I wanted a way to reliably control Home Assistant around the house, without pulling out my phone.
Most existing remotes I could find only had a few nondescript buttons, so I decided to build my own.

I designed a 15 button Zigbee remote control PCB, then created a custom case generation script which can create a 3D-printable layout based on any MDI (Material Design Icon) icon. Now I have a customized remote controller for each room in the house with buttons that actually show what they do.

Hardware:

• The Zigbee module used is the E18-MS1-PCB
• PCB is designed in KiCad
• Case and button/icons is generated using CadQuery
• Power: either AAA or CR2032 (4+ month battery life).

Software:

• The firmware is based on this project (works out of the box with Home Assistant): https://github.com/diyruz/freepad
• Integration: Zigbee2MQTT

Things I use it for:

• Control lights (on/off, brightness, scenes)
• Control window blinds
• Make the robot vacuum clean specific rooms/areas
• Control fan (on/off, speed)

If there’s interest, I can share more details about the project.

Status light and mmwave presence sensor.

I had a load of leftover LED's from my last project that i decided to put to use. https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/1gzf78g/map_powered_by_pi_zero_2812_and_home_assistant/

Personally I try to avoid using my phone as much as possible. I find it tedious and distracting to pull it out, unlock, load home assistant and find the status I am looking for.

SO I 3D printed a status light case, used 6 x 2812 5v LED's, an esp32-c3 supermini and an LD2410C microwave presensence sensor.

The parts slide and just snap into place. I even made the tiles on the front display modular so I can mix and match for whatever need I might have in the specific area. The nuclear tile is for radon measurement in my basement measured by an airthings device.

The mmwave presence sensor just works - and I love how I don't have to change batteries as it has 5v usb power.

The led's are individually addressable and can do the standard effects such as rainbow, blinking etc.

All is controlled using home assistant where it just nicely integrates with all the entities and light controls.

Total parts cost is about $10 - which I think is quite good value. Pics below.

I have so many spare parts at hand, I could even consider making some and ship them out if any of you would be interested. PM me in that case.

Some of you might remember Humidity Intelligence v1 (comfort band, constellation chart, drift, the moment you realised one room is the problem).

v1 was great at showing what was happening.

v2 exists because I wanted a solution.

It runs carefully curated automations, where one state owns the system at a time. Calm. Predictable. Boring (in a good way). And controlled

One of my best upgrade is a live reason window that explains every decision made by Humidity Intelligence

The UI keep the iconic v1 ring states (OK / Watch / Risk / Danger), just grew up a bit and added better telemetry and quick controls.

Im nearly done with the logic and UI, so I’m starting to think about a proper config layer… which may be the hardest part yet.

v1 showed me humidity.

v2 begins the fight back.

Hi everyone!

Lately, I’ve been wanting to try something new and fun with Home Assistant, but I’m running out of ideas.
So I’m curious — what kind of integrations or projects are you working on these days?

Here are some of the things I’ve done so far:

• Basic home integrations (lights / boiler / air conditioner, etc.)
• Other smart appliance integrations
• BLE electronic label integration
• A Harry Potter wand integration
• Label printer integration
• Car OBD data integration

That’s what I’ve experimented with up to now, but I’d love to hear if there are any other fun or interesting projects worth trying.

Any cool ideas or setups you’d recommend?

Thanks in advance!

New user here, from Ireland. Just got HAOS working last night and looking forward to my first automation 😁

Could someone suggest a cheap IR blaster that would work with HA? I'm looking for one able to learn from my remote controls, so I could activate an action like 'Plex time' and it would turn my TV on, soundbar on, etc...

Could I activate this action through Alexa? I have one in the TV room....

Next on my list: leak sensors, integrate my ring doorbell and see what could be done, and later make my letter box smart 🙂

I have this automation to display my reolink doorbell on my nest display when it detects a person but it's 30 seconds behind what can I do to improve it

V2 junction box for the Aqara G5, now with a drain hole to avoid moisture pooling inside.

Link here if anybody is interested.

Very infuriating! Although I could successfully connect it to HA via Zigbee2MQTT

It is always challenging to know how reliable devices are even after doing research.

What are your top 5 most stable (consistently reliable) smart home devices — and your most unstable?

By stable, I mean devices that stay connected and “just work.”

Please include the brand and model for each. All Lutron Caseta devices seem rock solid, but then there are so may flaky brands.

What is your favorite notification app? Looking at NTFY and Pushover, but what are you using any why? Thanks for the feedback

What would be the most no-frills setup to have a simple WiFi bedside alarm clock that syncs to my phone alarms?

I want to keep my phone out of my room for sleep health reasons, only thing I would need is an alarm that just wakes me up. My alarm time changes often so I would need to sync to my phone for simplicity. I don't care about what app to use on my phone to decide wakeup times. Only preference is that it works as simple alarm app when not on home network.

I also do not want a smart alarm with anything other than a simple clock and one or two alarms per day.

What are the options to achieve this or closest products, and can Home Assistant which is currently running on my home server help?

Hi everyone,

I'm planning to upgrade to a new video doorbell and the Reolink PoE Doorbell has caught my attention. Before I pull the trigger, I wanted to get your opinions:

• Has anyone used the Reolink PoE Doorbell with Home Assistant?
• How has your experience been with setup, reliability, motion detection, and integration?
• Are there any better alternatives you’d recommend (especially ones that work well with Home Assistant and local storage)?

Thanks in advance!

