory rate
• Heart-rate-zone minutes
• Floors and sedentary minutes when available
• Latest workout type and duration
• Data source and synchronization status
• Optional weight data, disabled by default

The integration polls every 15 minutes and supports multiple independently authorized family members. Each person gets their own Home Assistant config entry and entities.

Google Health can combine information from sources such as Fitbit and HealthKit when those sources have been synchronized into Google Health. The integration does not connect directly to Apple Health. It reads the reconciled information that Google makes available.

Privacy was a major consideration. The integration:

• Uses read-only Google Health permissions
• Does not use a ResiyHome server, hosted credential proxy, or external backend
• Requires you to own and control your Google OAuth client
• Stores normalized daily summaries instead of raw Google API payloads
• Redacts OAuth credentials, Google identifiers, and health values from diagnostics
• Keeps each family member’s authorization separate

Installation is currently through HACS as a custom repository. You will need to create a Google Cloud project and OAuth client, but I wrote detailed step-by-step documentation covering the complete Google and Home Assistant setup:

https://github.com/ResiyHome/resiyhome-health-sync/blob/main/docs/installation.md

Google OAuth setup:

https://github.com/ResiyHome/resiyhome-health-sync/blob/main/docs/google-cloud-oauth.md

Multi-user setup:

https://github.com/ResiyHome/resiyhome-health-sync/blob/main/docs/multi-user.md

This is the first public release, and I am still completing longer-term testing with multiple people in my own Home Assistant installation. My own Fitbit and HealthKit-sourced data is currently working, including detailed sleep stages, VO2 max, oxygen saturation, and respiratory data.

This is an independent community project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google, Home Assistant, Fitbit, Apple, or Nabu Casa. It is also not a medical device and should not be used for diagnosis, treatment, or emergency monitoring.

Feedback, testing, and contributions are welcome. Please use the GitHub issue forms for bugs or feature requests, and do not post OAuth credentials, tokens, or private health-data screenshots.

I’m especially interested in hearing which Google Health data types would be most useful in Home Assistant and what kinds of health or family fitness automations people would build with them.

Cheers and Enjoy!

Logic77

I have a L40 ultra, I just got an update for it that added the matter protocol. I’ve been using the Dreame beta integration that requires internet.

I was able to add my vacuum to home assistant via matter. I blocked all internet access to the internet via router and it still works. Now it’s 100% local. I can create automations to clean rooms however there is no map.

I'm sure many people have discussed this, but I have poor experience with triggers that rely on my home or away state. I use GPS geofencing via my iPhone companion app, but this hasn't been very reliable (sometimes misses a status change). I've tried SSID triggers, but when you disconnect, the time needed to change to cellular and pass the message on is sometimes too long, also causing a status change to be missed. Using my iPhone as a BLE beacon also doesn't work, as apple isn't cooperative.

Is anyone able to share a working setup?

My expected behaviour is, when I leave my house, my personal entity status changes to 'away' and when I return to 'home'.

I work with HA container 2026.6.4 installed on a Linux debian environment, iPhone 15 Pro (iOS 26) with the HA companion app.

Just a note to say thanks to the Connor and guys who organised a first get together in the north east of Britain. A great event and I’m happily going home with my raffle prize of a HA voice assistant!

I can't seem to find any accurate details on if the JST connector inside the Home Assistant Voice Edition Preview is a 1.25mm or 2mm JST connector.

I recently tried my first job at wiring up a taken apart Amazon Echo Dot Gen 3 speaker, to say the least my first time soldering was poor to be generous.. it works and sounds great.... but I thought for in the event my solder joints fail a more robust solution would be to just find a speaker that has a JST connector on it already that I can plug into the board and then design a 3D enclosure for it.

Guide I followed was here for those interested - https://github.com/glbailey/Voice-Assistant-EE/wiki

I use Home Assistant and Music Assistant to play me random music each morning for my alarm from a playlist, so just covering off those joints failing and me not waking up in time!

For those that want to see my poor first attempt, you can witness it here and flame me - https://imgur.com/a/xkRWexk

My excuses as follows:

• The flux in my kit was the hard type flux & I'm really not sure if I got a good amount on the pads, I need to get some liquid flux.
• The pads were very close together...
• The cheap iron I did buy didn't seem to stay hot for very long and even though I did tin, the iron, wire and pad. It seemed to struggle to then melt them all.

Going to buy some dummy boards, wires and such to do some more practice on... any tips appreciated!

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?

So I got an Aeotec ZI the other day to help make my zigbee system more stable. I notice the light on it is somewhat bright and with how my plug was it was pointed down. This basically turned it into a really good night light.

The issue is, I couldn't remotely control the light from Home Assistant. So I sent them a feature request. And they got back to me and said

I can confirm it is possible, and the feature will be added in the next firmware update when it is released.

So for anyone who has one, wants to have a nightlight they can remotely control, or thinking of getting one. Hopefully soon we will be able to control when the light is on/off with Home Assistant vs using the physical button.

I'd like to have a little LED, potentially red, for notification purposes. It is supposed to tell me if I'm leaving the house but I have left one of the windows open. I want to position it opposite to the apartment door, such that it will flash red at me while I'm walking out the door. It needs to be battery-driven because there is no socket outlet there, so I cannot use a smart bulb.

However, it seems that there are no such devices that are controllable from HA (say they connect via Zigbee or Wifi). It seems like such an obvious device that people want to have for many different purposes, but I cannot find anything.