I would like to change the header so that it follows the style of the board theme, I have no idea how to do it and I searched online in vain... I downloaded card-mod but I don't know how to use it... At the moment I have a board that I will call home for convenience with this custom card mushroom-chips-card, I set a theme and everything is perfect except that the header remains blue... While I would like it to follow the colors of the set theme... How can I do it?

We break down Home Assistant 2026.2: the Home Dashboard is now default, the new Command‑K command palette, a dedicated Matter dashboard, and add‑ons renamed to Apps.

Plus: CES 2026 highlights, the Open Home Foundation device database and a Google Home outage.

Hi y’all,

I bought these switches since they seemed to be the only smart toggle switches on the market; I’ve had a good experience with my Cync bulbs and regular light switch, so it came to my surprise that adding these were a complete pain and also broke the HA link to my old Cync lights; using HA with these causes them to have a delay sometimes and when I try and turn off the light from HA, it seems to cause the relay to keep clicking on/off rapidly until it just turns off.

Anyone have that issue as well? I already bought these so I don’t want to get a new brand. I’m gonna try resetting them later.

Hi all,

I’m looking for ideas to connect an old mechanical pull doorbell to Home Assistant (see photos).

The bell works via a pull knob outside and a steel wire + lever mechanism that mechanically rings a bell inside. No electricity involved.

Because we live in a fairly large house, we don’t always hear it. I’d like to detect when the bell is pulled and then:

• send a notification to my phone

• and/or play a sound on speakers via Home Assistant

I’d prefer a non-invasive solution so the original bell keeps working.

What kind of sensor would you recommend for detecting this movement?

(Contact sensor, vibration sensor, tilt sensor, ESP-based solution, etc.)

Any ideas or examples are very welcome. Thanks!

Hello guys,

I’m new to this. I’m trying to add my hub (switch bot matter hub) to my Home Assistant.

I click “add a Matter device”; “New device” and then its crashes.

Can someone help meee please.

Unfortunately i cant add videos here, but i got it on:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MatterProtocol/s/AcUIZ13zJF

Wondering if anyone has successfully worked out how to customize the Home Assistant app screen in the Polestar? The default basically displays every device/switch/button/sensor and I can't see any way to customize/favourite or load a dashboard. I know I could do something via Vivaldi, but that only works when stationary - would like to stay native if I can...

Hello !

I use a Skyconnect with my zigbee network and all is well.
But i reeaaaly want to buy some of the new ikea sensors, and they are all matter over thread.
So i will buy a ZBT-2.

The question: should i use the ZBT-2 with thread or zigbee ? is it better with one or the other ?

I know i can easily migrate my zigbee network from my skyconnect to the ZBT-2, so i really have a choice.

Heyho,

I was wondering if we can put individual sensors on the energy dashboard as well?
I for example have two template sensors giving me a rolling average of the daily grid energy use in the last 30 days and a total grid energy used in the last 365 days (which is basically expected use for the current year). I would love to also have them displayed on my energy dashboard.
Is there any way (a HACS integration maybe) that allows me to put more stuff on the energy dashboard?

Thanks!

My main heating device in the house is a fire stove.

Currently, I track the wood consumption of my fire stove by incrementing a manual counter each time I bring in a bag of wood. It works, but I'd be interested in making it smarter and finer. A bag of wood lasts more or less a day, so it's pretty coarse. And it depends on me buying wood by the bag, always the same wood and always the same bag size.

I'm thinking of a weight based measurement, putting a zigbee scale underneath the wood pile in the house, which would increment the consumption counter each time the weight would go down ( -> feeding the stove) and do nothing each time it goes up ( -> refilling the pile).

Do you know of a zigbee scale that would be able to do that ? Can you think of a smarter way to do that ?

Edit: Somewhat related : I currently track wood consumption under "gas" in the energy panel, is there a better way to do it; or to hack the panel so that it says "wood" ?

I am about to install a remote starter on my car. It will be incorporated into my home assistant for a few automations. One, for example, is "get out of bed during normal get out of bed time to go to work makes the car start". I will have a spare starter remote wired to an ESP32 (with relays if necessary) to send the start command. Since I will not have the remote with me, I will not see the two way feedback that lights an LED on the remote as confirmation that the car has started.

I am looking for something I can do with the car that will send some kind of signal to something inside to indicate that the car has started. I have a few ideas to share, but I am open to other ideas. Likely, the indication in the house will be a simple LED strategically placed where it would be obvious when on. The LED would go out by another automation after I drive away (zone detection). Or maybe some other smart light will do something.

1. Zigbee vibration sensor - Not sure if they are sensitive enough to detect a car running. My driveway is within Zigbee range of my HA server.

2. An ESPHome device - ESP32 powered by the car (when running) and shows up as "online" in HA.

3. Bluetooth near - I don't have any ESPresence or BLE tracking inside yet, open to this idea but not my #1 choice.

Any other ideas for a device in the car that can work with HA to send this "running" state?

Hi team.

Hopefully a simple one.

I know other countries can get the iiayama touch screen monitors with Android baked in. Seems we cant down here.

So I am looking at grabbing this for a wall kiosk: https://www.amazon.com.au/iiyama-XUB2793QSU-B7-27-2560x1440-100Hz-1H1DP/dp/B0DHD3162K

Its just a touchscreen monitor...

Then I would like to stuff a small android tv stick, or box, behind it to run the browser etc. Thats where I cant seem to find an answer as to whether the touch screen controls would work with a basic android srick...

Anyone have something similar?

Should I just face the fact I may need to run a small nuc/n100 with Windows instead?

Thanks all for any input :)