I was considering "misusing" another device, e.g. I have a door sensor that flashes with an intense red when you open the door. However, this flashing is not controllable via HA, you physically need to move the contact away.

Any ideas on this? I had an LLM search for me several times, but without result.

Edit: A "beeper" would also be okay, but an eInk display would be overlooked too easily. The bulb outside of the door only turns on when a button is pressed and the button is outside of what I can touch (shared staircase).

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.).

I have been running ha bare metal on a 2012 mac mini with 500GB ssd and 16GB of ram. Absolute overkill for HA. The machine stays cool and uses max 9% of cpu. It has been running for + 5years without issues. I have a separate mac mini with mac os, a plex server and 2 external drives. I like the mac os setup as i can take over the mini from my macbook, but i almost never have to. Would it make sense to add the plex server to home assistant and shut down the second mini? Any experiences with plex rserver runningbin home assistant? Max 4 simultanious users on plex.

So I've been gradually moving over from Homekit for my automations to Home Assistant. Happy to have the extra usability but one niggling little thing is bothering me still.

I have 6 large windows all near each other (3 up and 3 down, it's a two story great room) in my great room with Hunter Douglas duette shades and the powerview gateway. When I was using Homekit for the automation, Homekit sends all the shades the open/close/set to X open at the same time. So all six shade start at the exact same time and it's quite lovely to see them all moving together at the same heights.

Home Assistant appears to still send the shade commands one at a time to each shade, so each is offset by a second or so. So the shades do not come up or down exactly together, they are staggered.

I've tried setting the automation to parallel, (I realize now that setting that is not what it's for) and I've set up a parallel block and then adding the shade to the block. No matter what I do the behavior is the same. The staggering varies a bit (less staggered with the parallel block) but the commands still seem to be staggered.

It's a stupid little thing, but I loved seeing the shades go up and down perfectly together which they no longer do.

However, I love being able to tell the shades to go up, down or to a setup point based on either the temperature or whether it's cloudy or sunny which you cannot do with Homekit.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Thanks!

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.

I'm about 1/3rd of the way migrating 200-ish Z-Wave devices from Vera to HA. One at a time, I tediously un-pair from Vera then re-pair with HA's Z-Wave. Many/most of my devices are 10+ years old so it's been an adventure digging up documentation on exclude/include and sometimes factory reset procedures, but I'm fumbling through them.

My latest migration was for an old Zooz 4-in-1 sensor (ZE040). The exclude from Vera was easy, and the include back into HA *should* have been as easy, but... This was the first of my devices that support secure communications. I'm using the default inclusion of "use security if possible" so it was the first time that I was prompted for a PIN to include into HA.

I opened the cover of the 4-in-1 device and immediately saw a tiny QR code sticker attached to the circuit board, so I entered the number from that sticker. The incusion got stuck at "getting device information". I waited a long while but eventually had to X out of it, then remove the "Node 40" that it had created (without proper device config parameters of course). I used the remove form for a working device so that it properly excluded it from HA first.

Then I found another, larger QR code sticker with 5-digit number on the inside of the device's cover. Duh, this is obviously the correct PIN code, so it should be an easy matter to re-add this device afresh.

But upon re-pairing into HA's Z-Wave, it never prompted me again for the new/proper PIN. It just went straight to "getting device information", which hung forever. I tried a factory reset of the 4-in-1 device but got the same problem when re-included. I tried restarting HA and again no help. I restarted the whole virtual server to clean up any cache; same problem.

Evidently, HA's Z-Wave is holding onto the security PIN "somewhere", and it's not deleted when excluding or removing the device from the topology. This makes it impossible to re-include the device afterwards.

Well I don't really care about transport security for this simple 4-in-1 sensor, so after wasting all that time retrying, I did it one more time, but this time opened up the "Security options" area when adding, and clicked on the "Insecure" option ... which allowed the pairing process and getting its device information to proceed normally and quickly.

I'm posting this in case someone else runs into this. And in case an HA developer might see this and know where that PIN is cached (on disk apparently) and be able to fix it so that it's removed when the device is removed.

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

Someone was generous enough to gift me a STv2 Hub so I can troubleshoot these 8 lights which the manufacturer claimed worked with Zigbee.

I have no prior experience with SmartThings. I'm only using these hub for these 8 lights (after complaining to the manufacturer for months they admitted these lights were made specifically with SmartThings in mind).

I know SmartThings will be changing things in October 2026 but I want to tinker around while I can.

I can't control anything from HA using the SmartThings integration. Not sure if this an user error or if there's a better fork I should try.

This is a regular occurrence now. It generally happens when I have to reset my Eero WiFi network due to software updates.

A majority of my Matter over Thread / WiFi devices connect, but often times there are a handful of Matter devices that fail to become available again on the network.

I have tried pinging the devices but usually the only solution is factory resetting and adding them again. This is a big inconvenience, particularly for the ceiling mounted smoke / CO detectors.

These are a combination of leak, temperature, and smart buttons by IKEA along with smoke / CO detectors by Heiman. My Thread network compromises of border routers from my Eero Pro 7 mesh access points, Google Home speakers, and Aqara cameras / doorbells. They are all added to the same Thread network with the Eero set as the priority device.

Is this a common issue for others and something we expect to be solved with Matter in the future? Or is it something wrong on my end? Thanks.

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

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

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!